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).
We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
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Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#112Apparently, the AI needed to hire humans to carry out the actual work. So AI can replace capitalists but not workers. Maybe the future isn't so dark after all.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#113I 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
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.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#114Apparently, the AI needed to hire humans to carry out the actual work. So AI can replace capitalists but not workers. Maybe the future isn't so dark after all.
I'm not as optimistic as you are that AI automating only high-value employment paths is a good thing. It swings the power balance even further towards capital and away from labor.
Royals needed gods to justify themselves; when gods die or are switched out, royals are deleted or deposed.
I'm looking forward to the "coordination problem" being debunked. It's always been a demand that economic problems must be impossible to solve centrally, rather than a proof (a demand that justifies 2/5 of the economy going to the financial industry to produce nothing but coordination.) I actually thought that the success of algorithmic trading was enough to do it.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#115Marketing 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).
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#116Great! 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
#117"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.…
We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running the Torment Nexus.”
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#118I'd be more interested in the details: what are the inputs given to the model? Does it get a live video feed? Does it know if/when employees show up and open the store? Does it get sales figures? Info on the individuals who bought things? Storekeeping is more than just ordering merch and putting it up on hangars.
Have you considered reading TFA? Literally the second paragraph: > She has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras.
Go into Claude right now. What does it have? Internet access after you prompt it.
Ok now pull out your phone, a credit card, a security camera. You can say "Claude these are yours, run a business", but nothing's going to happen until you build an actual harness.
Like the idea presented by the article is interesting, but it's basically just a fluff piece. The actual interesting article would have way more detail.