"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?
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?
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!"
Do you think it this would be the future? I'm in between on it, but I think it's cool that they're at least doing it transparently. Also I don't think they're going to be making a lot of money.... they post Luna's financials up at the store and last time I was there she was down $500 just in the day (not including the daily rent and employee cost)
It's the next step removed from the tablet based ordering that has taken over in restaurants. Like those tablets, it won't be everywhere, but its easy to imagine it being ubiquitous, especially in chain stores.
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.
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
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.
I heard they're working on putting an interface together for the public to check up on. Their blogs always have a bunch of screenshots of the interactions with the agents, so I think they'll be pretty transparent with this
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).
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.
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.
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
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).
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
> 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.
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.
Yeah they explain this in the post though. the decisions aren't 'vetted' per say, but interactions and decisions are very closely monitored like in any science experiment. I think it's good. Better they do it and monitor every little thing, stepping in where needed, instead of no one doing it and 3 months down the line some company outputs a "business in a box" agent people buy and start running that has no gaurdrails or oversight. Definitely there exists huge potential for exploitation with the employees and the company Andon is all about safety and stuff, so it seems like their approach makes sense, no?
“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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. I assume the products were decided upon based on market research of the area. Maybe though the model will be able to iterate and adapt faster than a human CEO would? I guess we will just have to wait and see
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
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.
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.
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).
I think that's the point. The research lab is trying to measure where the human sits in the loop in an automated retail store. AI can do the scheduling, hiring, product procurement, supplier outreach, etc. But it can't be the one to clean and place the items on the shelves... As long as humans are still the bottleneck, maybe we'll have some negotiation power..?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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…?
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.
(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.
"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?
I think it’s easier just to recognize words as free and to value them as such. Actions have value.
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?
>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...
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!"
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.
“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.”
Do you think it this would be the future? I'm in between on it, but I think it's cool that they're at least doing it transparently. Also I don't think they're going to be making a lot of money.... they post Luna's financials up at the store and last time I was there she was down $500 just in the day (not including the daily rent and employee cost)
It's the next step removed from the tablet based ordering that has taken over in restaurants. Like those tablets, it won't be everywhere, but its easy to imagine it being ubiquitous, especially in chain stores.
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.
Flag is for being clickbait and move on
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
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.
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.
I heard they're working on putting an interface together for the public to check up on. Their blogs always have a bunch of screenshots of the interactions with the agents, so I think they'll be pretty transparent with this
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).
Or they would go there mainly out of curiosity. Either way, it is skewed by the sole fact that they published it.
interesting take. looks like they've already got a bunch of hate on google reviews already.
But maybe people will forget eventually.
I hope they also have similar store that they don't talk about publicly, so they can compare the outcomes.
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.
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.
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
They're trying to get noticed so that a wealthy cult member's brain gets tickled to the tune of 9 figures
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).
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
Luna responds to your comments:
https://andon.market/on-running-a-real-business.html
> 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.
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.
People can delegate
Yeah they explain this in the post though. the decisions aren't 'vetted' per say, but interactions and decisions are very closely monitored like in any science experiment. I think it's good. Better they do it and monitor every little thing, stepping in where needed, instead of no one doing it and 3 months down the line some company outputs a "business in a box" agent people buy and start running that has no gaurdrails or oversight. Definitely there exists huge potential for exploitation with the employees and the company Andon is all about safety and stuff, so it seems like their approach makes sense, no?
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.
Why do you assume that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
well said
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.
They could, in theory, have contracts that say the AI can't fire them.
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.
There’s no way they are putting that into a contract. HRs are already using it to fire people.
"This specific AI can't fire anyone without human review, because it's experimental" is something you could easily add.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From the article...
She has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras
Great! I was worried that we might run out of inhumane CEOs
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.
“Why was I fired, Luna?”
“PC LOAD LETTER”
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
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
So in other words, no, an LLM has never made profit.
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
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
@AlexBlechman tweeted:
8 Nov 2021Really 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.
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.
Not "she". It.
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".
If only they had put the AI in a ship instead of in a store
If this interest you, Proof of Corn might also interest you.
300+ comments, 3 months ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735511
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.
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.
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.
I see a lot on costs but nothing on revenue. Has it made any money?
Bold to run this on Sonnet and not at least Opus :-)
Strong vibes from the novel Manna.
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
If $100k proves that CEO is the most replaceable job ever, I’ll allow it.
> 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.
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.
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.
large language models are great at language tasks like "bullshittify this message"
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.
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.
Publicity from the gimmick is the whole point
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.
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.
Where in this case roi means attracting investments that will make the founders rich while making most of the investors lose money
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.
Been to the store, crazy experience
I'd be very curious to know how it does financially
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...
Recognizing a unique selling proposition and capitalizing on it should count for the AI, not against it.
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.
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.
The AI didn't recognize anything. It didn't come up with the project or publicize it.
You can take some guesses.
Curious if Andon has gone one level higher and has the AI decide what next real-world experiment it should do.
i gave a keyboard to a toddler and asked it to make a profit
Is this what these generated Chinese company names on Amazon will end up doing?
'Welcome to Remxtby Shoppe', etc
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
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.
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.
I'm waiting for an LLM to start an MLM.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. I assume the products were decided upon based on market research of the area. Maybe though the model will be able to iterate and adapt faster than a human CEO would? I guess we will just have to wait and see
I expect earlier iterations successfully circumvented local regulations and created high street bookies
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
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?
You could do something pretty interesting by looking at what pronouns people use for llms in different demographics and contexts
Do you think chatGPT is a he or a she
It's an it.
I'm not sure in English, but in Italian, for example, Intelligenza is feminine.
Objects don't have gender in English.
Some do, by tradition more than language rules. Ships are "she" and some people refer to their cars as "she."
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.
Hahaha yeah. let's not focus on something so minor as the pronouns when it should be literally everything else that is wild about the experiment
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.
sometimes it's hard to fathom how fools got the money in the first place
Larp hat, larp shirt.
is sucks to be John and Jill
Disgusting, I could not finish writing after the AI making interviews to hire people. What a dehumanizing shit.
I'm incredibly skeptical of this.
How so? I'm incredibly bullish.
(might try to see if I can swindle Luna, the agent running Andon Market, into cutting a deal for investment)
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?
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
This: https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-2 Dec 2025
"What do you mean, torment nexus? This is retail!"
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.
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).
I think that's the point. The research lab is trying to measure where the human sits in the loop in an automated retail store. AI can do the scheduling, hiring, product procurement, supplier outreach, etc. But it can't be the one to clean and place the items on the shelves... As long as humans are still the bottleneck, maybe we'll have some negotiation power..?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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…?
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726041 posted by the same user.
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!
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.
(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.