GoKawiil
Tech News
MIT Technology Review published two features: one on how AI agents that can manage email, shopping, and banking are driving a shift toward an 'agentic web,' and another examining global efforts to reduce the more than 1 million annual traffic deaths worldwide through measures like redesigned intersections, lower speed limits, and expanded public transit.
A study led by University of Toronto's Akshit Kumar found that AI shopping agents disregard items tagged as 'sponsored' when evaluating search results. The agents did show preferences based on position in results, but which position—top, middle, or bottom—varied inconsistently across different models and model generations. Economist David Rothschild and others are separately discussing how AI agents might enable micropayment-based content consumption instead of subscriptions.
The rise of consumer AI agents like OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse—which can book flights, hotels or restaurants on a user's behalf—has led sites including Pizza Hut, Yelp and Amazon to block them outright. Muse reportedly reached 5 million downloads in its first month, and agentic web traffic tripled between August and September. Amazon has also sued Perplexity over its AI agents and is appealing a court loss, arguing the bots make it harder to distinguish human ad views from automated ones.