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

andonlabs.com

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

#131

Post by anon84873628 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #10

> 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…

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.

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

#132

Post by anon84873628 »

andrewmurphy wrote: post #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.

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.

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

#133

Post by famouswaffles »

embedding-shape wrote: post #55
kenferry wrote: post #47

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…

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.

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

#134

Post by fl4ppyb3ngt »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #68

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 attent…

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

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

#135

Post by LeifCarrotson »

mhink wrote: post #64
tiffanyh wrote: post #31

If this interest you, Proof of Corn might also interest you. 300+ comments, 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735511

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 obvio…

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.

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

#137

Post by anon84873628 »

kenferry wrote: post #47

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?

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.

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

#138

Post by sodality2 »

pessimizer wrote: post #92
altruios wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[dead]

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

#139

Post by ethin »

Xx_crazy420_xX wrote: post #3

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.

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

#140

Post by 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.
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