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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

#201

Post by Barbing »

beloch wrote: post #179
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 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 w…

“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)

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

#202

Post by cyanydeez »

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.…

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

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

#203

Post by phreeza »

fl4ppyb3ngt wrote: post #113
vannevar wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

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

#204

Post by Barbing »

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.

FIRE!

-crowded theater (negative value example)

Words can be pretty much actions depending on who you are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

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

#205

Post by jmcgough »

fl4ppyb3ngt wrote: post #116
drgo wrote: post #105

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

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

Interesting that you made an account just to comment on this and seem to have "heard" a lot of things about this place.

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

#206

Post by mesofile »

astrange wrote: post #183
Mordisquitos wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.”

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.

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.

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

#207

Post by krapp »

astrange wrote: post #185
krapp wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You need a good CEO when things are going bad, because without one they'll go even worse. You still want to make payroll and can't just randomly fire people. (Also, if you own a failed company you're responsible for cleanup tasks for years afterward.)

>You still want to make payroll and can't just randomly fire people.

In the US you can.

>Also, if you own a failed company you're responsible for cleanup tasks for years afterward.

But we're talking about golden parachutes, where a CEO screws up the company and gets fired with a multi-million dollar raise. This is Hacker News, and the pro-business narrative is strong here, but in reality CEOs rarely suffer any meaningful risk or consequence for failure (unless it involves jail time, and even then they aren't doing hard time) they just wind up slightly less rich than when they succeed.

I don't care how good a CEO is, that isn't justifiable. Certainly not in a country where people can get laid off with an email and lose their access to healthcare on the whim of anyone above them in the power hierarchy.

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

#208

Post by notahacker »

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?

it's about the only way of reconciling experimental validity (if the AI can't "fire" staff and remove them from business operations and their P&L account in situations when it would be legal and normal to do so, is it really running a business?) and not having the massive ethical issue of people being arbitrarily fired because a computer glitched. Whether that's what they actually do is tbc.

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

#209

Post by jmcgough »

fl4ppyb3ngt wrote: post #108
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.…

[flagged]

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.

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

#210

Post by 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?
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