Live data from Hacker News

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

andonlabs.com

21–30 of 312 posts

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

#21

> 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 fi…

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.

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

#25
post #20

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

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

#27
post #19

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).

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

#29
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.

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

#30
> 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.

Post reply on HN