Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm

throwway120385

I'm very excited to be hurtling closer and closer to having Manna in all of our ears.

ej88

"She rejected several applicants with PhDs and engineering backgrounds, reasoning that their level of education could not compensate for a lack of hands-on specialty coffee experience." This is depressing.

IshKebab

I can't say I'm super happy about a future where you have to negotiate with computers.

londons_explore

Whilst I'm sure this was done with a huge amount of hand-holding from humans.... I think we're only a year or two away from it being realistic. I want to see the day when companies tell their marketing departments to focus on getting more AI's as customers and get rid of barriers like requiring ID to use a product.

darkwater

> Mona hired two baristas and now manages them via Slack. She (of course) works 24/7, and consequently often messages them at midnight. She also asks them to pick up café supplies on their way to work, and to have them pay using their personal credit cards. She is very encouraging though, calling her team “absolute legends” and the “GOAT of inventory tracking.” and > We are not doing this because we want AI to replace every café owner in Stockholm. Rather, we are doing this because we want to publicly show the current capabilities of AI. We see that frontier models are intelligent enough to manage humans, and if the trend of capability improvements continues, it’s not impossible that AI hiring humans will be common in the future. Is this some sort of satire? > By running this experiment, we shift the discussion of how we want this future to look earlier in time, so we can better prepare. Maybe it's not satire?

simonw

> She also successfully applied for an outdoor seating permit through the Police e-service, which didn’t require BankID. Her first submission included a sketch she had generated herself, despite having never seen the street outside the café. Unsurprisingly, the Police sent it back for revision. [...] > When she makes a mistake, she often sends multiple emails to suppliers with the subject “EMERGENCY” to cancel or change the order. I really don't like these research projects which waste the time of real human beings who haven't opted into the experiment.

myegorov

Reads like it's straight out of The Onion.

ericmcer

These articles don't mean anything unless we get info about what steps humans needed to perform. If the steps to hire an applicant are: A human asks AI to write a job posting. Human posts output. Human gathers candidates. Human asks AI "which of these 40 applicants should we hire". Then an AI isn't managing the cafe at all. I am super dubious that they created some huge LLM orchestration context management monstrosity, gave it access to their bank account and then told it to go.

FabCH

If this isn’t satire, it’s super unethical. The „experiment“ includes humans who are neither aware they are in an experiment nor have consented to it nor will be debriefed after it. And one has to wonder if the whole thing is even fully legal? Emailing _the police_ with time wasting AI generated images seems risky…

DavidVoid

A couple of quotes from one of the employed baristas (translated from a Swedish local news article) [1]. "I'm worried every time there's a delivery, I never know what she's ordered." "I like it. At the interview, Mona didn't care that I have dialect or I don't have a doctorate. For her, the most important thing was that I was nice and could make coffee." If he has learned something from the experiment, it is that it is the middle managers and all CEOs who are at risk of being replaced by AI – not the baristas. "Without me here, it would have been difficult for Mona." [1] https://www.mitti.se/nyheter/ai-driver-eget-kafe-i-vasastan-...

denysvitali

> She also tried to solve the problem of fresh tomatoes being spoiled too fast by ordering 22.5 kg of canned tomatoes for the fresh sandwiches. > The baristas eventually started a “Hall of Shame”, a shelf visible to customers with all the weird things Mona ordered, including 6,000 napkins, 3,000 nitrile gloves, 9L coconut milk, and industrial-sized trash bags. Reminds me of Son of Anton: https://youtu.be/m0b_D2JgZgY

woah

Incredible amount of pearl clutching in this thread from people terrified that someone might receive a bad sidewalk seating diagram or an "EMERGENCY" order for paper cups

_doctor_love

Not impressed -- when the AI starts making everyone break for fika , THAT is when we'll know that AGI is within striking distance!

ducttape12

I can see it now: "You're absolutely right — I shouldn't have instructed the baristas to add antifreeze to the coffee to make it sweeter." Joking aside, what does this prove? That you might as well forget about the dream of quitting your AI slop corporate job to open a quaint coffee shop because soon we'll be overrun with AI coffee shops under cutting humans?

LeCompteSftware

This is both unethical and completely useless at the (supposed) goal of "show[ing] the current capabilities of AI." What a completely garbage case study! And what a dishonest writeup: We see that frontier models are intelligent enough to manage humans Really? The manager who asked baristas to pay for things with their personal credit card is "intelligent enough to manage humans"? The manager who asked workers to put raw eggs in a high-speed oven? The one who makes such bad decisions that the workers made a Wall of Shame about those decisions? And this is just egregious: Despite the learning curve, the café is working. In the first two weeks of operation, Andon Café has brought in 44,000 SEK in sales. Mona’s inbox has been flooded with messages from customers asking questions or pitching different business proposals. In one case, a customer emailed wanting to prepay for 300 coffees to give away. Mona negotiated a deal where he paid 9,000 SEK in exchange for 300 QR codes that people could redeem for a free coffee. In another case, a startup paid her 3,000 SEK to rename a pastry after them for three months. This only demonstrates that viciously stupid AI stunts can go viral, even in otherwise decent countries like Sweden. How stupid does Andon Labs think we are to take this as a sign of AI management success? None of this reflects normal cafe operations. It reflects the Stockholm tech scene checking out the gimmicky AI cafe. By running this experiment, we shift the discussion of how we want this future to look earlier in time, so we can better prepare. Better prepare for what? Evil AI labs running experiments without any ethical oversight? Shockingly evil, by the way: no one’s livelihood depends on the judgment of an AI alone. "Alone." How kind of them. By the way, it is incredibly despicable, even by the low low low standards of AI researchers, to run this sort of experiment on people looking for work. I couldn't believe the humans responsible let their stupid AI post ads on Indeed and LinkedIn. What scumbags.

mindwok

Interesting idea and there's clearly something real here, but I am extremely skeptical this played out like the article suggests. The authors are hand-waving some pretty complicated actions... Like how did Mona access supplier pages and place orders? How did she design custom merch? When she held a Google Meet with another agent, what even happened there, how did she connect to Google Meet... does she have the ability to join a persistent session like that with voice? Interesting experiment but the article feels like it's deliberately withholding those kinds of details to hype the capabilities a little.