You don’t need “AI” for that. All you would need is some standardized APIs for the various shops, and you could easily solve this with computer technology from 20 years ago.
The reality is, though, that there are no such APIs. LLMs on the other hand could be a valid tool for the use case.
LLMs are not a good tool for processing data like this. They would be good for presenting that data though.
Llms are great for scraping data
LLMs don’t scrape data, scrapers scrape data. LLMs predict text.
Both of those sound kinda dystopian. Because you just know the first one will start getting gamed by every company from the grocery companies trying to SEO the AI, to the big fossil fuel companies trying to get you to drive your car more.
I can’t wait for the technology to get basic enough where I can roll my own self hosted instance of it without it taking months. Because I can see a way it’s doable without a centralized service to get around that. But for mass consumer level, I can see that becoming true. But this can be applied to every bit of software currently. All of it can be ran by you, if you have time. Hell I’ve got my own cloud (hosted at my home ) music streaming service.
A lot of that is doable now - like, how many grocery stores are even nearby to someone, so writing a custom bit of code to check the website of each, one by one, and looking for previously manually-identified items could be automated.
One major downside is prioritization of large chain stores at the expense of smaller mom & pop ones that don’t maintain a constant inventory system accessible via the web. Someone could even volunteer their time to build them a database backend, but still they’d have to see the value in actually scanning the items every time or else it would quickly fall behind.
