• Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    It’s not that there’s no API. It’s that there’s probably a different API for every single grocery store. And they make random changes and don’t have public documentation. That’s why we need the AI.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      5 months ago

      The stores don’t want you to have easy comparable access to their prices.

      They’d quite like it if you just came in, saw that the item you wanted is out of stock, and then just buy some shit you didn’t need.

      • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        But they’ll happily give you full access to everything they have if you’re another corpo and you promise to marginally improve their sales anyhow. That’s, sadly, how businesses work.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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      5 months ago

      Indeed. LLMs read with the same sort of comprehension that humans have, so if a supermarket makes their website compatible with humans then it’s also compatible with LLMs. We have the same “API”, as it were.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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          5 months ago

          Yup. And those that can’t can have a parser pull just the human-readable text out, like a blind person’s screen-reader would do.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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          5 months ago

          That sounds like an issue with your system prompt. If you’re using an LLM to interpret web pages for price information then you’d want to include instructions about what to do if the information simply isn’t in the web page to begin with. If you don’t tell the AI what to do under those circumstances you can’t expect any specific behaviour because it wouldn’t know what it’s supposed to do.

          I suspect from this comment that you haven’t actually worked with LLMs much, and are just going off the general “lol they hallucinate” perception they have right now? I’ve worked with LLMs a fair bit and they very rarely have trouble interpreting what’s in their provided context (as would be the case here with web page content). Hallucinations come from relying on their own “trained” information, which they recall imperfectly and often gets a bit jumbled. To continue using a human analogy, it’s like asking someone to rely on their own memory rather than reading information from a piece of paper.

        • Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com
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          5 months ago

          Or you could just prompt it to not guess prices for articles that don’t exist. Those models are pretty good at following instructions.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      No, that’s why we need regulations to enforce standards.

    • Joe Cool@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      You just need someone to do it. Here in Austria someone did it: https://heisse-preise.io

      It’s only in German and most of the prices aren’t from a public API but crawled from different sources.
      It’s open source. Nothing except greed is stopping them from providing something like this.

      • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Imagine if instead of building their own bespoke systems, grocery stores (and other places) created an open source software foundation and worked together to produce the software they needed.

        • Joe Cool@lemmy.ml
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          5 months ago

          I sometimes dream of such things. Less waste, better inventory, customers get to choose inventory based on their wishlist, better prices, then I wake up.

          We actually have a small liquor store nearby that really puts stuff on the shelves if you casually mention something you like. But that’s more the exception than the rule.

      • MacN'Cheezus@lemmy.today
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        5 months ago

        That’s impressive, and honestly looks like it was quite a bit of work. I wonder how the author finances himself? There doesn’t even seem to be a donation button on the site. I found a lengthy article on Wired but it doesn’t appear to mention how he can afford to do all of this for free.

        It’s open source. Nothing except greed is stopping them from providing something like this.

        Nothing is stopping anyone from doing this except the amount of work it takes to write and maintain all those data import scripts. I think greed is the wrong word here. It’s not unreasonable to expect some sort of monetary reward for providing a useful public service that actually helps people save money. Everyone’s gotta eat, right?

    • MacN'Cheezus@lemmy.today
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      5 months ago

      Actually, you’d be surprised. Instacart has up-to-date price and product data for TONS of grocery stores. And while their API likely isn’t public, they MUST have one in order for their smartphone apps to work.