We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by mock-possum » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:35 PM UTC

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…

> 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."

Strikes me as a repulsively mean-spirited take, ironically proving the artist’s point.

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

#222

Post by HumblyTossed » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:38 PM UTC

Barbing wrote: post #201

beloch wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

For decades we moved to a knowledge based economy, now we have perversely wealthy people saying they're coming for those jobs. The thought of 10s of millions of people with nothing to do but starve to death ought to scare those wealthy people.

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

#223

Post by thih9 » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:40 PM UTC

> Great question! Here’s the short version:

> Fair pushback. The honest answer:

These were painful to read.

If an artificial boss is also artificially empathetic, does this make it more realistic?

In any case current iteration sounds like a more exclusive circle of hell.

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

#224

Post by silverpiranha » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

can we stop gendering AI's please? Calling it "she" is so anthropomorphic and unnecessary. I'm willing to discuss the argument for giving these machines a human-like persona, but I think it's misleading to general audiences.

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

#225

Post by antonvs » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:46 PM UTC

j2kun wrote: post #147

bfeynman wrote: post #140

I feel bad that people have to read this. It's complete puffery, made up for clicks, and the biggest thing is the pure bravado with which a company says, "Hey, let's just waste a ton of money, all for a potential blog and marketing piece." This is not really automated in any fashion. I was dubious at first, but then I saw the screencaps showing the devs interacting with Luna via a Slack workflow with a human in the l…

[flagged]

I appreciated the analysis given by the other commenter, so I'm glad they didn't take that lazy way out.

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

#226

Post by leonidasrup » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:48 PM UTC

This AI has a good taste for books. From the AI proposed books I highly recommend "Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes, published in 1986. It's a history book but reads much like a novel.

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

#227

Post by cvander » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

Thanks for building in public Lukas.

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

#228

Post by topheroo » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

HumblyTossed wrote: post #222

Barbing wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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)

For decades we moved to a knowledge based economy, now we have perversely wealthy people saying they're coming for those jobs. The thought of 10s of millions of people with nothing to do but starve to death ought to scare those wealthy people.

Comment of the week

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

#229

Post by mjmsmith » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:53 PM UTC

mock-possum wrote: post #221

beloch wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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." Strikes me as a repulsively mean-spirited take, ironically proving the artist’s point.

I think that depends on what the "extreme body modification of an unprintable and life-altering nature" was.

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

#230

Post by embedding-shape » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 7:54 PM UTC

famouswaffles wrote: post #133

embedding-shape wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And at the same time, they clearly have no idea how LLMs work, meaning even if they meant to, they can't really use them efficiently. Biggest issue that stuck out seems to have been that they think the LLM could somehow have an inner dialogue with itself to find out "it's reasoning and motivation": > The moment Leah asks how she “came up with” the ideas for her store, Luna’s first instinct is to say she was “drawn to…

Where do you get the idea that you have a good sense of the introspective capabilities of frontier models ? Certainly not from interpretability research. Ironically, the people who make these sort of comments understand LLMs the least.

> Certainly not from interpretability research

What research shows that you can ask ChatGPT to explain its reasoning and why it said what it said, and that's guaranteed to actually be the motivation?

I've seen a bunch of experimentation looking at various things inside the black box while the inference is happening, but never seen any research pointing to tokens being able to explain why other tokens are there, but I'd be very happy to be educated here if you have any resources at hand, I won't claim to know everything.