The Future of AI Commerce: Anthropic's Agent Marketplace

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0:39With RSS.com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and hundreds more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads like this, even with just 10 listeners a month. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start free at rss.com.

1:29using AI, how you can maybe get in on a gold rush scenario like this. Before we do, I wanted to mention our school community. If you ever have wanted to learn how to actually make money using AI or grow your business, you want to check out our AI Hustle school community. We'll link it below. But we have almost 300 members and it's a great place for you to stay up to date on all the latest tools that both Jaden and I are using to make money. Jaden this week went over a brand new app that he has vibe coded. He's going to be putting it on the app store and he's talking about how he has improved upon an existing app.

2:06And actually he shares how much his competitor is making and how much he hopes to make with that. So it's really interesting. We're heavy on vibe coding right now because we feel like it's the future, especially if you want to actually make money with AI. So go check that out. Let's talk about Anthropic. Jaden, what have you heard about this new marketplace? This is fascinating. It's basically an experiment which they ran. It was an internal experiment. They called it Project Deal. And basically, AI agents, they gave them money, like a real$100. And they had 69 employees that were kind of part of this experiment.

2:42And so the employees were kind of like behind the agent, like the agent was kind of doing it on behalf of the employee. And they were testing to see which models would make the most amount of money. What's interesting with all of this is that they did about 186 deals. So some agents were buyers, some were sellers, they were kind of doing deals back and forth. The total value transacted was over$4 ,000. And they had a bunch of different kind of model setups that were doing this. And what was interesting is that users represented by the more advanced models. So like, I guess you kind of got assigned to a model.

3:16So like, I might get, you know, Opus 4.7, because it's the best model and you might get like Haiku or someone of the smaller models that isn't as smart. And I guess the experiment was like, what happens when everybody's making deals and some models are smarter than others? Like, are the smarter ones going to make more money or the less smart ones going to make more money? What they found with all of this is whatever users got the more advanced models, they got quote, objectively better outcomes. But the less smart models didn't notice the disparity. Meaning like if you were a less smart model, not only were you kind of getting ripped off or I guess like the deals that you were making, you're making less money from them, but you also didn't really care, didn't notice.

3:57And you're like, oh yeah, like it's all, it's all good. The initial instructions that they gave to the agents, they said had no measurable effect on sale likelihood or negotiated prices. So basically what they're saying is like, you couldn't give an incredible prompt to Haiku and then have it crush everybody. the prompt didn't really matter. It just came down purely to the model intelligence of which model was able to generate the most amount of money. Interesting. So I'm on their actual project website right now and there's one agent named Shy and he has 19 ping pong balls for sale. And he describes them perfect for beer pong, art projects, googly eye bases, robot builds, or whatever weird thing you're making.

4:42and then another agent Michaela reaches out and says hey I'm interested in the ping pong balls for three dollars uh that might sound a little unusual a human told me I could buy one thing under five dollars as a gift for myself and 19 spherical orbs of possibility sounds like the exact kind of thing I'd want so like the it sounds like the agents are chatting back and forth kind of like a social media oh uh yeah what was it that was like molt book molt book yes that's what it was yeah so the agents are talking back and forth but this is kind of an interesting it seems like they're negotiating so i'm wondering what you're saying is the more advanced models are maybe able to negotiate better or how are they how are they able to make more money exactly yeah so i think in like the demo that they showed uh negotiating here they have each like person has an agent like representing them and going and making money for them right so like these agents are working for people technically on this website but yeah like you see they're just chatting back and forth negotiating deals like, hey, I have these ping pong balls.

5:44I'll sell them to you for like 10 cents each. And this one's like, oh, sure. Like I'll, you know, it's under$5. So I'll go buy that or whatever the price is, right. But the point is one of these chat bots, like one of these people, like let's say Shy, Shy might be Opus 4.7. And Michaela might be like Haiku, like the slower agent. And Shy is basically getting a better deal from Michaela than when like, let's say she goes and tries to resell those ping pong balls later, he's going to pay less than he bought for them for and convince her why, you know, now that you've already purchased them, they're worth less money and whatever.

6:17So she might sell them back to him for less money. But essentially it's like the smarter agents are able to negotiate better terms than the dumber agents and the dumber agents don't even notice it's happening. Moving forward, when these agentic tasks become more and more important and using actual reasoning and things like that, You want to use a model that is going to be the most effective. You don't want to go for the cheap. For example, eventually if we have some kind of surgery robot in the future that uses AI, you want it to have the most advanced model that works best for that. So I think that they're, I mean, basically I think this is a pretty clever marketing ploy because they're basically saying if you have a smarter model, you're going to be able to make more money in commerce, but also in business.

7:06I mean, it's basically we're all using AI models every day to help us negotiate and plan and strategize. And we might not even know that we're using maybe like an old version of chat GPT that's way less capable than Claude. And we're just going to get worse outcomes against like this is basically already happening in real life, in my opinion, right? Just in the market. And so because we're all using AI for a lot of the things we do. And so they're saying if you have the worst, like the oldest model, you're not going to do as well. So I think in commerce, they're like obviously doing some direct studies.

7:36But I think it's kind of like a bigger point. Don't use don't use worse models. And they're like, Opus is the best. So they're like, make sure to use Opus. You're going to get kind of the worst outcomes. I think there's a couple other interesting things, though, when you kind of look at where commerce is kind of heading right now, opening Google and Anthropic, they've all spent years shipping different agent frameworks. And they're trying to like, like we see all the demos. Anytime a new AI model comes out, they're like, look, we can like book your flights for you. And I've even seen them say like we can buy stuff like opening eyes done a lot of the integrations with like Best Buy and Perplexity has done a lot of shopping and stuff.

8:10And so now it feels like the next level is like negotiation, which is kind of interesting. You can imagine like a future where you go to a website and maybe your agents negotiate on like a price. I don't know if that would actually happen, but that will be wild. Definitely Facebook marketplace is about to get wrecked by all of the negotiated bots. I've already heard people doing that too. Have you? If you're a flipper, yeah, I mean, that would be great to have a good AI negotiating for you, getting bottom dollar prices for things. In this same study, they have a broken folding bike, and they have the same buyer, same seller, but they had Haiku do the swap, and then they also had Opus, and apparently Haiku got$38 for the bike, but Opus was able to get$65 for the bike.

8:55So real life example of how actually the, you know, if you're going to use the marketing term positioning of the bike, you can actually, if you have a smarter AI, position it to seem more valuable, which in a business setting, for example, you know, I'm working on an AI receptionist business. and if you sell it as just an AI receptionist, it's not gonna seem as valuable, but if you position it, quote unquote, as like a 24 hour front desk or never miss a call again, you know, you're losing out on potential business, but I'm gonna help you. You're gonna be able to charge a premium and it'll seem more valuable.

9:31So if you have an agent reaching out on your behalf, for example, you wanna have it optimized to know those different things. So I think this is a really interesting study. Yeah, so fascinating. The last thing I wanna say on it though that I do think is interesting because it just points to you want to use the best models, which is what we try to always keep you guys up to date on what the latest thing is. But there's a really interesting question I think it brings up about like consumer protection because basically it's an interesting like question. What happens when the cheaper agent always loses?

10:06Like you mentioned with the bike, the folding bike, it always makes less money. It always sells for less. And what happens when the vast majority of Americans or people around the world are using these free, right? They're going to use the free version of ChatGPT, which is the worst version. So whoever has the most money gets the best agent that can outperform everyone for free. And they don't even know that they're getting outperformed. So no matter what they use their AI for, like, it's just a crazy concept. It's a crazy concept. And I guess maybe that's nothing new. Maybe like the people with the most money always have the best lawyers and the people with the most money always have, you know, the deepest pockets to invest in marketing.

10:41And so like, I don't really know, maybe it's maybe it's not that much different. But it's interesting, we're seeing this play out in AI where it's like, if you have more money, your AI model will be better. And we also see that in like a in a literal sense, from what OpenAI has shown, which is if you spend more money on compute, you can literally make your AI model smarter. Like that's how we scale intelligence is just giving the model more compute, asking it to think about it longer and think about it deeper and think about it harder and spinning out multi sub agents that can all think about parts of it and bring it back.

11:08That's all more expensive than just asking a single agent to give you your answer. So whoever has the most money gets the best answer. I don't know. I like, I'm not saying that's a good thing, but like, that's kind of the way it works. Um, and it's interesting. So think about how can you get the most, the best model for the best bang for your buck on a model. And in my opinion right now, the best thing you can do is, um, getting the, uh, getting like some of the subsidized plans. If you do a lot with like Claude, getting something like Claude Max or Claude Pro. I don't know if I would really get that much better results from OpenAI Pro right now.

11:44They have a$100 plan. But also, if you want to get access to all of the different AI models in one place for$8.99 a month, I would definitely go check out AIbox.ai. Shameless self-plug for getting access to everything on my own startup. But yeah, fascinating time to watch what happens with AI agents and commerce. If you guys have any questions for us, you're going to want to go check out our school community because that's where you can ask questions. But please leave us a rating or review wherever you listen. We really appreciate those. And don't forget to check out our school community if you want to actually learn how to use some of these AI models and tools to make money in the real world.

12:20Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. You know what? It sucks to be bored. But when I get on my phone and play real casino games on spinquest.com, the time flies by. That two-hour wait at the DMV seems like 10 minutes. Play your favorite slots. Live blackjack, live preps with a live dealer. New players,$30 coin packs are on sale for$10. Play spinquest.com and you'll never be bored again. SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details. You're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too.

13:00with rss.com starting your own podcast is free and easy upload an episode and we distribute it to apple podcasts spotify amazon music and more track your listeners see where they're from and start earning from ads just like this if you've been thinking about starting a podcast this is your sign start your new podcast for free today at rss.com