ChatGPT Agent, Comet, Delta Pricing, and Enshittification
Weekly Review of News in Technology, UX and AI
Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:
📊 Unstructured Data
💁♂️ ChatGPT Agent
☄️ Comet
✈️ Delta
😓 Goldman Sachs AI
💩 Enshittification
👺 Extremism
Podcast
Structured Thinking for Unstructured Data: A Conversation with Founder Kirk Marple
In this episode of Product by Design, Kyle is joined by Kirk Marple, founder and CEO of Graphlit, to explore the world of unstructured data and how it’s transforming with the rise of LLMs and AI-native tools. Kirk shares his journey from working at Microsoft and General Motors to building Graflit—a platform designed to make unstructured data as usable as structured data.
News and Useful Reads
Introducing ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action
ChatGPT rolled out its new agent this week, with the potential to check your email, book your flight, and do all sorts of other things. According to their press release:
ChatGPT can now do work for you using its own computer, handling complex tasks from start to finish.
Perplexity’s Comet is the AI browser Google wants
Many people are shifting from traditional Google searches to asking AI directly. Which means the way we browse the internet is poised to change. And browsers will too.
Perplexity has just launched its agentic answer to Google Chrome — it’s called Comet, and it knocked out a slate of tasks on my behalf, though I think I could’ve done some faster myself.
Delta plans to set prices as high as possible using AI
We’ve seen several companies talking about the use of AI to create dynamic pricing. And it seems like it’s getting more real every day. Companies want to capture any surplus value left to customers. For example, if you had been willing to pay $600 for a flight but got it for $400, that’s $200 of value for you. But not for much longer…
The skies are getting their own Ticketmaster: Delta is moving away from regular pricing in favor of an AI system that determines how much each customer is willing to pay for tickets and jacks prices up accordingly, Fortune reported this week.
Goldman Sachs is testing viral AI agent Devin as a ‘new employee’
Goldman Sachs, ever ready to cut people and costs wherever it can (believe me, I know), is testing out a new AI agent employee.
“We’re going to start augmenting our workforce with Devin, which is going to be like our new employee,” Argenti told the outlet, adding that it plans to roll out hundreds of instances of Devin, potentially growing to thousands.
Other Interesting Finds
The Enshittification of American Power
Most of the world is built on the “American” ecosystem. And that’s worked out well for many people for a long time. Until Americans installed the most corrupt, incompetent regime in modern history. And everyone suffers from the ensuing enshittification.
Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too.
The 4 psychological markers of ideological extremism
As America continues its slide into authoritarian fascism, it’s disheartening to see so many people cheer and celebrate. While extremism has taken over politics, it doesn’t have to be that way.
If we know that cognitive rigidity and emotional volatility incline a person to extremism, we can reverse-engineer the problem. If we raise our children to be less emotionally volatile and help our friends to flex their cognitive worlds, we can hope to reverse a trajectory of increasing extremism.