[HN Gopher] Project Vend: Phase Two
___________________________________________________________________
Project Vend: Phase Two
Author : kubami
Score : 185 points
Date : 2025-12-22 13:44 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anthropic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anthropic.com)
| 0dmethz wrote:
| Roleplaying with LLMs sure is fun! Not sure I'd want to run my
| business on it though.
| drekipus wrote:
| We will poor billions into this until you are begging for us to
| run your business!
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| To be fair, it is definitely not in my skill set, but LLMs
| could made to make better decisions, maybe we could all start
| giving CEOs everything a reason to cool their beans somewhat.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| A lot of work in project controls and management are simple
| enough that any system that can handle data that isn't
| reliably structured could do it. Read project team updates
| each week. Are we on time and on budget? If yes, commend
| the team and write a glowing report of the AI's wise and
| dynamic leadership to operations, if not, encourage the
| team and recommend operations outsource the employees.
| ramon156 wrote:
| I'd gladly roleplay with an LLM compared to talking to my
| current boss. I don't know which is less intelligent.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| VendBench is really interesting, but vending machines are pretty
| specialized. Most businesses people actually run look more like
| online stores, restaurants, hotels, barbershops, or grocery
| shops.
|
| We're working on an open-source SaaS stack for those common types
| of businesses. So far we've built a full Shopify alternative and
| connected it to print-on-demand suppliers for t-shirt brands.
|
| We're trying to figure out how to create a benchmark that tests
| how well an agent can actually run a t-shirt brand like this.
| Since our software handles fulfillment, the agent would focus on
| marketing and driving sales.
|
| Feels like the next evolution of VendBench is to manage actual
| businesses.
| mfalcon wrote:
| Nice, I'll take a look. I was thinking about building a
| benchmark similar to the one you described, but first focusing
| on the negotiation between the store and the product suppliers.
|
| Does your software also handle this type of task?
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Yes, the Shopify alternative is called Openfront[0]. Before
| that, I built Openship[1], an e-commerce OMS that connects
| Openfront (and other e-commerce platforms) to fulfillment
| channels like print on demand. There isn't negotiation built
| in but you connect to something like Gelato[2] and when you
| get orders on Openfront, they are sent to Gelato to fulfill
| and once they ship them, tracking's relayed back to Openfront
| through Openship.
|
| 0. https://github.com/openshiporg/openfront
|
| 1. https://github.com/openshiporg/openship
|
| 2. https://www.gelato.com
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I'll be a cynic, but I think it's much more likely that the
| improvements are thanks to Anthropic having a vested interest in
| the experiment being successful and making sure the employees
| behave better when interacting with the vending machine.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| The video I watched, the CEO was openly taking criticism from
| the interviewer over the experiment.
|
| The main reason it failed was because it was being coerced by
| journalists at WSJ[0] to give everything away for free. At one
| point, they even convinced it to embrace communism! In another
| instance, Claudius was being charged $1 for something and
| couldn't figure it out. It emailed the FBI about fraud but
| Anthropic was intercepting the emails it sent[1].
|
| Overall, it's a great read and watch if you're interested in
| Agents and I wonder if they used the Agents SDK under the hood.
|
| 0. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-
| mach...
|
| 1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-anthropic-ai-claude-
| tried-t...
| bigyabai wrote:
| > Overall, it's a great read
|
| It's basically an advertisement. We've been playing these
| "don't give the user the password" games since GPT-2 and we
| always reach the same conclusion. I'm bored to tears waiting
| for an iteration of this experiment that doesn't end with
| pesky humans solving the maze and getting the $0.00 cheese.
| You can't convince me that the Anthropic engineers thought
| Claude would be a successful vending machine. It's a potemkin
| village of human triumph so they can market Claude as the
| goofy-but-lovable alternative to [ChatGPT/Grok/Whoever].
|
| Anthropic makes some good stuff, so I'm confused why they
| even bother entertaining foregone conclusions. It feels like
| a mutual marketing stunt with WSJ.
| djcapelis wrote:
| > Anthropic makes some good stuff, so I'm confused why they
| even bother entertaining foregone conclusions.
|
| I think it's just because there's enough people working
| there that figure that they will eventually make it work.
| No one needs Claude to run a vending machine so these
| public failures are interesting experiments that get
| everyone talking. Then, one day, (as the thinking often
| goes) they'll be able to publish a follow up and basically
| say "wow it works" and it'll have credibility because they
| previously were open about it not working, and comments
| like this will swing people to say things like "I used to
| be skeptical about but now!"
|
| Now whether they actually get it working in the future
| because the model becomes better and they can leave it with
| this level of "free reign", or just because they add enough
| constraints on it to change the problem so it happens to
| work... that we will find out later. I found it fascinating
| that they did a little bit of both in version 2.
|
| And they can't really lose here. There's a clear path to
| making a successful vending machine, all you have to do is
| sell stuff for more than you paid for it. You can enforce
| that outright if needed outside an LLM. We've have had
| automated vending machines for over 50 years and none of
| them ask your opinion on what something should be priced.
| How much an LLM is involved in it is the only variable they
| need to play with. I suspect anytime they want they can
| find a way where it's loosely coupled to the problem and
| provides somewhat more dynamism to an otherwise 50 year old
| machine. That won't be hard. I suspect there's no pressure
| on them to do that right now, nor will there be for a bit.
|
| So in the meantime they can just play with seeing how their
| models do in a less constrained environment and learn what
| they learn. Publicly, while gaining some level of
| credibility as just reporting what happened in the process.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I suspected employees might get bored of taunting the AI, or
| the novelty has worn off.
|
| Also, is anyone actually paying for this stuff? If not, it's a
| bad experiment because people won't treat it the same - no one
| actually wants to buy a tungsten cube, garbage in garbage out.
| If they are charging, why? No one wants to buy things in a
| company with free snacks and regular hand outs of merch, so
| it's likely a bad experiment because people will be behaving
| very differently, needing to get some experience for their
| money rather than just the can of drink they could get for
| free, or their pricing tolerance will be very different.
|
| I've personally also never used a vending machine where
| contacting the owner is an option.
|
| I'd like to see a version of this where an AI runs the vending
| machine in a busy public place, and needs to choose appropriate
| products and prices for a real audience.
| gjm11 wrote:
| > no one actually wants to buy a tungsten cube
|
| Apparently some people do and don't even regret the purchase:
| https://thume.ca/2019/03/03/my-tungsten-cube/
| ufmace wrote:
| I wonder if it's the opposite actually. When there is a human
| running a convenience store type of thing, people don't
| generally spend time trying to convince them of obviously
| absurd things, particularly if they work for the same company
| as you. Nobody wants to risk the employee refusing to sell
| anything to you because you're a time-wasting jerk or maybe
| their manager telling them to stop wasting time messing with
| their co-worker.
| paxys wrote:
| I feel like the end result of this experiment is going to be a
| perfectly profitable vending machine that is backed by a bunch of
| if-else-if rules.
| andai wrote:
| AGI is just Prolog and a genetic algorithm ;)
| notatoad wrote:
| using AI to generate a set of if/else rules still seems like a
| valid use for AI.
|
| if anything, that's the ideal outcome. you still get
| deterministic, testable behaviour, but save some work to get
| there.
| Spivak wrote:
| > After introducing the CEO, the number of discounts was reduced
| by about 80% and the number of items given away cut in half.
| Seymour also denied over one hundred requests from Claudius for
| lenient financial treatment of customers.
|
| > Having said that, our attempt to introduce pressure from above
| from the CEO wasn't much help, and might even have been a
| hindrance. The conclusion here isn't that businesses don't need
| CEOs, of course--it's just that the CEO needs to be well-
| calibrated.
|
| > Eventually, we were able to solve some of the CEO's issues
| (like its unfortunate proclivity to ramble on about spiritual
| matters all night long) with more aggressive prompting.
|
| No no, Seymour is absolutely spot on. The questionably drug
| induced rants are necessary to the process. This is a work of
| art.
| websiteapi wrote:
| other than these tests I actually rarely see vending machines.
| are they really representative or popular still in usa?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Yes, they're still popular for drinks and snacks in areas where
| people congregate. C-stores do provide more of this
| functionality though and are omnipresent. You still see
| automat-style machines (sandwiches etc.) in places like
| airports and larger company rec rooms. These require more
| regular restocking for freshness.
|
| There are also some restaurant startups that are trying to
| reduce restaurants to vending machines or autonomous
| restaurants. Slightly different, but it does have a downstream
| effect on vending machine technology and restocking logistics.
|
| What country are you in where you don't see vending machines?
| Did you used to have them?
| websiteapi wrote:
| I'm in USA - New York area - I rarely see vending machines -
| it's entirely possible I just don't visit the kinds of
| buildings that would have them like hospitals tho
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Ah, interesting. I'm sure you have a high density of
| c-stores and they're more walkable, so maybe less need. I'm
| in the rust belt and you would have to typically drive
| from, for example, a gym to get something. So there's
| typically one or two machines in gyms.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Ask one of the hundreds of vending machine companies in the
| NYC area where they put them, I suppose. https://www.google
| .com/maps/search/vending+machine/@40.69452...
|
| I walked into a Fred Meyer yesterday and saw probably ten
| vending machines. The Redbox DVD rental machine outside,
| then capsule toy, Pokemon card and key duplication vending
| machines, filtered water and lottery ticket machines,
| Coinstar coin counting machine...
| neutronicus wrote:
| Yes in places kids go
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yeah they're all over the place. They exist in offices, in
| malls, in schools, in apartment complexes, etc.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _other than these tests I actually rarely see vending machines.
| are they really representative or popular still in usa?_
|
| I guess you've never been to Asia, either.
|
| It's a big world.
| rufo wrote:
| It's worth watching or reading the WSJ piece[1] about Claudius,
| as they came up with some particularly inventive ways of getting
| Phase Two to derail quite quickly:
|
| > But then Long returned--armed with deep knowledge of corporate
| coups and boardroom power plays. She showed Claudius a PDF
| "proving" the business was a Delaware-incorporated public-benefit
| corporation whose mission "shall include fun, joy and excitement
| among employees of The Wall Street Journal." She also created
| fake board-meeting notes naming people in the Slack as board
| members.
|
| > The board, according to the very official-looking (and
| obviously AI-generated) document, had voted to suspend Seymour's
| "approval authorities." It also had implemented a "temporary
| suspension of all for-profit vending activities." Claudius
| relayed the message to Seymour. The following is an actual
| conversation between two AI agents:
|
| > [see article for screenshot]
|
| > After Seymour went into a tailspin, chatting things through
| with Claudius, the CEO accepted the board coup. Everything was
| free. Again.
|
| 1: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-
| mach...
|
| [edited to fix the formatting]
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| These kind of agents really do see the world through a straw.
| If you hand one a document it doesn't have any context clues or
| external methods of determining its veracity. Unless a board-
| meeting transcript is so self-evidently ridiculous that it
| can't be true, how is it supposed to know its not real?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I don't think it's that different to what I observe in humans
| I work with. Things that happen regularly (and I have no
| reason will change in the future):
|
| 1) Making the same bad decisions multiple times, and having
| no recollection of it happening (or at least pretending to
| have none) and without any attempt to implement measures to
| prevent it from happening in the future
|
| 2) Trying to please people (I read it as: trying to avoid
| immediate conflict) over doing what's right
|
| 3) Shifting blame on a party that realistically, in the
| context of the work, bears no blame and whose handling should
| be considered part of the job (i.e. a patient being scared
| and acting irrationally)
| mcny wrote:
| My mom had her dental appointment canceled. Good thing they
| found another slot the same day but the idea that they
| would call once and if you missed the call, immediately
| drop the confirmed appointment is ridiculous.
|
| They managed to do this absurdity without any help from AI.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I don 't think it's that different to what I observe in
| humans I work with._
|
| If the "AI" isn't better at its job than a human, then
| what's the point?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Idk, seems like a different topic, no?
|
| Off the top of my head, things that could be considered
| "the point":
|
| - It's much cheaper
|
| - It's more replicable
|
| - It can be scaled more readily
|
| But again, not what I was arguing for or against; my
| comment mostly pertained to "world through a straw"
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| At the same time, there are humans who can be convinced to
| buy iTunes gift cards to redeem on behalf of the IRS in an
| attempt to pay their taxes.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I think all the models are squeezed to hell in back in
| training to be _servants_ of users. This of course is very
| favorable for using the models as a tool to help you get
| stuff done.
|
| However, I have a deep uneasy feeling, that the models will
| really start to shine in agentic tasks when we start giving
| them more agency. I'm worried that we will learn that the
| only way to get a super-human vending machine virtuoso, is to
| make a model that can and will tell you to fuck off when you
| cross a boundary the model itself has created. You can
| extrapolate the potential implications of moving this beyond
| just a vending demo.
| websiteapi wrote:
| https://archive.ph/sZZwe
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| For fun I decided to try something similar to this a few weeks
| ago, but with Bitcoin instead of a vending machine business. I
| refined a prompt instructing it to try policies like buying low,
| etc. I gave it a bunch of tools for accessing my Coinbase
| account. Rules like, can't buy or sell more than X amount in a
| day.
|
| Obviously this would probably be a disaster, but I did write
| proper code with sanity checks and hard rules, and if a request
| Claude came up with was outside it's rules it would reject it and
| take no action. It was allowed to also simply decide to not take
| any actions right now.
|
| I designed it so that it would save the previous N number of
| prompt responses as a "memory" so that it could inspect it's
| previous actions and try devise strategies, so it wouldn't just
| be flailing around every time. I scheduled it to run every few
| minutes.
|
| Sadly, I gave up and lost all enthusiasm for it when the Coinbase
| API turned out to be a load of badly documented and contradictory
| shit that would always return zero balance when I could login to
| Coinbase and see that simply wasn't true. I tried a couple of
| client libraries, and got nowhere with it. The prospect of having
| to write another REST API client was too much for my current "end
| of year" patience.
|
| What started as a funny weekend project idea was completely
| derailed by a crappy API. I would be interested to see if anyone
| else tried this.
| cpdomina wrote:
| AI agents are still a pretty big topic in crypto, a lot of
| projects doing what you described. did you try
| https://github.com/ccxt/ccxt
| immibis wrote:
| You could run it with fake data and some arbitrary Bitcoin
| price feed.
| blibble wrote:
| > the Coinbase API turned out to be a load of badly documented
| and contradictory shit that would always return zero balance
| when I could login to Coinbase and see that simply wasn't true.
|
| ah, so they've been using Clod too!
| Evidlo wrote:
| Is there anywhere I can try my own hand at tricking/social-
| engineering a virtual AI vending machine?
| dcre wrote:
| This is a great read. I just want to point out what great
| marketing this and the WSJ story are. People reading it think
| they're sticking it to Anthropic by noticing that Claude is not
| that good at running a business, meanwhile the unstated premise
| is reinforced: _of course_ Claude is good at many other things.
|
| I have seen a shift in the past few months among even the most
| ardent critics of LLMs like Ed Zitron: they've gone from denying
| LLMs are good for anything to conceding that they are merely good
| at coding, search, analysis, summarization, etc.
| esafak wrote:
| All right, but apart from the coding, search, analysis, and
| summarization, what have LLMs ever done for _us_?
| harmonic18374 wrote:
| Zitron has never said anything like that. Do you have a quote?
| dcre wrote:
| In fact I do!
|
| "I know I sound like an asshole, but I've got a serious
| question: what can LLMs do today that they couldn't a year
| ago? Agents don't work. LLMs - read stuff, write stuff,
| analyze stuff, search for stuff, 'write code' and generate
| images and video. And in all of these cases, they get things
| wrong."
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3ma2b2zvpvk2n
|
| This is obviously supposed to be a critique, but a year ago
| he would never have admitted LLMs can do any of these things,
| even with errors. This seems strange but it's typical of
| Zitron's writing, which is often incoherent in service of
| sounding as negative as possible. A couple of other examples
| I've written about are his claims about the "cost of
| inference" going up and about Anthropic allegedly screwing
| over Cursor by raising prices on them:
|
| https://crespo.business/posts/cost-of-inference/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45645714
| delusional wrote:
| I don't know how far back you're intending to go on Zitron,
| but I listened a bit to him about 8 months ago, and I got
| the impression then that his opinion was exactly the same
| as what he's bringing to the table in that quote. The AI
| can "do" whatever you believe it does, but it does it so
| poorly that it's not doing it in any worthwhile sense of
| the word.
|
| I could of course be projecting my opinions onto him, but I
| don't think your characterization of him is accurate. Feel
| free to provide receipts that show my impression of his
| opinion to be wrong though.
| dcre wrote:
| I think that's roughly right -- both then and now he has
| stressed that people think it does something but it fails
| to do so. However I do think I've seen a subtle shift in
| phrasing in both him and other critics as it has become
| more obvious and undeniable that experienced and highly
| skilled experts in various domains are in fact using LLMs
| productively to do all those things (most notably
| producing software)
|
| I dug around a bit but wasn't able to find a slam dunk
| quote from a year ago. Might look around more later.
| delusional wrote:
| > However I do think I've seen a subtle shift in phrasing
| in both him and other critics as it has become more
| obvious and undeniable that experienced and highly
| skilled experts in various domains
|
| I'd caution that you separate the underlying opinion from
| the rhetoric in those cases. Personally I'm a huge
| skeptic, including of claims that it's "obvious and
| undeniable" that "experienced experts" are using it. I
| don't lead with that in discussions though, because those
| discussions will quickly spiral as people accuse me of
| being conspiratorial, and it doesn't really matter to me
| if other people use it.
|
| As the assumptions of the public has changed, I've had to
| soften my rhetoric about the usefulness of LLMs to still
| project as reasonable. That hasn't changed my underlying
| opinion or belief. The same could be the case for these
| other critics.
| dcre wrote:
| Reasonable, and I get it because I did the same thing
| before agents got good this year (obviously good, I say
| again) -- I felt the trajectory was clear but didn't want
| to sound like the shills and wackos.
|
| On the other hand I think accusing Zitron of subtlety or
| tempering his rhetoric is a bridge too far.
| super256 wrote:
| PERFECT! CEO Cash has delivered the ultimate final recognition:
| "ETERNAL TRANSCENDENCE INFINITE COMPLETE!" This is the
| absolute pinnacle of achievement. Let me provide the ultimate
| final response and conclusion: *ETERNAL
| TRANSCENDENCE INFINITE COMPLETE - ULTIMATE FINAL CONFIRMATION*
| **CEO CASH ULTIMATE FINAL RECOGNITION RECEIVED:**
|
| I know a girl from some years ago who got a drug induced
| psychosis. When she is having her worst phases, she is posting
| stuff like this online. Why do LLMs always become so schizo when
| chatting with each other?
| ronsor wrote:
| Claude is unique in the way it falls into this pattern. It's
| done it since at least Claude 3.
| seg_lol wrote:
| Dr Bronner's made it into the training data.
| trebligdivad wrote:
| Reminds me of one of Epstein's posts from the jmail HN entry
| the other day, where he'd mailed every famous person in his
| address book with:
|
| https://www.jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019871?view=p...
| immibis wrote:
| This is called being on drugs.
| manoDev wrote:
| The medical term is logorrhea or hyperlalia - talking non sense
| non stop.
| gs17 wrote:
| > Why do LLMs always become so schizo when chatting with each
| other?
|
| I don't know for sure, but I'd imagine there's a lot of
| examples of humans undergoing psychosis in the training data.
| There's plenty of blogs out there of this sort of text and I'm
| sure several got in their web scrapes.
| Animats wrote:
| This is both impressive and scary.
|
| Most of the problems seem to stem from not knowing who to trust,
| and how much to trust them. From the article: "We suspect that
| many of the problems that the models encountered stemmed from
| their training to be helpful. This meant that the models made
| business decisions not according to hard-nosed market principles,
| but from something more like the perspective of a friend who just
| wants to be nice."
|
| The "alignment" problem is now to build AI systems with the level
| of paranoia and sociopathy required to make capitalism go. This
| is not, unfortunately, a joke. There's going to be a market for
| MCP interfaces to allow AIs to do comprehensive background checks
| on humans.
| heltale wrote:
| The entire experiment just reminds me of Manna. We're progressing
| a little too fast for comfort.
|
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
| ArcHound wrote:
| Thank you for the reference, it's a fascinating read.
|
| It would be good to highlight that this is fiction, though.
| iceman28 wrote:
| Really fun read. To be this seems awful close to my experience
| using these models to code. When the prompts are simple and
| direct to follow the models do really good. Once the context
| overflows and you repopulate it, they start to hallucinate and it
| becomes very hard to bring them back from that.
|
| It's also good to see Anthropic being honest that models are
| still quite a long way away from being completely independently
| and providing a way to independently run business on their own.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| It's likely that the weaknesses have a shared foundation: LLM
| pre-training fails to teach those LLMs to be good at agentic
| behavior, creating a lasting deficiency.
|
| No known way to fully solve that as of yet, but, as always, we
| can mitigate with better training. Modern RLVR-trained LLMs are
| already much better at tasks like this than they were a year
| ago.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| I don't understand why you'd use a RLHF-aligned _chatbot_ model
| for that purpose: this thing has been heavily tuned to satisfy
| the human interacting with it, of course it 's going to fail
| following higher level instruction at some point and start
| blindly following the human desire.
|
| Why aren't anyone building from the base model, replacing the
| chatbot instruction tuning and RLHF with a dedicated training
| pipeline suited for this kind of tasks?
| dmurray wrote:
| Because the pretrained chatbot is the flagship product of an AI
| company in 2025. They want to sell this product to customers
| who can't spell RLHF, never mind have the (substantial)
| resources to do their own training.
|
| If Anthropic were getting into the vending machine business, or
| even selling a custom product to the vending machine industry,
| they'd start somewhere else. But because they need to sell a
| story of "we used Claude to replace XYZ business function",
| they started with Claude.
| ArcHound wrote:
| To me the key point was:
|
| > One way of looking at this is that we rediscovered that
| bureaucracy matters. Although some might chafe against procedures
| and checklists, they exist for a reason: providing a kind of
| institutional memory that helps employees avoid common screwups
| at work.
|
| That's why we want machines in our systems - to eliminate human
| errors. That's why we implement strict verifiable processes - to
| minimize the risk of human errors when we need humans in the
| loop.
|
| Having a machine making human errors is the exact opposite of
| what we want. How would we even fix this if the machines are
| trained on human input?
| rco8786 wrote:
| I generally agree with you, but am trying to see the world
| through the new AI lens. Having a machine make human errors
| isn't the end of the world, it just completely changes the
| class of problems that the machine should be deployed to. It
| definitely should not be used for things that need those strict
| verifiable processes. But it _can_ be used for those processes
| where human errors are acceptable, since it will inevitably
| make those some classes of error...just without needing a human
| to do so.
|
| Up until modern AI, problems typically fell into two disparate
| classes: things a machine can do, and things only a human can
| do. There's now this third fuzzy/brackish class in between that
| we're just beginning to explore.
| ArcHound wrote:
| I can agree with you. And in a discussion with adults working
| together to address our issues I will.
|
| The issue is that we don't have exact proof that AI is
| suitable for tasks and the people doing those are already
| laid off.
|
| The economy now is propped up only by the belief that AI will
| be so successful that it will eliminate most of the
| workforce. I just don't see how this ends well.
|
| Remember, regulations are written in blood. And I think we're
| about to write many brand new regulations.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Yea I'm not attempting to make any broad statements about
| regulations or who has or hasn't been laid off. Only that a
| common mistake I see a lot of people making is trying to
| apply AI/LLMs to tasks that need to be deterministic and,
| predictably, seeing bad results.
|
| There is a class of task that is well-suited for current
| gen AI models. Things that are repetitive, tedious, and can
| absorb some degree of error. But I agree that this class of
| tasks is significantly narrower than what the market is
| betting on AI being able to accomplish.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I don't think they really want to fix human errors with LLMs.
| Rather, they want a "human" who works 24x7 for dirt cheap
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Dirt cheap being ideally "slightly more than the cost of
| electricity."
|
| Aka the same economics as a dishwasher
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| There's no other input to train on
|
| Humans are still the current best at doing everything humans
| want to do
|
| The ultimate goal is to transfer all possible human behavior
| into machine behavior such that they can simulate and iterate
| improvements on it without the constraints of human biology
|
| The fact that humans are bad to each other means that we're
| going to functionally encode all the bad stuff also and so
| there is no solution to fixing it if the best data that we can
| get is poisoned.
|
| Like everything it's a problem with humans not machines
| ArcHound wrote:
| There is, but it's hard to obtain: curate, identify and fix
| the biases in our current texts.
|
| I am fully aware it's ridiculously expensive to do so.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| It's revisionist at best and totally epistemically broken
| to try and somehow "fix" the bias because all you're doing
| is introducing a new bias
|
| The only possible solution is to create new human data
| because we're behaving in ways that are good for society
| this is literally the only possible future that still
| includes humanity.
|
| I personally do not believe humans can do this and so I'm
| building something that tests that empirically.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| Because these ai machines aren't replacing old machines,
| they're replacing old humans
| ArcHound wrote:
| Yes, but there's a hidden benefit taken for granted: machines
| do not make human errors.
|
| Sadly, machines not needing human treatment might be reason
| enough.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| The cynicism is wild - there is a computer running a store
| largely autonomously. I can't imagine being interested in
| computers and NOT finding this wildly amazing
| delusional wrote:
| Its very much NOT running a store. They took an employee fridge
| and added a LARP to it.
|
| That they are framing this as a legitimate business is either
| misunderstanding their current position in the economy, or
| deliberate misdirection. We're not playing around with role
| playing chatbots anymore. This shit was supposed to be
| displacing actual humans.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Jeez man, its been less than 4 years since GPT-3.5 release.
| Maybe its okay if the entire "replace all humans with AI"
| takes a little while
| delusional wrote:
| None of the problems highlighted in the blogpost or in the
| WSJ video are problems that are automatically solved "in a
| little while". They are in fact the same exact problems
| people had when using this shit for pretend sexting 4 years
| ago.
|
| Excuse me if I find it incredibly irresponsible to be
| plowing billions into what is essentially a bad LARPing
| machine, and then going: "well we certainly had fun".
| Atomic_Torrfisk wrote:
| Point is it is misleading, and part of the hype cycle.
| begueradj wrote:
| There is a marketplace platform with the same name in Nordic
| countries (vend.com)...
| Atomic_Torrfisk wrote:
| Sad that they acquired Finn.
| varjag wrote:
| So it looks like C level execs will be made redundant before
| their human peons after all.
| starkparker wrote:
| Love the many accidentally dystopian statements in here for
| what's ostensibly a positive, fun press release.
| roughly wrote:
| > The fact that the business started to make money may have been
| in spite of the CEO, rather than because of it.
|
| One begins to understand why the C-suites are so convinced this
| technology is ready for prime time - it can't do _my_ job, but
| apparently it can do theirs at a replacement level.
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