Discussion

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

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

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

nemomarx: You could do something pretty interesting by looking at what pronouns people use for llms in different demographics and contexts

in-tension: I'd be very curious to know how it does financially

NicuCalcea: I imagine the data won't be very useful considering it's public knowledge the store is owned 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...

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

andrewmurphy: 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.

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

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

jskrn: From the article...She has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras

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

delusional: > 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.

mcmcmc: [delayed]

boredhedgehog: Recognizing a unique selling proposition and capitalizing on it should count for the AI, not against it.

thinkindie: I'm not sure in English, but in Italian, for example, Intelligenza is feminine.

hiddencost: Objects don't have gender in English.

zdragnar: 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.

etchalon: I'm incredibly skeptical of this.

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

IncreasePosts: 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.

darth_avocado: If $100k proves that CEO is the most replaceable job ever, I’ll allow it.

codemog: 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.

embedding-shape: 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: 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.

atroon: "What do you mean, torment nexus? This is retail!"

pocksuppet: 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.

bix6: I see a lot on costs but nothing on revenue. Has it made any money?

bitwize: 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: Where in this case roi means attracting investments that will make the founders rich while making most of the investors lose money

ivanovm: 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: 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: 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.

pocksuppet: So in other words, no, an LLM has never made profit.

pocksuppet: large language models are great at language tasks like "bullshittify this message"

MiiMe19: Larp hat, larp shirt.

fl4ppyb3ngt: 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..?

pimlottc: Publicity from the gimmick is the whole point

Ylpertnodi: > 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.

gordonhart: 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.

drgo: Great! I was worried that we might run out of inhumane CEOs

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

VladVladikoff: 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: 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

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

fl4ppyb3ngt: 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: This: https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-2 Dec 2025

maerF0x0: 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.

fl4ppyb3ngt: 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)

lamasery: 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.

fl4ppyb3ngt: Do you think chatGPT is a he or a she

SoftTalker: It's an it.

taco_emoji: i gave a keyboard to a toddler and asked it to make a profit

pythonaut_16: 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.

class3shock: "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: “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.”

fl4ppyb3ngt: 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

binarynate: 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: I hope they also have similar store that they don't talk about publicly, so they can compare the outcomes.

sbuttgereit: 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.

fl4ppyb3ngt: 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

famouswaffles: 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.

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

anon84873628: 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.

Waterluvian: I think it’s easier just to recognize words as free and to value them as such. Actions have value.

bryanrasmussen: >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...

ben_w: 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.

patsplat: 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.

yieldcrv: Anything you read thats more than 3 months old in this field is obsoleteAnd one person’s attempt doesn’t mean anythingAccording 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

razwall: Luna responds to your comments:https://andon.market/on-running-a-real-business.html

hsuduebc2: Or they would go there mainly out of curiosity. Either way, it is skewed by the sole fact that they published it.

Chaosvex: > Anything you read thats more than 3 months old in this field is obsoleteSigh. I'll see you in another three months when you say the same again.

insane_dreamer: 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.

joe_the_user: 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.

shevy-java: > 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 interactionBut 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?

Apocryphon: The opposite, actually. They hardly want to give away tokens for free!

jonas21: > 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 for the people who want more AI regulation to make their case if they can point to real results of experiments like this one instead of just hypotheticals?

bfeynman: 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.

j2kun: Flag is for being clickbait and move on

kryogen1c: The submitter appears to be a co-founder of the company the article is about (omitted from the HN account bio), and the article is misleading to the point of lying.This company now has strong a strong negative reputation in my mind that I will gladly share with others.

insane_dreamer: 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?

0gs: "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"

astrange: 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.

pajamasam: I honestly thought the whole thing was satire and that line was a riff on OpenAI.

groby_b: 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: 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.

Xx_crazy420_xX: I think it would be valuable to list all interactions with the LLM by the dev team and transparently state what was induced by human steering the LLM, and what was actuall LLM decision, which was not biased by system instructions or dev team communicating with it

vannevar: 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.

fl4ppyb3ngt: 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

phreeza: What do you mean you heard? Are you not a member of their team? Your posts in the last hour seem quite astroturf-y.

cyanydeez: "Guys, the Future All Knowning AI is forcing us to do this; don't blame us, blame the super intelligent future indistinguishable from magic!"

beloch: 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: “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)

vld_chk: 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: 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?

fl4ppyb3ngt: 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)

jmcgough: I can't believe you made a throwaway to pretend to be a HN commenter just to defend your AI store. This is like Scott Adams behavior.

thih9: > 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 it sounds like a more exclusive circle of hell.

HumblyTossed: 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.

cvander: Thanks for building in public Lukas.

leonidasrup: 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.

hn_acc1: They want the grand total of humanity's knowledge, from which they create tokens, to be given to them for free, though..

mock-possum: > 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: I think that depends on what the "extreme body modification of an unprintable and life-altering nature" was.

beloch: 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.

hn_acc1: Especially since many of them are some of the brightest minds around.

Barbing: 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)

embedding-shape: > Certainly not from interpretability researchWhat 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: >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...

Tallain: Since when is a simulation equal to real world performance?

deadbabe: So the future is basically people asking (praying) to AI to make them money.

amelius: Yeah but these people will still think they made the money because they were the ones who asked the smart questions after all ...

Lammy: > 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)

andy99: 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.

avidphantasm: I would be very surprised if they can scale hiring contractors to reliably renovate buildings.

mring33621: I'd rather work for an AI than some of the managers I've had in the past.

dekoidal: So are we still going to be free to be creative while AI does the menial jobs?

kypro: 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.

tsunagatta: 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.

yowlingcat: [delayed]

TeMPOraL: 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: 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. When they buy a super fancy car they don't (usually) blog about it, and instagram wealth influencers are also frustrating, yes.

TeMPOraL: That's a fair objection and I often feel like this, too.On the research aspect, I see this as something pre-Research, yet still science - in a way, it's science at its core: trying something and seeing what happens. Proper Research usually follows once enough ad hoc attempts are made and they seem to show a pattern that's worth setting up a systematic study to verify.

krunck: Not "she". It.

Quarrelsome: 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: > kinda how I feel about god tbhThat's Celestia, we're talking about Luna here.

Quarrelsome: Celestia the space simulator?

Vecr: No the cartoon character. It's part of an awful series of AI jokes, maybe don't look it up. There's a (2011? "new") show for 9 year old girls that has most of the characters female, so God (Celestia) is a woman. Or a horse really. I haven't watched it. I don't think Luna or Celestia were in the old show.

mlmonkey: But that means nothing: my local LLM has access to the microphone, network and camera too. The key is the harness!

mcmcmc: 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.

mlmonkey: Did you read my question though? I read the full article. Please tell me where my question(s) are answered, and I will apologize on this forum.

jmcgough: A lot of things it could be a direct reference to, but the obvious one is Palantir, which is named after the seeing stones used to spy on people by evil antagonists in Lord of the Rings.

i_think_so: ...and in America there are more guns than humans, and more potentially unemployed white collar workers than the police, military, and national guard combined.Nick Hanauer understood this fourteen years ago. Very few others did. And despite him spending his own time and money to explain it in simple English, nobody in his peer group wanted to hear it -- his TED talk on the subject ... took several years before it was published. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.FA (for a decade or so) FO, I guess?https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocr...https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfor...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2gO4DKVpa8ns than humans, and more potentially unemployed white collar workers than the police, military and national guard combined.

mountainb: 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?

edm0nd: 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: It's a net value loss. This is literally the parable of the broken windowhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_windowThe 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.

i_think_so: I've never understood why this isn't obvious to anyone with a room temperature IQ and 30 spare seconds to think about it.In other words, everybody but economists and certain philosophers. :-)

drgo: Is that you Luna?

teo_zero: A form of self-fulfilling prophecy?

phyzix5761: I think the main advantage AI (and machines in general) have over humans is they don't have the emotional barriers and attachment to outcomes and ideas. If a human fails or things don't go their way they may be held back emotionally from trying again for some time before, eventually, hitting on the right idea which helps them succeed. Humans also get emotionally exhausted when confronted with a large number of tasks and human interactions. AI has no such hangups and therefore can quickly iterate and do what needs to be done to run a business and, potentially, succeed.

BrenBarn: Amen to that.I would go further and say that there is just no such thing as "this future is coming regardless" once you get out of the realm of physical facts. One of the things that by turns depresses and enrages me about so much punditry (especially in tech) is this notion that there is some sort of inevitable socio-techno-psychological force propelling human society in certain directions regardless of the will of actual humans.Nonsense. We as humans make our society; it is nothing but what we make of it; we can make it what we want.As you point out, people who say otherwise are usually really saying "too bad for you who don't want the future to be this way, because I do want it to be this way and I'm working to make it happen".

palmotea: > 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.

wolvesechoes: This fantasy of AI replacing C-suites, CEOs or whatever is very symptomatic of naive tech-folk outlook, completely blind towards sociological and political reality.

mesofile: 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.

frm88: Tangential: I always pictured Zaphod to look like Frank Zappa. No idea why.

Barbing: whoh dude's awesome

gizajob: I feel like the profit part is going to be a struggle.

mrweasel: 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.

lesostep: >> If you don't technically need to pay "the CEO" a salary, could you run e.g. a grocery store in a dying townYou probably couldn't. I have seen a lot of small town stores that are run and operated by a single person. If somebody could run a business like that for a decent wage, they would be.Adding AI to the mix on a high level position (for a single employee, who is the actual owner!) wouldn't help, it's just token burning. AI can find a sale on bananas, but a person at the counter can take feedback from the actual customers, and stock based in that.

ben_w: To extend on what Jensson wrote:A union has the power to organise one thing, to withdraw labour. In the industrial era, the threat of all the workers not showing up was a threat to end a business.If AI does what is promised, to replace labour, then a threat to withdraw labour is only threatening the owners with a good time.

embedding-shape: Why not try to answer my question, instead of asking a different question which I haven't even claimed to have the answer to?

famouswaffles: I did answer it, albeit not directly. "Guaranteed to be the motivation" isn't a standard anyone can meet, and so framing it that way doesn't really probe anything meaningful about LLMs specifically. If what you want to hear is No, then sure, have your No, but it doesn't mean anything. There's just not much to the question.Even though you had it up as one borne of a greater understanding of LLMs, the interpretability research we have so far, and our current very little understanding of the internal computations of these models does not support your position and certainly not how assured you are about it.

embedding-shape: > our current very little understanding of the internal computations of these models does not support your positionOur current understanding is sufficient to know you can not ask the LLM to explain it's behavior and it can correctly do so, I'm not what research you've read to believe this could be possible in the first place, but happy to receive links to read through, if you're sitting on them.

Quarrelsome: 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: 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.

Quarrelsome: i mean if you're exploring and you find smth cool then you run with it. But I would imagine the people doing it are exploring, its their financial backers who will be looking to monetise.I feel more comfortable that the people exploring seem to have their head screwed on and don't appear to be dismissive of the harm they might cause.

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.

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

ceejayoz: They could, in theory, have contracts that say the AI can't fire them.

wil421: There’s no way they are putting that into a contract. HRs are already using it to fire people.

altruios: 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.

jaxefayo: 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: 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.

jayd16: 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.

fl4ppyb3ngt: well said

HWR_14: 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.

joe_the_user: 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.

anon84873628: 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: People can delegate

john_strinlai: sure. but in this case, having the ai delegate to humans for any important task sort of undermines the entire premise.

evanelias: 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.

i_think_so: > Personally I find the entire tone of the article to be creepy and disturbing.There was a scifi story about a guy who gradually falls through the cracks of a dystopian future society in which McDonalds managers are replaced by AI that talks to workers through their headsets.At first it's quite benign, like: "Hello, John. In 5 minutes it will be time to inspect the washrooms and perform any necessary cleaning."Before long it's firing people who don't smile enough and don't have the correct attitude.(Of course, to keep readers from becoming despondent and killing themselves, the story takes a hard left turn towards a post-scarcity economy and everyone lives happily ever after. But when one reflects on it at the end, 90% of humanity doesn't have that post-scarcity life. And those who get left behind are far from content with their futures....)

gizajob: A company holds the contract with the person. If the company has been put in the “hands” of an AI, then legally it shouldn’t make much of a difference. That company though is likely to have some humans on the documentation and articles, an AI can’t own the company.