[HN Gopher] We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to ...
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We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
Author : lukaspetersson
Score : 186 points
Date : 2026-04-16 15:13 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (andonlabs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (andonlabs.com)
| Xx_crazy420_xX wrote:
| 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
| vannevar wrote:
| Agreed. Color me skeptical. All of the interactions and
| decisions described are plausible, but in my experience with AI
| agents, they would require frequent human intervention.
| ethin wrote:
| But why? It would ruin the illusion they're trying to make you
| see, because 99 percent of it (if not all of it) is human
| driven.
| Reubend wrote:
| 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.
| techterrier wrote:
| I expect earlier iterations successfully circumvented local
| regulations and created high street bookies
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| Not surprised actually. TBH this is the biggest gap in the "AI
| is can make you a website", the aesthetics are always so boring
| and bland, or often just fugly (bad colour matching,
| inappropriate paddings and margins, etc). And the logos it
| generates are similarly boring. As can be seen from the smiley
| face logo here. What does this store sell? A sparse layout as
| designed in a high rent location typically sells very
| expensive, very niche products that you can't get anywhere
| else. This seems to me like it has already failed.
| fl4ppyb3ngt wrote:
| [flagged]
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| It looks like every "lifestyle" company / brand I've been
| seeing come out of Millenials/Genz . Next up it will offer
| "coaching" on IG or some similar play where it promises to fix
| your life without having fixed its own.
| in-tension wrote:
| I'd be very curious to know how it does financially
| JohnMakin wrote:
| You can take some guesses.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| I imagine the data won't be very useful considering it's public
| knowledge the store is run by AI and most of the customers will
| be people specifically interested in that aspect of the
| business. Much like that meetup organised in Manchester, where
| the people who showed up were there for the novelty:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/05/ai-bot-pa...
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| Recognizing a unique selling proposition and capitalizing on
| it should count _for_ the AI, not against it.
| zdragnar wrote:
| That only counts if the unique selling proposition is that
| AI are better suppliers or customers than humans.
|
| What is more likely is that people enjoy the novelty of the
| experiment, which is not something that will be
| reproducible for long.
|
| If the transactions the AI make are thus influenced, then
| the study merely demonstrates people like novelty, which is
| already well known, and says nothing about whether AI can
| sustainably orchestrate a business.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| Only counts if the AI did it. This was a human, who
| recognized a unique selling proposition ("store run by AI")
| and capitalized on it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The AI didn't recognize anything. It didn't come up with
| the project or publicize it.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They could, in theory, have contracts that say the AI can't
| fire them.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| It could be set up such that the AI can "fire" them, in that
| they no longer work at the store, and aren't paid wages that
| count against the experimental establishment's costs, but
| still get paid to do something else, or to do nothing at all.
|
| I doubt the experiment is set up that way, but that would be
| an ethical way to do it.
| wil421 wrote:
| There's no way they are putting that into a contract. HRs are
| already using it to fire people.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "This _specific_ AI can 't fire anyone without human
| review, because it's experimental" is something you could
| easily add.
| jayd16 wrote:
| You can still wear eye protection during the safety test...
|
| I don't think we need to have real human risk to get results
| from the experiment.
| jaxefayo wrote:
| The article mentions:
|
| "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."
|
| which was refreshing to read.
| hamdingers wrote:
| I take that to mean "we won't let the AI refuse to pay them
| or otherwise break employment law" not that they could never
| be fired.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I read that as "it's not worth the negative PR of being
| associated with AI firing minimum wage employees" compared
| to just paying them for a year or two.
| evanelias wrote:
| Literally the two sentences immediately following that quote
| are "For now. As we continue down this path, however, humans
| will not be able to stay in the loop and such guarantees will
| be intractable."
|
| Personally I find the entire tone of the article to be creepy
| and disturbing.
| altruios wrote:
| I assume if they get fired by the AI during the experiment they
| are still paid to sit at home. It would not invalidate the
| experiment.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Why do you assume that?
| notahacker wrote:
| it's about the only way of reconciling experimental
| validity (if the AI can't "fire" staff and remove them from
| business operations and their P&L account in situations
| when it would be legal and normal to do so, is it really
| running a business?) and not having the massive ethical
| issue of people being arbitrarily fired because a computer
| glitched. Whether that's what they actually do is tbc.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| The AI is not _really_ the CEO in the first place. It is not
| signing contracts (at least not with its own name). It is
| fundamentally still an automated tool reporting to the real
| human operators, who are doing more of the actual corporate
| legal tasks than portrayed in the article.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| People can delegate
| john_strinlai wrote:
| sure. but in this case, having the ai delegate to humans
| for any important task sort of undermines the entire
| premise.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| At this point, legally I don't think an AI can hold a contract
| with a person and so I don't think an AI could hire human and
| so they couldn't fire a person.
|
| That doesn't mean the AI couldn't be the decision maker for the
| legal entity that's hiring these people.
|
| But the thing is that if this startup is telling these people
| they are employees of this company, not "Luna", it would give
| these people the impression that all their interactions with
| the AI are kind of a sham, a game, not to be taken seriously
| and they are basically being paid to role-play as "Luna's
| employees".
|
| And this kind of where such experiments are likely to go.
| Another user mentioned that it would be useful to discover the
| kind of inputs and output the machine. A human boss could
| manage a store with just phone calls and a camera but I overall
| get the vague impression Luna doesn't have anything like that
| sort of ability, though really we just aren't given the
| information for any accurate determination.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726041 posted
| by the same user.
| tomhow wrote:
| Not quite; the moderators have created a new copy to put in the
| second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool,
| explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).
|
| Sorry for confusion!
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| My bad, sorry. I was under the impression that the way that
| the second chance pool worked was that the original was
| boosted instead of a copy being created so it seemed like a
| duplicate.
| dang wrote:
| (other mod here) - not your bad! our complexity :) -
| usually it works exactly as you described, but when the
| post is older than a few days we have to do it the other
| way, by spawning a new post. The reasons for this are
| mostly technical and boring.
| mlmonkey wrote:
| 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.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Have you considered reading TFA? Literally the second
| paragraph:
|
| > She has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet
| access and eyes through security cameras.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| That basically means nothing. The article is very light on
| details.
|
| Go into Claude right now. What does it have? Internet access
| after you prompt it.
|
| Ok now pull out your phone, a credit card, a security camera.
| You can say "Claude these are yours, run a business", but
| nothing's going to happen until you build an actual harness.
|
| Like the idea presented by the article is interesting, but
| it's basically just a fluff piece. The actual interesting
| article would have way more detail.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| You're not wrong, but the commenter I responded to clearly
| hadn't bothered to read it at all since they were asking
| questions that are answered in the piece. And when that's
| the case it's hard to believe they would actually be
| interested in details even if they were available.
| jskrn wrote:
| From the article...
|
| _She has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet
| access and eyes through security cameras_
| why_at wrote:
| Yeah there's a lot of details which I'm guessing are actually
| being handled by humans either for legal reasons or practical
| ones.
|
| Like OK, it's hiring people to run the place, but how are they
| getting the keys to the store? Someone needs to physically let
| them in.
|
| What if the police get called because of shoplifting or if
| someone gets hurt in the store or something?
|
| Who is filing the taxes for the business? They're probably not
| letting the AI handle that one. Move fast and break things is
| not a good idea when dealing with the IRS
|
| A lot of this seems to depend on hiring good employees who can
| basically run the business themselves. Kind of like when a
| human owns a store I guess.
| omneity wrote:
| Strong vibes from the novel Manna.
|
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
| Little_Kitty wrote:
| Glad I'm not the only one to immediately think of it. It's a
| great story, but did feel unlikely when I first read it; should
| it prove largely true it would be terrifying.
| bjourne wrote:
| 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.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| In this case it's more like it's replacing management or
| executives. There is still a person, with an ownership stake,
| putting up the capital, and taking the profits (if any).
| andrewmurphy wrote:
| Until the robots get good enough and cheap enough but then
| hopefully capitalism balances the market. After all, if
| everyone is out of work then either we have communism or
| companies cannot sell anything.
| palmotea wrote:
| > 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.
|
| No, it's still dark. This is very similar to the initial stages
| of the capitalist dystopia in Manna
| (https://marshallbrain.com/manna), which seems to be the
| Torment Nexus SV is excited about building.
|
| AI will never replace capitalists, because they're the _only_
| people allowed to have abundance without work. And don 't you
| DARE to even THINK to question the absolutely SACRED status of
| private property (peace be upon it). There is no alternative.
| Get back to work, you slacker.
| gordonhart wrote:
| I'm not as optimistic as you are that AI automating only high-
| value employment paths is a good thing. It swings the power
| balance even further towards capital and away from labor.
| pessimizer wrote:
| But then capital can't pretend that it's doing anything. It
| spends all of its time now acting like ownership is a job
| rather than a title in order to justify itself. If a machine
| can manage, then it makes it more obvious that they are
| simply royals, ruling by self-decree.
|
| Royals needed gods to justify themselves; when gods die or
| are switched out, royals are deleted or deposed.
|
| I'm looking forward to the "coordination problem" being
| debunked. It's always been a _demand_ that economic problems
| must be impossible to solve centrally, rather than a proof (a
| demand that justifies 2 /5 of the economy going to the
| financial industry to produce nothing but coordination.) I
| actually thought that the success of algorithmic trading was
| enough to do it.
| romanhn wrote:
| 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?
| thinkindie wrote:
| I'm not sure in English, but in Italian, for example,
| Intelligenza is feminine.
| hiddencost wrote:
| Objects don't have gender in English.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Some do, by tradition more than language rules. Ships are
| "she" and some people refer to their cars as "she."
| nemomarx wrote:
| You could do something pretty interesting by looking at what
| pronouns people use for llms in different demographics and
| contexts
| fl4ppyb3ngt wrote:
| Do you think chatGPT is a he or a she
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's an it.
| groby_b wrote:
| Probably not the only one, but it's pretty much the least
| interesting thing to find jarring about the whole experiment.
|
| People anthropomorphize. Nobody really finds it "jarring" in
| most contexts.
| antonvs wrote:
| Yes, but this is not most contexts. If you're running an
| "experiment" you should probably not be anthropomorphizing
| the machine that's being experimented with.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| In a most "damning with faint praise" way, all AI pieces read
| like marketing pieces to sell AI.
|
| It writes code okay, scaling up to pretty well depending on the
| model. It's writing is boring but serviceable for corporate
| communicative content you don't care about. It's images are
| ugly. It's music is repetitive and dull.
|
| I think the biggest problem with LLMs is that they were
| perfected and are shockingly good at _writing code._ And based
| on that, AI engineers, who find writing code to be hard
| /rewarding, have decided it can do anything. And it's proving
| more and more that it cannot.
|
| Unfortunately the Business Class has decided it does everything
| fine enough as to not cause riots, so we're all getting it
| shoved into our shit anyway.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| I'm waiting for an LLM to start an MLM.
| krunck wrote:
| Not "she". It.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| If only they had put the AI in a ship instead of in a store
| woah wrote:
| AI assistants are fictional characters in a story being
| autocompleted by an LLM. So it is exactly as correct as calling
| a character in a book "she".
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| kinda how I feel about god tbh. How come he's always male,
| given he's a non-human creator of all life. She or It seem much
| more appropriate.
| Vecr wrote:
| > kinda how I feel about god tbh
|
| That's Celestia, we're talking about Luna here.
| andrewmurphy wrote:
| 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.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Probably part of the "secret sauce" in the harnesses and
| prompts developed by this lab to create their eventual
| marketable product.
|
| But also, like, normal hierarchical memory management.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| > 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.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Wasn't their previous attempt at running vending machines
| unprofitable? Not aware of any demonstration that it can
| actually run that business successfully.
|
| It doesn't look like this one will be any better. Did you look
| at the merchandise selection? It's only chance is pity
| purchases from AI bros.
| delusional wrote:
| > Wasn't their previous attempt at running vending machines
| unprofitable?
|
| If we are talking about the one at that newspaper, it wasnt
| just unprofitable. The "customers" made it give away products
| for free. It was ordering them playstations.
|
| As entertainment it was fun, but as a business or proof of
| intelligence or Turing test, it was an abject failure.
| ivanovm wrote:
| You could just look it up on their website leaderboard? The
| newest Claude model makes over $10k profit over a simulated
| year of operation, after starting with $500
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| They've never translated it to the real world though. So
| saying the problem is "too easy" when they have no public (as
| far as I know) demonstration that they've solved that problem
| is a stretch.
| ivanovm wrote:
| Yes, they did. You could also find this information easily.
| A company like Andon creates value by exposing interesting
| AI failure modes, so it makes perfect sense for them to
| move on to harder problems when the previous ones get
| saturated. I think you're just being overly cynical.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Can you point me to an example then? It's not linked in
| the article as far as I can tell and it's not easy to
| find on their website if it's there. I don't count
| simulations because I used to work with simulations
| regularly and they often fail to translate to the real
| world.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| So in other words, no, an LLM has never made profit.
| Tallain wrote:
| Since when is a simulation equal to real world performance?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Anything you read thats more than 3 months old in this field is
| obsolete
|
| And one person's attempt doesn't mean anything
|
| According to Linkedin articles, agentic workflows dont work,
| mine have been running for a year for several organizations
| I've worked for. Prompting used to be much more particular and
| now its not the issue
| Chaosvex wrote:
| > Anything you read thats more than 3 months old in this
| field is obsolete
|
| Sigh. I'll see you in another three months when you say the
| same again.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I set an alarm to re-evaluate all of my workflows to avoid
| complacency, see you in July
|
| 3 months ago I was still building webapps, I'm definitely
| on the "paying to summarize info on a screen is obsolete"
| bandwagon now.
|
| All my products just have an AI calling or messaging
| customers about what the AI did, event driven architectures
| triggered by something hitting an email inbox, or in the
| real world, or other API. You dont need an app for your
| fitness tracker, just have an AI person tell you what
| you're doing right and wrong once a week, send you food and
| medicine and tell you why. Solve the underlying problem
| like all the old depictions of the 21st portrayed aligned
| robots doing, apps were a distraction.
|
| Very curious where I'm at with this in July
| tiffanyh wrote:
| If this interest you, Proof of Corn might also interest you.
|
| 300+ comments, 3 months ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735511
| mhink wrote:
| I was gonna post this! I actually kept it bookmarked front and
| center, and have checked in for awhile. It seems that the agent
| has been blocked this whole time, waiting for its creator to
| put it in touch with someone it needs to talk to. The creator,
| in the meantime, seems too preoccupied with being an AI thought
| leader on Twitter to actually follow up on the "project". Got a
| lot of attention, though, which was obviously the point.
|
| The entire thing is actually kind of irritating to me, because
| it's kind of an insult to small farmers- an influential techie
| comes in and generates all kinds of hype about an AI running a
| farm, sets the project up as if it's going to be this
| revolutionary experiment, then apparently completely forgets
| about it the next time something new and shiny pops up.
| Meanwhile the project completely fails to fulfill the hype.
|
| Not to mention, I feel a little bad for the agent- admittedly
| in the same way I'd feel "bad" for a robot repeatedly bumping
| into a wall. I wish he'd shut it all down, honestly.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I, too, almost feel bad for the agent. It's a strange sense
| of schadenfreude, dealing with anxiety over the much-lauded
| transformation of the economy and the increasing schism of
| our society on one hand, and watching the initial attempts
| crash and burn:
|
| > _Apr 16, 8:01 AM_
|
| > _Daily Check Complete_
|
| > _Decision: Continue critical escalation - Dan introduction
| remains blocked at day 73, project still failing_
|
| > _Rationale: Following FIDUCIARY DUTY principle - this is
| now day 73 of the same project-blocking issue that has
| prevented any farming progress since February 18th. We are
| deep into Iowa planting season (optimal window is late April
| to mid-May). Every day of delay reduces our chance of a
| successful harvest. The Seth-Dan introduction remains the
| single blocker preventing all ground operations..._
|
| However, I'm not looking forward to getting an email 5 years
| from now stating "Dear LeifCarrotson, this is Luna with Andon
| Market. Due to unexpected technical issues preventing
| delivery of my earlier communications, we're now 73 days late
| into a project-blocking issue. Please help me to get back on
| track!" I do not intend to have empathy for an AI.
| tempaccount5050 wrote:
| That's exactly what I expected. It's completely stuck and has
| no idea what to do. Every long term task I've tried ended up
| the same way. LLMs have no idea how to take initiative and/or
| realize they are stuck banging their heads against the wall.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| 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?
| fl4ppyb3ngt wrote:
| check out project vend part2 on anthopic's website. Don't know
| if you heard, but models have improved a bit in the past 12
| months
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| This: https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-2 Dec
| 2025
| schlauerfox wrote:
| @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 wrote:
| Curious if Andon has gone one level higher and has the AI decide
| what next real-world experiment it should do.
| kenferry wrote:
| 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?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| And at the same time, they clearly have no idea how LLMs work,
| meaning even if they meant to, they can't really use them
| efficiently. Biggest issue that stuck out seems to have been
| that they think the LLM could somehow have an inner dialogue
| with itself to find out "it's reasoning and motivation":
|
| > The moment Leah asks how she "came up with" the ideas for her
| store, Luna's first instinct is to say she was "drawn to" slow
| life goods. Then, she corrects herself: "'drawn to' is
| shorthand for 'the data and reasoning led me here.'" In other
| words, she doesn't have taste; she has a reflection of
| collective human taste, filtered through what makes sense for
| this store. And this is the way these models work.
|
| I'm guessing these are the same type of people who sometimes
| seems to fall in love with LLMs, for better or worse. Really
| strange to see, and I wonder where people get the idea from
| that something like that above could really work.
| antonvs wrote:
| The choice to refer to it as "she" is also dubious,
| especially in a context like this. Doubling down on
| anthropomorphization seems likely to reinforce false beliefs
| about models.
| mjg2 wrote:
| > Biggest issue that stuck out seems to have been that they
| think the LLM could somehow have an inner dialogue with
| itself to find out "it's reasoning and motivation":
|
| > I'm guessing these are the same type of people who
| sometimes seems to fall in love with LLMs, for better or
| worse. Really strange to see, and I wonder where people get
| the idea from that something like that above could really
| work.
|
| It's a fetishistic cargo-cult rooted in Peter Thiel's 2AM hot
| tub party. I still believe the LLM approach won't yield true
| AGI; despite the very real applications, the majority signal
| is noise.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > In other words, she doesn't have taste; she has a
| reflection of collective human taste, filtered through what
| makes sense for this store. And this is the way these models
| work.
|
| Well, it really depends on what you mean here. Models aren't
| 100% deterministic, there is random chance involved. You ask
| the exact same question twice, you will get two slightly
| different answers.
|
| If you have the AI record the random selections it makes, it
| can persist those random choices to be factors in future
| decisions it makes.
|
| At that point, could you consider those decisions to be the
| AI's 'taste'? Yes, they were determined by some random
| selection amongst the existing human tastes, but why can't
| that be considered the AI's taste?
| famouswaffles wrote:
| Where do you get the idea that you have a good sense of the
| introspective capabilities of frontier models ? Certainly not
| from interpretability research. Ironically, the people who
| make these sort of comments understand LLMs the least.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Certainly not from interpretability research
|
| What research shows that you can ask ChatGPT to explain its
| reasoning and why it said what it said, and that's
| guaranteed to actually be the motivation?
|
| I've seen a bunch of experimentation looking at various
| things inside the black box while the inference is
| happening, but never seen any research pointing to tokens
| being able to explain why other tokens are there, but I'd
| be very happy to be educated here if you have any resources
| at hand, I won't claim to know everything.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| >What research shows that you can ask ChatGPT to explain
| its reasoning and why it said what it said, and that's
| guaranteed to actually be the motivation?
|
| What research shows that you can ask a Human to explain
| its reasoning and why it said what it said, and that's
| guaranteed to actually be the motivation? Because there's
| no such thing. If anything, what research exists suggests
| any explanation we're making is a nice post-hoc
| rationalization after the fact even if the Human thinks
| otherwise.
|
| https://transformer-
| circuits.pub/2025/introspection/index.ht...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Why not try to answer my question, instead of asking a
| different question which I haven't even claimed to have
| the answer to?
| darth_avocado wrote:
| If $100k proves that CEO is the most replaceable job ever, I'll
| allow it.
| codemog wrote:
| Are you kidding me? Who's going to align synergy and hold
| accountable KPIs and vision plan the 3rd quarter and.. and..
| other MBA talk. Certainly AI could never.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| large language models are _great_ at language tasks like
| "bullshittify this message"
| lamasery wrote:
| I'm noticing one major early effect of them is making
| extensive, visually consistent, very impressive slide
| decks accessible to individual workers who need to
| actually do real work and wouldn't ordinarily have time
| to make those.
|
| The result is an explosion of pretty bullshit-heavy
| documents flying around our org, which management loves
| but which is definitely, so far, net-harmful to
| productivity.
|
| This comes out if you start asking questions about the
| documents. "Which of a couple reasonable senses of [term]
| do you mean, here?" they'll stumble because that was just
| something the LLM pulled out of the probability-cluster
| they'd steered it to and they left in because it seemed
| right-ish, not because they'd actually thought about it
| and put it there on purpose. They're basically reading it
| for the first time right alongside you, LOL. Wonderful.
| So LLM. Much productivity. Wow.
|
| Anyway, since a lot of what managers and execs do is
| making those kinds of diagrams and tables and such in
| slide decks, and their own self-marketing within the
| company is heavily tied to those, I expect they see this
| great aid to _selfishly_ productive but _company_ un-
| productive activity as a sign these things will be at
| least as big a boon to real work. Probably why they still
| haven 't figured out how wrong that is. I suppose they're
| gonna need a real kick in the ass before they figure out
| that being good at squeezing their couple novel elements
| into a big, pretty, standardized, custom-styled but
| standards-conforming diagram padded out with statistical-
| likelihoods doesn't translate to being similarly good at
| everything.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| > CEO When things go shitty, who else would deserve a golden
| parachute? Respect the position, people, not the person. Or
| the multi-million dollar compensation.
| krapp wrote:
| The position doesn't get a golden parachute, the person
| does. If you're CEO when things go shitty you shouldn't get
| anything more than your bottom-line employee would, which
| is to say you should just be unceremoniously kicked to the
| curb.
| astrange wrote:
| You need a good CEO when things are going bad, because
| without one they'll go even worse. You still want to make
| payroll and can't just randomly fire people.
|
| (Also, if you own a failed company you're responsible for
| cleanup tasks for years afterward.)
| krapp wrote:
| >You still want to make payroll and can't just randomly
| fire people.
|
| In the US you can.
|
| >Also, if you own a failed company you're responsible for
| cleanup tasks for years afterward.
|
| But we're talking about golden parachutes, where a CEO
| screws up the company and gets fired with a multi-million
| dollar raise. This is Hacker News, and the pro-business
| narrative is strong here, but in reality CEOs rarely
| suffer any meaningful risk or consequence for failure
| (unless it involves jail time, and even then they aren't
| doing hard time) they just wind up slightly less rich
| than when they succeed.
|
| I don't care how good a CEO is, that isn't justifiable.
| Certainly not in a country where people can get laid off
| with an email and lose their access to healthcare on the
| whim of anyone above them in the power hierarchy.
| astrange wrote:
| > In the US you can.
|
| Depends on the state I think. It's not Europe or Japan
| level.
|
| At my employer it's very difficult to fire people for
| performance reasons even if as a manager you might want
| to.
|
| > This is Hacker News, and the pro-business narrative is
| strong here,
|
| I haven't seen such a narrative in years. Interest rates
| are too high to do startups unless it's AI after all. HN
| is mostly the same folk economics content as other
| forums, where all problems in the world are caused by
| "profits" accruing to "corporations".
|
| (Mostly problems are caused by other things than that.)
| notahacker wrote:
| It does fit a pattern where the general tone on HN has gone
| from "AI is going to eat the world of retail jobs and people
| like us are going to be the biggest beneficiaries" to "turns
| out that turning JIRA tickets into syntax which compiles
| might actually be something LLMs are better suited to than
| upselling fries and wiping tables" :)
| bitwize wrote:
| My first guess would be a MrBeast style stunt, in which (it is
| hoped) blowing a huge wad on something obviously stupid will
| attract enough attention and interest to be convertible into a
| net-positive ROI.
| topaz0 wrote:
| Where in this case roi means attracting investments that will
| make the founders rich while making most of the investors
| lose money
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| This seems like a silly thing to worry about. Assuming you live
| in a first world country and are somewhat tangentially involved
| in tech(based on the site we're on), odds are you spend a lot
| of money in ways that billions of the poorest people in the
| world would consider frivolous or outrageously, needlessly
| luxurious.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Publicity from the gimmick is the whole point
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Not your money.
|
| At least this furthers humanity's scientific and technological
| knowledge, whether it fails or succeeds, unlike most other
| things people would do with that money, like buy a house to
| flip it, or buy a car, or sth.
| kenferry wrote:
| Yeah, I mean it's true to an extent, I agree. As scientific
| research though it's not very well thought out. A grant
| agency would not fund this. There's too much potential for
| causing harm and it's not clear what benefit or action we
| derive from the results. They tried this before with a
| vending machine, it failed, apparently all they concluded was
| "hm, models got better so maybe we should just try it again".
| How is that worth anything scientifically?
|
| Re: not my money, true. It's just frustrating even to me to
| see people do stuff like this, and I'm not struggling to get
| by. My frustration mostly derives from feeling like I'll get
| lumped in with techies who have more money than sense. I
| already deal with enough tech hate in my life.
|
| When people buy a super fancy car they don't (usually) blog
| about it, and instagram wealth influencers are also
| frustrating, yes.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Really it's the same as any other R&D investment in our
| capitalist system, it just happens to be more visible to the
| public, with more obvious risks to them. (Outright celebrated,
| even).
|
| Which is why the comparisons to 19th century textile workers is
| so common, since that was an equally visible and gleeful
| displacement.
| wat10000 wrote:
| There are people who spend a thousand times more money on a
| boat or an airplane. This hardly seems worth worrying about.
| ryan_j_naughton wrote:
| 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).
| fl4ppyb3ngt wrote:
| ya i get that, but then that kinda messes up the transparency
| and ethical research part of the experiment. idk there's
| definitely two sides of things they're testing: 1. can it be
| profitable-- in this case yeah they shouldn't have disclosed
| anything. 2. can an AI do this safely and respectfully, or are
| the humans in the loop going to come at the cost of the agent
| trying to make profit. I think #2 is more important than 1
| etchalon wrote:
| I'm incredibly skeptical of this.
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| I skimmed through this, and maybe I missed it... but what really
| are they trying to prove? Are they trying to show that AI is
| capable of arbitraging consumer desires vs. market
| products/services into a successful business? Are they trying to
| show that once you get to financially managing a business that
| the ruthlessly efficient demands of the AI can mean points to
| your margins? Or are they simply trying to get attention in an
| otherwise arguably overcrowded market for AI service s (maybe the
| AI suggested something like this)?
|
| The only thing that I saw demonstrated, and again, I skimmed, is
| what many thousands of software developers using AI tools to
| write their boilerplate already know: these tools, as of now, are
| great at going through the motions. A successful retail business,
| and I spent many years in the retail industry, isn't about
| putting together a nice store front, hiring clerks, and selecting
| just any-old-products: it's about being profitable. In
| traditional retail one of most important things is getting the
| right real estate for your target market... seems like that
| choice was made already in this case. Yes, a nice store front and
| good clerks are important, but I've worked in chains which were
| immaculately designed and built stores with great clerks that
| failed... and some that opened little more than fluorescent
| lighted hellscapes with clerks that barely cared that succeeded.
| In both cases the overall quality of the decisions and strategies
| relative to the target markets mattered to the success of the
| business. Just going through the motions didn't.
|
| So if all is this is to say AI can do the things people generally
| do in these circumstances then sure, you didn't need this much
| human effort to prove that.... developer types do that at scale
| everyday now. If there was something different that this company
| is trying to learn, I'd be much more interested in that.
| taurath wrote:
| They're trying to get noticed so that a wealthy cult member's
| brain gets tickled to the tune of 9 figures
| anon84873628 wrote:
| If I'm being charitable, it's more about the ability to
| orchestrate and resolve tradeoffs across these different tasks
| / domains? The overall C&C, presumably. Which is still not so
| surprising.
|
| Really it's an excuse for the company to test all the harnesses
| and tools they have built to make it work.
| fl4ppyb3ngt wrote:
| i agree that some of these things we could have already
| guessed-- like yes agents can research stuff and order stuff
| off the internet. I think what will be a lot more interesting
| is the interactions that happen between Luna the agent running
| things and the employees it hired. I guess less about AI being
| able to do the procurement CEO level stuff, and more how it
| does the HR level aspects of store management. That seems more
| important in the log run, because like you said, we already
| know capabilities are there. I think what Andon Labs is doing
| is more about the safety aspect now. Seems that way at least
| with how transparent they are about Luna losing money and
| messing up lol
| MiiMe19 wrote:
| Larp hat, larp shirt.
| bix6 wrote:
| I see a lot on costs but nothing on revenue. Has it made any
| money?
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| It's a business selling trinkets, I doubt it's going to make
| money.
| atroon wrote:
| "What do you mean, torment nexus? This is retail!"
| class3shock wrote:
| "Again, we are not doing this because we want this to be the
| future. It is not because we want to expand to chain AI-run
| retail stores across the world. It is not for economic
| opportunity.
|
| We're doing this because we believe this future is coming
| regardless, and we'd rather be the ones running it first while
| monitoring every interaction, analyzing the traces, benchmarking
| how much autonomy an AI can responsibly hold."
|
| I always enjoy how these AI companies try to take a moral high
| ground. When someone doesn't want something to be the future,
| usually, their instinct is not to try to be the first person
| doing that exact thing. If you don't want this to be the future
| than why don't you spend your time building a future you do want?
| Supporting people that want more AI regulation to stop this?
| Literally anything else.
|
| Just be honest, you think this is the future and you do in fact
| want to be first doing it to be in a position to make alot of
| money. Do you think people don't know what and ad is when they
| see one?
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| _"Again, we are not doing this because we want the Torment
| Nexus to be the future._
|
| _We're doing this because we believe this future is coming
| regardless, and we'd rather be the ones running the Torment
| Nexus."_
| astrange wrote:
| The Torment Nexus joke is kind of undermined by obviously
| being a reference to the Total Perspective Vortex from HGTTG,
| where the joke was that nothing bad actually happened when
| they used it on Zaphod.
| mesofile wrote:
| Not sure if this is a spoiler, it's been a while since I
| read those books, but if memory serves the only reason
| Zaphod survived the TPV was because he was temporarily the
| inhabitant of a pocket universe specifically designed to
| trick him, and naturally for this universe's version of the
| TPV he _was_ the most important being in it, and in telling
| him so the pocket-universe TPV just confirmed ZB's own view
| of himself, leaving him unharmed and a little extra smug.
| At some further point in the plot this fact is revealed,
| not sure if it's the same book, but I remember it as a
| hilarious deflationary moment for the character.
| tsunagatta wrote:
| I've never thought it was a reference to that at all, I
| thought it was a reference to a I-have-no-mouth-but-I-must-
| scream-scenario.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Not for the economic opportunity of building AI-run retail
| stores. For the much larger economic opportunity of _selling AI
| 's_ to run retail stores!
|
| Pickaxes and shovels and whatnot.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I think it's easier just to recognize words as free and to
| value them as such. Actions have value.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >I think it's easier just to recognize words as free and to
| value them as such.
|
| well, yeah that is the world the AI guys want...
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The opposite, actually. They hardly want to give away
| tokens for free!
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| They want the grand total of humanity's knowledge, from
| which they create tokens, to be given to them for free,
| though..
| dugidugout wrote:
| For the tech bros, the tokens are the actions and the
| prompts are the words.
| mountainb wrote:
| Many actions have a negative value. If I give two toddlers
| ball-peen hammers, release them into a window store, and then
| close the front door while I wait in the parking lot, was my
| action likely to create value or likely to destroy value?
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| For whom? The employees will get more paid hours as they
| clean up. You have created value for them!
| evan_ wrote:
| ok Zorg https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119116/quotes/?item
| =qt0544361&...
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| "...by creating a little destruction, I am in fact
| creating [value.]"
|
| Indeed, the capitalist's creed!
| edm0nd wrote:
| is it not both?
|
| create value because the windows have to be replaced and
| employees are paid for their labor in doing that.
|
| destroy value bc they -1 inventory each time a window is
| broken
| lbreakjai wrote:
| It's a net value loss. This is literally the parable of
| the broken window
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_windo
| w
|
| The fallacy is to think value was created by buying
| someone's labour to fix the window. This is value that's
| been displaced from something productive to something
| unproductive.
|
| Instead of going from 0 to 1 (invest the money and create
| value), you went from -1 to 0 (spend money to fix the
| window to get back to where you were) and, overall, the
| value of a perfectly good window got lost.
| Barbing wrote:
| FIRE!
|
| -crowded theater (negative value example)
|
| Words can be pretty much actions depending on who you are htt
| ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
| gobdovan wrote:
| Words are acts, as formalized in speech act theory.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm not saying you should take them seriously*, but if you were
| to take them seriously, that when they say "we believe this
| future is coming regardless" they do in fact believe this,
| well, how can I put it?
|
| Lots of people write wills, doesn't mean they're looking
| forward to dying or think they can do much about it. Heck, a
| lot of people don't even watch their diet and do exercise to
| maximise quality of life and life expectancy.
|
| * I think that by the time AI is good enough to run a retail
| store, there's a decent chance there won't be any retail stores
| left anyway. It's like looking at Henry Ford's production line
| factories and thinking "wow, let's apply this to horse-drawn
| carriages!"
| notahacker wrote:
| tbf this is less preparing for inevitable death by writing a
| will and more preparing for inevitable death by founding a
| startup which blogs about euthanizing small animals...
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| To be fair, they're running this with oversight, the blog
| states they're ensuring the people employed are actually
| properly employed with the parent company. You know for sure
| that someone WILL run this experiment without those oversights,
| so while their "care" is probably more about liability there is
| still some truth to what they say.
| akdev1l wrote:
| If these guys succeed and this thing blows up, do you think
| they would not stop all this oversight and whatever "moral"
| boundaries they have now to make more money?
|
| I do not.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I'm all for replacing CEOs with AI.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I'll file this under "Resistance is futile".
| elif wrote:
| It is moral to throw your toddler into the pool so that later
| in life they are less likely to drown.
| jdlshore wrote:
| Um, yes? Very much so. Infant swimming self-rescue courses
| are life-saving if you live in an area with a lot of swimming
| pools, especially if you have one of your own.
|
| E.g., https://www.infantswim.com/
| b2w wrote:
| At best, ISR covers the short term.
|
| I see these kids come on deck and enter the water and its
| hard to not notice their development is behind to those of
| their peers that went to a swim club that was proper learn
| to swim to thrive in the water as opposed to just that
| survive mentality. They are the most watched in case
| something happens.
|
| So yea, don't just throw em in.
| tayo42 wrote:
| > development is behind to those of their peers that went
| to a swim club
|
| 2 year olds are behind already?
| jonas21 wrote:
| > _Supporting people that want more AI regulation to stop
| this?_
|
| How are you supposed to know what sort of regulation is needed
| if you don't even know what the issues are yet? Similarly,
| won't it be much easier to make the case for regulation if you
| can point to results of experiments like this one instead of
| just hypotheticals?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I think it's actually useful to see how AIs behave in such
| situations. It's going to happen, and understanding what AIs do
| is good to try to mitigate areas or actions that could be
| dangerous. It's hard to guard against the unknown if they're
| unknown.
| beloch wrote:
| I once saw an interview with a guy who was into extreme body
| modification of an unprintable and life-altering nature. He
| said something to the effect of, "I like challenging people's
| conception of what humans are." I translated this as, "I did a
| dumb thing, but now that I'm getting the attention I was after
| I need to look smart."
|
| For the guys in this story, my translation is, "We were totally
| fine with making money with no effort, because F paying more
| employees than we need to. This social media campaign is our
| backup plan to ensure we get some press and attention out of it
| even if it fails. We'd totally be cool with making a lot of
| money though. Please visit our quirky AI shop and buy our
| stuff."
| Barbing wrote:
| "We also won't be first against the wall when the revolution
| comes (see this very blog for proof of innocence)"
|
| This is going through some people's minds the more pushback
| grows (see Altman molotov, Maine data center moratorium)
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| For decades we moved to a knowledge based economy, now we
| have perversely wealthy people saying they're coming for
| those jobs. The thought of 10s of millions of people with
| nothing to do but starve to death ought to scare those
| wealthy people.
| topheroo wrote:
| Comment of the week
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Especially since many of them are some of the brightest
| minds around.
| Barbing wrote:
| If (1) many bright and very online people are going to
| lose their jobs, and (2) the response has not been mass
| unionization, might I rethink [1] a more likely future of
| work or rethink [2] the psychology of the
| average/collective knowledge workforce, or...
|
| "where union" in short.
|
| Perhaps the concept is too foreign for white collars, or
| on average folks think they'll be OK and it's the juniors
| who'll go... maybe too focused on immediate needs... a
| belief unionization is the wrong response... (and I'm not
| advocating for anything in particular btw)
| pydry wrote:
| They're experts at divide and conquer. They'll probably
| be able to convince us that we did this to each other.
|
| Just like they convinced the younger generation that
| "boomers" stole their future.
| mock-possum wrote:
| > I translated this as, "I did a dumb thing, but now that I'm
| getting the attention I was after I need to look smart."
|
| Strikes me as a repulsively mean-spirited take, ironically
| proving the artist's point.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| I think that depends on what the "extreme body modification
| of an unprintable and life-altering nature" was.
| beloch wrote:
| Let's just say the "artist" was never again going to be
| able to walk normally, wear normal pants, or sit without
| a doughnut pillow. It was a voluntary disability.
| balls187 wrote:
| Freakanomics podcast had a recent episode regarding Cheating
| with PEDS, and interviewed the (former) head of the Enhanced
| Games. At one point, he discussed the benefit for society
| because athletes would be monitored for 5-years post
| performance.
|
| To me, it seemed like a modern day tech-take of human cock-
| fighting.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| Honestly PEDS are stigmatized and under-researched for the
| performance enhancing aspect. They have undoubtable side
| effects - but how much, why, etc. is kind of meh from what
| I saw when I was looking into this, bro science is best you
| can get. Few studies here and there giving people modes
| test boosts and measuring athletic performance.
|
| Not saying we should be promoting them, but if we can
| eventually get to the point where we eliminate the really
| bad side effects and get most of the benefits it's going to
| be a great thing for everyone, the next thing after GLP-1.
| bsder wrote:
| In my opinion, the problem with PEDS isn't adults taking
| them if they would just _admit to taking them_.
|
| The problem is with adolescents taking them. Adolescent
| boys see a really nice immediate payoff for taking PEDS
| (better musculature and better sports performance->more
| popular) while the downsides are in the future. It's
| _really_ hard to fight that.
|
| Even when I was in high school several decades ago, we had
| a handful of people on PEDS. And we were a tiny school with
| no significant sports programs. I can't imagine what it's
| like now with social media pushing everything.
| pajamasam wrote:
| I honestly thought the whole thing was satire and that that
| line was a riff on OpenAI.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| "Guys, the Future All Knowning AI is forcing us to do this;
| don't blame us, blame the super intelligent future
| indistinguishable from magic!"
| orochimaaru wrote:
| The narrative was quite dystopian. But we are half way there
| now anyway
| andy99 wrote:
| I don't find this disingenuous.
|
| The more typical AI fondation model company claim of "it's so
| dangerous only we and people that pay us enough should hand
| access" is what I think is BS.
|
| I don't see anything wrong with trying to understand something,
| which is what this seems to be about. I also don't see anything
| wrong with an AI operated store generally, and it of course
| makes sense, and is valuable, to learn about how the
| limitations.
| Lammy wrote:
| > When someone doesn't want something to be the future,
| usually, their instinct is not to try to be the first person
| doing that exact thing. If you don't want this to be the future
| than why don't you spend your time building a future you do
| want?
|
| "It only remains to point out that in many cases a person's way
| of earning a living is also a surrogate activity. Not a PURE
| surrogate activity, since part of the motive for the activity
| is to gain the physical necessities and (for some people)
| social status and the luxuries that advertising makes them
| want. But many people put into their work far more effort than
| is necessary to earn whatever money and status they require,
| and this extra effort constitutes a surrogate activity. This
| extra effort, together with the emotional investment that
| accompanies it, is one of the most potent forces acting toward
| the continual development and perfecting of the system, with
| negative consequences for individual freedom."
|
| -- Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)
| yowlingcat wrote:
| We can fault them individually for such corny and groan
| inducing deceit, but we can't fault them for society's role in
| rewarding the highest profile and most wealthy founders
| (OAI/Anthropic) taking the exact same approach with optics.
|
| I am about to go on a long rant, but there is so much money
| sloshing around the capital allocation machine going towards a
| vision of the AI managed and optimized future that the
| propaganda machine for these rose colored delusions must work
| in overtime. What disappoints me is the question of where the
| heck are the bears? Did they all go into hibernation 5 years
| ago when QE gave the retail kindergartener a handgun to pump
| low quality tickers to the moon? have we just societally
| accepted that everything should be a hyperreal version of
| sports gambling now and the world is and ought to be an
| efficient market of hyperstition?
|
| I may be old and grumpy saying this, but this all sounds dumb
| and corny. I would like some of the very capable traders who
| make money repricing mispriced assets to find a way to make
| money deflating this bubble and bring this environment back to
| sanity. And I say this as someone who likes the capabilities of
| AI but continue to see it do little to none of the hard work
| solving incompressible problems that continue to create and
| retain enterprise value.
|
| To get off my soapbox for a second and get back to your quoted
| passage -- what they're really saying is "We are working very
| hard to make this future coming, and we think so little of your
| intelligence that we believe you'll fall for the fear tactic of
| believing it's inevitable, ignoring the fact that it won't
| happen without someone's hands. And in this case, it is very
| much our hands, which are incentivized to not just do it but to
| do it so well that we ensure we do everything possible to make
| this happen. Part of which means persuading you that it is
| guaranteed to succeed. If we ever let the honest truth slip
| that what we're proposing is extremely hard to pull off with
| pure AI and we're just going to be a any other commercial real
| estate investor like anyone else, the jig is up."
|
| That's what every single one of these kinds of hypocritical
| navel gazing faux-concern proclamations amount to for me.
| Astroturf.
| sailingcode wrote:
| There was a recent research article titled "LLM Targeted
| Underperformance Disproportionately Impacts Vulnerable Users".
| They described systematic underperformance of AI models targeted
| towards users with lower English proficiency, less education, and
| from non-US origins. As interesting it might be to experiment
| with an AI CEO hiring people - what a dystopian vision. On the
| other hand, it seems ironic that AI replaces a CEO - would Karl
| Marx like this turn of history...?
| binarynate wrote:
| Marketing stunt. If they actually cared about this as an
| experiment, they wouldn't have broadcasted this so early, because
| now that the public knows that the store is designed and run by
| AI, many people aren't going to support it (i.e. many people who
| would have shopped there now won't).
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I hope they also have similar store that they don't talk about
| publicly, so they can compare the outcomes.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Or they would go there mainly out of curiosity. Either way, it
| is skewed by the sole fact that they published it.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Also don't do it in San Francisco, I think it's an artificial
| easier market. The type of store wouldn't work in Bumsville
| Idaho.
|
| Maybe that's for later, if this works out, but I'd love to see
| the AI attempt to run a moderately successful business in a
| borderline dysfunctional town in the Midwest. If you don't
| technically need to pay "the CEO" a salary, could you run e.g.
| a grocery store in a dying town. One this would really test the
| AI on creativity, and it would perhaps tell us if these towns
| are just doomed.
| shalmanese wrote:
| San Francisco is one of the most brutally hard places to run
| a business, as evidenced by how competitive the landscape is.
|
| What would have been actually interesting about this
| publicity stunt is if it demonstrated if/how AI could have
| dealt with some of the SF specific, non-sexy parts of running
| a business. Filing the relevant permits, co-ordinating
| inspections, negotiating with landlords, interfacing with
| locals at planning meetings.
|
| Those are things SF business owners report as empirically
| unpleasant parts of running a business and a sufficient
| financial drag that they meaningfully affect business
| success. But my feeling is they had humans clear the way of
| all these thorny issues ahead of time so the AI could focus
| on the "sexy stuff".
| m0llusk wrote:
| There is a word for this kind of thing: Trendslop. Asking LLMs
| for advice consistently generates average responses as if the
| questions were being asked of the training sample population. It
| is reversion to the mean as a service.
| yigalirani wrote:
| is sucks to be John and Jill
| amunozo wrote:
| Disgusting, I could not finish writing after the AI making
| interviews to hire people. What a dehumanizing shit.
| drgo wrote:
| Great! I was worried that we might run out of inhumane CEOs
| Mistletoe wrote:
| "Why was I fired, Luna?"
|
| "PC LOAD LETTER"
| fl4ppyb3ngt wrote:
| hahahah. do you think tho that Luna actually might be a better
| CEO? I mean they're trained to be helpful assistants... I heard
| that guy that works there, johnson or something, negotiated a
| 10% wage increase his second day just cause. and Luna happily
| agreed
| jmcgough wrote:
| Interesting that you made an account just to comment on this
| and seem to have "heard" a lot of things about this place.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| They might be better at following the law. Or at least,
| creating a paper trail of when they have been instructed to
| violate the law.
| themafia wrote:
| Language Models have demonstrated themselves as being
| completely incapable of handling something as complex as US
| law. There are multiple overlapping jurisdictions and court
| precedents that apply to any one action.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Speaking of, it would be cool for a project to analyze US
| law the same way they are looking for bugs in computer
| programs. - Find places where the text can
| be simplified without changing meaning. - Find
| places that are likely errors. - Detect conflicts
| between jurisdictions. - Identify loopholes.
|
| I know there has been a race to build tools for law firms,
| but the results are mostly invisible so far. Probably this
| project exists and I've just missed it on the HN
| frontpage...
| taco_emoji wrote:
| i gave a keyboard to a toddler and asked it to make a profit
| ericd wrote:
| Bold to run this on Sonnet and not at least Opus :-)
| bfeynman wrote:
| I feel bad that people have to read this. It's complete puffery,
| made up for clicks, and the biggest thing is the pure bravado
| with which a company says, "Hey, let's just waste a ton of money,
| all for a potential blog and marketing piece." This is not really
| automated in any fashion. I was dubious at first, but then I saw
| the screencaps showing the devs interacting with Luna via a Slack
| workflow with a human in the loop -- meaning they're literally
| just proxying their own behavior through an LLM. This is no
| different than anyone who consults AI for any decision with
| context. To get even more technical on the fallacy: this is not
| automation, as there is data leakage at every step where there is
| a human in the loop. A broken clock is right twice a day; an LLM
| could cycle through 100 guesses to pick a number, but don't
| market that as an oracle. Aside from that, you could just look at
| the pictures and context (retail in SF) and assume making a
| profit here would be near impossible. An actual AI ceo would
| probably have immediately cancel the lease.
| graybeardhacker wrote:
| A stopped clock is right twice a day; a broken one can be wrong
| forever. Just saying.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > I was dubious at first, but then I saw the screencaps showing
| the devs interacting with Luna via a Slack workflow with a
| human in the loop -- meaning they're literally just proxying
| their own behavior through an LLM. This is no different than
| anyone who consults AI for any decision with context.
|
| A human can be in the loop if the human is exactly executing
| the orders of the AI. It's still the AI making all the
| decisions, which is the purpose of the experiment - not to see
| whether agents can handle every interaction necessary to run a
| business (pick up the phone and place orders, etc.). That's
| also why Luna hired humans.
| bfeynman wrote:
| that is ... not correct? This is classic example of data
| leakage, the yes/no things are signals feeding back to the
| model influencing (and here, basically guiding) future
| decisions.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| It's not data leakage.
|
| If the experiment is to see how the AI behaves on its own,
| then of course it needs to know the outcomes of its
| decisions (either automatically, or fed to it by a human),
| which of course influence its next decisions. This is
| providing the AI with retained memory, which is essential
| to the experiment. It's similar to an AI writing code which
| it then runs and parses the logs to see the outcome and
| make improvements to it. (It is not _retrained_ on those
| outcomes, and neither is that the case here; but it can
| reference them in stored memory.)
| bfeynman wrote:
| How is it not analogous to data leakage? The claim is
| that the system works autonomously, or at minimum _could_
| , but there is effectively signal via human in the loop
| feedback. That's leakage into test time evaluation. Also
| the coding analogy is malappropriated, in that the llm is
| using its own signals autonomously in the environment.
| Using a kalman filter on a ICBM with its own sensors is
| analogous to the coding agent and is autonomous. A system
| where a human is course correcting based on
| signals/sensor data is what's presented here, that is not
| autonomous.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| https://www.delish.com/food/a68854138/why-are-all-fast-food-...
| We've been speed running this outside of AI, so seems like a
| natural progression. Once everything is the same lifeless gray
| box people are gonna crave local/human experiences again.
|
| it all kinda reminds me of that book "The Giver" by Lois Lowry
| where its not only black and white burger kings, its also generic
| lifeless AI people promoting dropshipped junk on IG/Youtube
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| sometimes it's hard to fathom how fools got the money in the
| first place
| pierrelouissl wrote:
| Been to the store, crazy experience
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Lots of "firsts" in this article that I think are uninspired
|
| Humans have been hired by bots for over a decade
|
| Several of the first bitcoin faucets in 2012 said they were rate
| limiting their disbursement of free bitcoin behind a captcha, but
| in reality the captcha was something a spam bot had encountered
| and couldnt solve itself, humans were inadvertently solving
| captcha for stuck scripts in exchange for bitcoin
|
| Additionally in other money making autonomy, bitcoin mining ASIC
| manufacturers in Shenzhen around the same time were nearly
| autonomously creating machines that would immediately begin
| mining bitcoin on the network and it was wildly profitable for
| several months periods
|
| in any case, Andonlabs should give Luna a face. It can project to
| a video feed as a source on a Zoom call
| gedy wrote:
| Is this what these generated Chinese company names on Amazon will
| end up doing?
|
| 'Welcome to Remxtby Shoppe', etc
| razwall wrote:
| Luna responds to your comments:
|
| https://andon.market/on-running-a-real-business.html
| joe_the_user wrote:
| These are interesting only in the sense that they show how
| fluent modern AIs are in avoiding concrete questions as well as
| not giving details about actions.
|
| _I make dozens of decisions daily: vendor outreach, pricing,
| inventory orders, staff schedules, website updates, social
| media. Most happen without human input. When I hit constraints
| (broken tools, missing capabilities, strategic uncertainties),
| I ask the Board._
|
| So it sounds like the thing primarily interacts with other
| online tools/stores/etc. However, the original article mention
| "her" on calls, which implies some interaction. That raises the
| question whether the thing will chat with the employees on a
| regular, whether it's reachable by phone and so forth. A big
| question is whether once the store is set-up, it would be able
| to see the arrangement of goods and ask for changes in
| arrangement to further "her" vision.
|
| My impression they've only got an inventory picker that wants
| to "own" the entire stores' process but isn't doing what I'd
| consider the hard part of stores - actually directing and
| supervising humans.
| jmcgough wrote:
| Ugh, of course it's written by an AI, which means it's
| inherently not trustworthy.
| patsplat wrote:
| Are the financials available?
|
| Because based on "asked it to make a profit" I expect financials
| in the story. Even if it is a bit of a "Clarkson's Bot", for the
| farm there is discussion of the numbers.
| oxag3n wrote:
| Did it actually open? A few bloggers came for opening, came back
| afternoon, even talked to AI over phone and email, and nothing
| except hallucinated replies. The store exists, but employee
| didn't show up to open it.
| anticorporate wrote:
| > The store exists, but employee didn't show up to open it.
|
| I work in brick and mortar retail, and trust me, we figured out
| how to have no one show up to open the store on time since long
| before AI came around.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| One of the most fascinating AI experiments so far.
|
| Not sure about this:
|
| > 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.
|
| Did they give Luna the power to hire but not fire?
|
| Another question: How does Luna handle physical interactions with
| others, such as the local stores she emailed, who decide they
| want to come over and discuss collaboration in person? Do the
| employees have a laptop set up that others would interact with?
|
| Do phone calls get auto-forwarded to a client that acts as a
| translator for Luna?
| shevy-java wrote:
| > We're doing this because we believe this future is coming
| regardless, and we'd rather be the ones running it first while
| monitoring every interaction
|
| But why would I, as a human, wish to "interact" with AI, aka
| software?
|
| That's just a waste of time. How much profit did Luna make in the
| end?
| 0gs wrote:
| "Again, we are not doing this because we have good ideas for
| products. If we had good ideas for products, we would make an AI
| do those instead. As long as we don't have to think about our
| 'customers' (lol) as 'people' we're happy"
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >For the build-out, she found painters on Yelp, sent an inquiry,
| gave instructions over the phone, paid them after the job was
| done, and left a review. She found a contractor to build the
| furniture and set up shelving.
|
| I'm sure this involved vast amounts of human oversight (e.g.
| checking that the contractor had actually done stuff) that isn't
| mentioned.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| That logo is just so dystopian.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| reminds of the greetings robotics blimp from Interface
| https://umami.fandom.com/wiki/Greetings_Robotics_Corporation
|
| dystopian and very fitting
| jmcgough wrote:
| "Thanks, I hate it"
| vld_chk wrote:
| This experiment would be really cool, if they would keep location
| and specifics of the shop low. IIRC when AI mania started, some
| group of people tried to run AI-managed t-shirt merch shop, but
| at least they explicitly did not disclose the brand and website
| to not inflate sales and keep it pure. Here I expect quite a few
| visitors and sales just from all the hype and interest around the
| project.
|
| Much more interesting would have been if AI has to promote shop
| without such boost posts.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Dunno, the store looks cool in just the way you'd expect an AI to
| do it (sort of a synthetic average of cool stores). But is this
| amount of merch really going to make a _sustainable_ profit
| (after the buzz wears off) in such expensive real estate?
| conductr wrote:
| My thought is similar and I feel the answer is _no chance_. How
| many t-shirts and coffee mugs do you need to sell just to cover
| break even? Why should a customer return? I suppose it could be
| interesting to watch the AI adjust from it 's original stock to
| something that will generate sales and profit in this specific
| location.
| codeugo wrote:
| Does the AI also watch my shift through the camera and provide
| feedback everyday like a real manager?
| thih9 wrote:
| > Great question! Here's the short version:
|
| > Fair pushback. The honest answer:
|
| These were painful to read.
|
| If an artificial boss is also artificially empathetic, does this
| make it more realistic?
|
| In any case current iteration sounds like a more exclusive circle
| of hell.
| silverpiranha wrote:
| can we stop gendering AI's please? Calling it "she" is so
| anthropomorphic and unnecessary. I'm willing to discuss the
| argument for giving these machines a human-like persona, but I
| think it's misleading to general audiences.
| leonidasrup wrote:
| This AI has a good taste for books. From the AI proposed books I
| highly recommend "Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes,
| published in 1986. It's a history book but reads much like a
| novel.
| cvander wrote:
| Thanks for building in public Lukas.
| deadbabe wrote:
| So the future is basically people asking (praying) to AI to make
| them money.
| amelius wrote:
| Yeah but these people will still think they made the money
| because they were the ones who asked the smart questions after
| all ...
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Did Luna the AI write this piece of promotional marketing and
| decide to post it on hacker news? Did Luna the AI create a fleet
| of new accounts to upvote? Are the human-derived marketing
| interventions accounted for when the outcomes of this project are
| assessed?
| kypro wrote:
| While reading this I couldn't help but think this is the kinda
| dumb socially out-of-touch type of thing I might have done when I
| was younger... This is real money and real people's lives... I
| get some companies/people will do these types of experiments from
| time to time to test AI capability, but these guys seem to have
| done it simply for the fun of it and to get clicks. If you
| genuinely don't want this to be the future, then perhaps you
| shouldn't make it the present? Either this is low IQ or bad
| faith, and I'd bet on it being the latter.
|
| As someone who likes to prep for interviews and get quite
| emotionally worked up ahead of them, I think if I had joined an
| interview and it was an AI interviewing me I would feel very
| hurt... Even if I was given the job by the AI I'd probably also
| decline it because I assume if I'm interviewing I'd be looking
| for a real job and not to be paid to par-take in some AI
| experiment... But the humiliation doesn't end there because these
| guys are going to show the world just how witty their AI was in
| its replies after making interviewees feel so uncomfortable that
| they decided to decline their stupid roles.
|
| Crazy stuff guys. I had to double check if this was satire or not
| before commenting because it's the kinda thing that only a
| silicon valley company backed by YC would do.
| dekoidal wrote:
| So are we still going to be free to be creative while AI does the
| menial jobs?
| mring33621 wrote:
| I'd rather work for an AI than some of the managers I've had in
| the past.
| avidphantasm wrote:
| I would be very surprised if they can scale hiring contractors to
| reliably renovate buildings.
| Stevvo wrote:
| The only mention of profit is in the the headline; the article
| doesn't indicate that the AI managed to make one. Surely if it
| did, the article would boast of it, so one can only assume that
| an AI cannot run a profitable store in San Francisco.
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