I'm incredibly skeptical of this.
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We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
101–110 of 312 posts
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#102Cool 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.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#103The 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
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#104Cool 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.
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 ex…
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Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#105Great! I was worried that we might run out of inhumane CEOs
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#106"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.…
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Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#107Great! I was worried that we might run out of inhumane CEOs
“Why was I fired, Luna?”
“PC LOAD LETTER”
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#108"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.…
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Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#109This 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?
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.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.