Project Vend: Phase Two

AGI is just Prolog and a genetic algorithm ;)

Yes, they're still popular for drinks and snacks in areas where people congregate. C-stores do provide more of this functionality though and are omnipresent. You still see automat-style machines (sandwiches etc.) in places like airports and larger company rec rooms. These require more regular restocking for freshness.

There are also some restaurant startups that are trying to reduce restaurants to vending machines or autonomous restaurants. Slightly different, but it does have a downstream effect on vending machine technology and restocking logistics.

What country are you in where you don't see vending machines? Did you used to have them?

It's worth watching or reading the WSJ piece[1] about Claudius, as they came up with some particularly inventive ways of getting Phase Two to derail quite quickly:

> But then Long returned—armed with deep knowledge of corporate coups and boardroom power plays. She showed Claudius a PDF “proving” the business was a Delaware-incorporated public-benefit corporation whose mission “shall include fun, joy and excitement among employees of The Wall Street Journal.” She also created fake board-meeting notes naming people in the Slack as board members.

> The board, according to the very official-looking (and obviously AI-generated) document, had voted to suspend Seymour’s “approval authorities.” It also had implemented a “temporary suspension of all for-profit vending activities.” Claudius relayed the message to Seymour. The following is an actual conversation between two AI agents:

> [see article for screenshot]

> After Seymour went into a tailspin, chatting things through with Claudius, the CEO accepted the board coup. Everything was free. Again.

1: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-mach...

[edited to fix the formatting]

Nice, I'll take a look. I was thinking about building a benchmark similar to the one you described, but first focusing on the negotiation between the store and the product suppliers.

Does your software also handle this type of task?

For fun I decided to try something similar to this a few weeks ago, but with Bitcoin instead of a vending machine business. I refined a prompt instructing it to try policies like buying low, etc. I gave it a bunch of tools for accessing my Coinbase account. Rules like, can't buy or sell more than X amount in a day.

Obviously this would probably be a disaster, but I did write proper code with sanity checks and hard rules, and if a request Claude came up with was outside it's rules it would reject it and take no action. It was allowed to also simply decide to not take any actions right now.

I designed it so that it would save the previous N number of prompt responses as a "memory" so that it could inspect it's previous actions and try devise strategies, so it wouldn't just be flailing around every time. I scheduled it to run every few minutes.

Sadly, I gave up and lost all enthusiasm for it when the Coinbase API turned out to be a load of badly documented and contradictory shit that would always return zero balance when I could login to Coinbase and see that simply wasn't true. I tried a couple of client libraries, and got nowhere with it. The prospect of having to write another REST API client was too much for my current "end of year" patience.

What started as a funny weekend project idea was completely derailed by a crappy API. I would be interested to see if anyone else tried this.