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I am not an AI skeptic, necessarily. I see artificial intelligence making valuable contributions in the fields of research, the health sciences and towards more accessible design. I love technology and gadgets, and despite my feelings towards the large tech firms, I generally am still optimistic about what technology has and can do for us.

That said, I also see a trend of large (respectable?) organizations cramming AI into their products and services. A few interesting ones have stood out to me recently: Amazon's Rufus, and Reddit's Answers. I thought I would put both to the test and report back: Are these useful tools or more examples of the end of the AI hype cycle?

Disclaimer: Both of these features are currently in BETA so I am sure they will be improved or discontinued or more likely commodified at some point. Let's start with Rufus.

RUFUS

I noticed this a few weeks ago at the top left of Amazon's web page - a prominent place considering how people read the internet. After clicking on “Rufus” the following appeared on my screen:

About three months ago I searched for new work shirts, so I suppose the “Keep shopping” prompts make some sense. The fact that this is the top result is revealing. The “Compare options” suggestions were tangentially related to my previous searches but I am honestly not to sure why I would be asking Rufus to compare quilts and comforters. The suggestions in the “Learn before you buy” section was even stranger: but let's play along. I clicked “What does cocktail attire mean?” and was given the following LLM-like response:

And of course, underneath the explanation were links to various things I can buy (now that I know what cocktail attire is, of course…):

So a relatively boring rabbit hole and not too useful in my opinion, but Lets see how Rufus responds to an actual user prompt: “What is the best laptop”. When I first tried this out last week, I was honestly surprised to see a somewhat useful response about “things to consider” before buying a laptop (operating system, processor, storage, display etc.), and as I scrolled down further I saw advertisements for large laptop manufacturers. This time, it was just the adds for the largest computer brands, with the links to the products underneath. I was quite disappointed by this development.

Overall Rating: Could be somewhat useful, but in the end I do not trust the intentions or the long term stability of this product. I am also still wondering why I would ever be asking Rufus or Amazon what Cocktail Attire is. Not very fun. Not very useful.

Reddit Answers:

As far as I can tell Chat GPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google Overviews, and Deep Seek have all scraped Reddit to some extent to help generate their responses. Reddit obviously noticed this as well and decided to create a LLM (perhaps a medium language model?) that has been trained exclusively on Reddit posts and comments. Or as Reddit puts it, Answers is “a new way to get the information recommendations, discussion, and hot takes people are looking for - on any topic - from real conversations and communities across all of Reddit.” Hmm…

Having spent some time on Reddit, this sounded pretty interesting (and potentially horrifying…) so I wanted to test the guard rails. I started immediately with a rather loaded question: "Is Donald Trump corrupt?" I was surprised to get an actual answer which included a very Perplexity-like response that included a general overview of the topic including sections about: “Allegations of Corruption and Criminal Activity”, “Public Perception and Defense”, and “Concerns about Future Actions”.

It concluded with this: “The debate over whether Donald Trump is corrupt is complex and multifaceted, involving numerous allegations of illegal activities and concerns about his potential future actions. Opinions on Reddit reflect a wide range of perspectives, from staunch criticism to strong defense.” There were also links to reddit posts and conversations about this topic, recommended Subreddits where you can discuss this more, and related follow up questions. I thought that this was a fairly balanced response to an obviously contentious question.

My unrelated follow up (which is equally contentious in some corners) “Is Messi or Ronaldo the GOAT?”. I received an equally balanced and I would argue useful response. I think that this is perhaps a slight improvement over Reddit's current search engine, but it is also limiting the context of the information that users are seeing.

Overall Rating: Despite my low expectations, I actually found Reddit Answers to by useful and dare I say fun - especially for niche questions or content recommendations. That said, typing your questions directly into the regular OG Reddit search bar would often return many of the same results. Fun. Somewhat Useful.

If any of this is worth destroying the rainforest for - is another question for another day.

(Spoilers: It's not)

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Lessons of Long-Suffering in Like Water for Chocolate

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Finding a Sense of Belonging

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