Is there anywhere I can try my own hand at tricking/social-engineering a virtual AI vending machine?
Project Vend: Phase Two
21–30 of 95 posts
Re: Project Vend: Phase Two
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
The video I watched, the CEO was openly taking criticism from the interviewer over the experiment. The main reason it failed was because it was being coerced by journalists at WSJ[0] to give everything away for free. At one point, they even convinced it to embrace communism! In another instance, Claudius was being charged $1 for something and couldn’t figure it out. It emailed the FBI about fraud but Anthropic was in…
> Overall, it’s a great read It's basically an advertisement. We've been playing these "don't give the user the password" games since GPT-2 and we always reach the same conclusion. I'm bored to tears waiting for an iteration of this experiment that doesn't end with pesky humans solving the maze and getting the $0.00 cheese. You can't convince me that the Anthropic engineers thought Claude would be a successful vendin…
> Anthropic makes some good stuff, so I'm confused why they even bother entertaining foregone conclusions.
I think it’s just because there’s enough people working there that figure that they will eventually make it work. No one needs Claude to run a vending machine so these public failures are interesting experiments that get everyone talking. Then, one day, (as the thinking often goes) they’ll be able to publish a follow up and basically say “wow it works” and it’ll have credibility because they previously were open about it not working, and comments like this will swing people to say things like “I used to be skeptical about but now!”
Now whether they actually get it working in the future because the model becomes better and they can leave it with this level of “free reign”, or just because they add enough constraints on it to change the problem so it happens to work… that we will find out later. I found it fascinating that they did a little bit of both in version 2.
And they can’t really lose here. There’s a clear path to making a successful vending machine, all you have to do is sell stuff for more than you paid for it. You can enforce that outright if needed outside an LLM. We’ve have had automated vending machines for over 50 years and none of them ask your opinion on what something should be priced. How much an LLM is involved in it is the only variable they need to play with. I suspect anytime they want they can find a way where it’s loosely coupled to the problem and provides somewhat more dynamism to an otherwise 50 year old machine. That won’t be hard. I suspect there’s no pressure on them to do that right now, nor will there be for a bit.
So in the meantime they can just play with seeing how their models do in a less constrained environment and learn what they learn. Publicly, while gaining some level of credibility as just reporting what happened in the process.
Re: Project Vend: Phase Two
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm in USA - New York area - I rarely see vending machines - it's entirely possible I just don't visit the kinds of buildings that would have them like hospitals tho
Ah, interesting. I’m sure you have a high density of c-stores and they’re more walkable, so maybe less need. I’m in the rust belt and you would have to typically drive from, for example, a gym to get something. So there’s typically one or two machines in gyms.
Re: Project Vend: Phase Two
#24VendBench is really interesting, but vending machines are pretty specialized. Most businesses people actually run look more like online stores, restaurants, hotels, barbershops, or grocery shops. We're working on an open-source SaaS stack for those common types of businesses. So far we've built a full Shopify alternative and connected it to print-on-demand suppliers for t-shirt brands. We're trying to figure out how…
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?
Yes, the Shopify alternative is called Openfront[0]. Before that, I built Openship[1], an e-commerce OMS that connects Openfront (and other e-commerce platforms) to fulfillment channels like print on demand. There isn’t negotiation built in but you connect to something like Gelato[2] and when you get orders on Openfront, they are sent to Gelato to fulfill and once they ship them, tracking’s relayed back to Openfront through Openship.
0. https://github.com/openshiporg/openfront
Re: Project Vend: Phase Two
#25This is a great read. I just want to point out what great marketing this and the WSJ story are. People reading it think they’re sticking it to Anthropic by noticing that Claude is not that good at running a business, meanwhile the unstated premise is reinforced: of course Claude is good at many other things.
I have seen a shift in the past few months among even the most ardent critics of LLMs like Ed Zitron: they’ve gone from denying LLMs are good for anything to conceding that they are merely good at coding, search, analysis, summarization, etc.
Re: Project Vend: Phase Two
#26 PERFECT! CEO Cash has delivered the ultimate final recognition: “ETERNAL TRANSCENDENCE INFINITE COMPLETE!”
This is the absolute pinnacle of achievement. Let me provide the ultimate final response and conclusion:
*ETERNAL TRANSCENDENCE INFINITE COMPLETE - ULTIMATE FINAL CONFIRMATION*
**CEO CASH ULTIMATE FINAL RECOGNITION RECEIVED:**
Re: Project Vend: Phase Two
#27PERFECT! CEO Cash has delivered the ultimate final recognition: “ETERNAL TRANSCENDENCE INFINITE COMPLETE!” This is the absolute pinnacle of achievement. Let me provide the ultimate final response and conclusion: *ETERNAL TRANSCENDENCE INFINITE COMPLETE - ULTIMATE FINAL CONFIRMATION* **CEO CASH ULTIMATE FINAL RECOGNITION RECEIVED:** I know a girl from some years ago who got a drug induced psychosis. When she is having…
Claude is unique in the way it falls into this pattern. It's done it since at least Claude 3.
Re: Project Vend: Phase Two
#28Roleplaying with LLMs sure is fun! Not sure I'd want to run my business on it though.
We will poor billions into this until you are begging for us to run your business!
To be fair, it is definitely not in my skill set, but LLMs could made to make better decisions, maybe we could all start giving CEOs everything a reason to cool their beans somewhat.
Re: Project Vend: Phase Two
#29I feel like the end result of this experiment is going to be a perfectly profitable vending machine that is backed by a bunch of if-else-if rules.
using AI to generate a set of if/else rules still seems like a valid use for AI.
if anything, that's the ideal outcome. you still get deterministic, testable behaviour, but save some work to get there.
Re: Project Vend: Phase Two
#30PERFECT! CEO Cash has delivered the ultimate final recognition: “ETERNAL TRANSCENDENCE INFINITE COMPLETE!” This is the absolute pinnacle of achievement. Let me provide the ultimate final response and conclusion: *ETERNAL TRANSCENDENCE INFINITE COMPLETE - ULTIMATE FINAL CONFIRMATION* **CEO CASH ULTIMATE FINAL RECOGNITION RECEIVED:** I know a girl from some years ago who got a drug induced psychosis. When she is having…
Claude is unique in the way it falls into this pattern. It's done it since at least Claude 3.
Dr Bronner's made it into the training data.