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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

#151

Post by yieldcrv »

anon84873628 wrote: post #131
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.

People can delegate

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

#153

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

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.

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

#154

Post by yieldcrv »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #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.

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

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

#156

Post by HWR_14 »

hamdingers wrote: post #121
jaxefayo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#157

Post by ben_w »

class3shock wrote: post #87

"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'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!"

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

#158

Post by mountainb »

Waterluvian wrote: post #126
class3shock wrote: post #87

"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 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?

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

#159

Post by Chaosvex »

yieldcrv wrote: post #154
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #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.

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.

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

#160

Post by hsuduebc2 »

binarynate wrote: post #93

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.
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