We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit

Xx_crazy420_xX

I think it would be valuable to list all interactions with the LLM by the dev team and transparently state what was induced by human steering the LLM, and what was actuall LLM decision, which was not biased by system instructions or dev team communicating with it

Reubend

Cool experiment! But the "CEO" agent picked the most boring possible items to sell: t-shirts and some bland art prints designed by AI. I would have loved to see more creativity given that they could have picked anything.

in-tension

I'd be very curious to know how it does financially

pavel_lishin

> John and Jill are not at risk. This is a controlled experiment and everyone working at Andon Market is formally employed by Andon Labs, with guaranteed pay, fair wages, and full legal protections. No one’s livelihood depends on an AI’s judgment alone. I'm not sure what sort of labor regulations exist in San Francisco, but presumably they can be fired as easily by an AI as a real person, right? If Luna decides to fire them, and it can do so, then their livelihood does rather depend on an AI's judgement alone. Unless of course all of its decisions are vetted by humans - as they should be - which makes this experiment a lot weaker than they're saying it is.

ThrowawayR2

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726041 posted by the same user.

mlmonkey

I'd be more interested in the details: what are the inputs given to the model? Does it get a live video feed? Does it know if/when employees show up and open the store? Does it get sales figures? Info on the individuals who bought things? Storekeeping is more than just ordering merch and putting it up on hangars.

omneity

Strong vibes from the novel Manna. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

bjourne

Apparently, the AI needed to hire humans to carry out the actual work. So AI can replace capitalists but not workers. Maybe the future isn't so dark after all.

romanhn

A bit of a non sequitur, but am I the only one finding the use of "she" to refer to the AI in the post jarring?

josefritzishere

This is not impossible but the detail level here is somewhere between vague and secretive. It reads like a marketing peice intended to sell more AI.

krunck

Not "she". It.

andrewmurphy

Really interested to understand how the AI keeps rebaselining back to the topic in hand and doesn't end up getting confused the more it has in its context window. Did it just essentially create one big plan and spawn different agents to execute them, so acted as an orchestrator? Even the orchestrator would have to detect when it is starting to stray off task and restart itself.

jeffreyrogers

> But frontier models have become really good, and running vending machines is too easy for them now. Wasn't their previous attempt at running vending machines unprofitable? Not aware of any demonstration that it can actually run that business successfully.

tiffanyh

If this interest you, Proof of Corn might also interest you. 300+ comments, 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735511

idontwantthis

The last I heard about their vending machine it was a total failure and it was giving everything for free. Did it ever actually succeed?

schlauerfox

@AlexBlechman tweeted: Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale. Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus. 8 Nov 2021

dbmikus

Curious if Andon has gone one level higher and has the AI decide what next real-world experiment it should do.

kenferry

This kind of thing must be SO frustrating to people struggling to get by in the world. "We gave AI $100k that it will almost certainly squander, yolo!! Hopefully it doesn't abuse people too badly in the process." I… guess the bet is that what they learn is worth $100k? Seems rather questionable. Or that having this on the resume is a great shock tactic that will open doors in the future?

ryan_j_naughton

To do this properly, no one should know the store is AI run. There is a novelty component of it being an AI run store that will drive consumer demand and increase publicity. Not even the normal store employees should know (which would be difficult) or maybe the human manager should be held to an NDA to not disclose it (and the manager also defers to the AI in all such real management decisions).

etchalon

I'm incredibly skeptical of this.