The only mention of profit is in the the headline; the article doesn't indicate that the AI managed to make one.
Surely if it did, the article would boast of it, so one can only assume that an AI cannot run a profitable store in San Francisco.
We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
261–270 of 312 posts
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
>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? What research shows that you can ask a Human to explain its reasoning and why it said what it said, and that's guaranteed to actually be the motivation? Because there's no such thing. If anything, what research exists suggests any explanation we're making is a nice…
Why not try to answer my question, instead of asking a different question which I haven't even claimed to have the answer to?
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#263Earlier 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…
Freakanomics podcast had a recent episode regarding Cheating with PEDS, and interviewed the (former) head of the Enhanced Games. At one point, he discussed the benefit for society because athletes would be monitored for 5-years post performance. To me, it seemed like a modern day tech-take of human cock-fighting.
Honestly PEDS are stigmatized and under-researched for the performance enhancing aspect. They have undoubtable side effects - but how much, why, etc. is kind of meh from what I saw when I was looking into this, bro science is best you can get. Few studies here and there giving people modes test boosts and measuring athletic performance.
Not saying we should be promoting them, but if we can eventually get to the point where we eliminate the really bad side effects and get most of the benefits it's going to be a great thing for everyone, the next thing after GLP-1.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not surprised actually. TBH this is the biggest gap in the “AI is can make you a website”, the aesthetics are always so boring and bland, or often just fugly (bad colour matching, inappropriate paddings and margins, etc). And the logos it generates are similarly boring. As can be seen from the smiley face logo here. What does this store sell? A sparse layout as designed in a high rent location typically sells very ex…
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Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#265Earlier 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.
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Why are you speaking with such faux-uncertainty without disclosing your relationship with Andon Labs?
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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What do you mean you heard? Are you not a member of their team? Your posts in the last hour seem quite astroturf-y.
The user's name is the name of an Anton Labs project [0]. Furthermore, the fact that the user is inconsistently bad at formatting, punctuation and capitalisation of their messages makes me suspect the user itself may be agentic-LLM-based, with a badly calibrated layer of "obfuscation" to pretend to be an oh-so-imperfect human.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
that is ... not correct? This is classic example of data leakage, the yes/no things are signals feeding back to the model influencing (and here, basically guiding) future decisions.
It's not data leakage. If the experiment is to see how the AI behaves on its own, then of course it needs to know the outcomes of its decisions (either automatically, or fed to it by a human), which of course influence its next decisions. This is providing the AI with retained memory, which is essential to the experiment. It's similar to an AI writing code which it then runs and parses the logs to see the outcome and…
How is it not analogous to data leakage? The claim is that the system works autonomously, or at minimum could, but there is effectively signal via human in the loop feedback. That's leakage into test time evaluation.
Also the coding analogy is malappropriated, in that the llm is using its own signals autonomously in the environment.
Using a kalman filter on a ICBM with its own sensors is analogous to the coding agent and is autonomous. A system where a human is course correcting based on signals/sensor data is what's presented here, that is not autonomous.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 meanin…
> In the US you can.
Depends on the state I think. It's not Europe or Japan level.
At my employer it's very difficult to fire people for performance reasons even if as a manager you might want to.
> This is Hacker News, and the pro-business narrative is strong here,
I haven't seen such a narrative in years. Interest rates are too high to do startups unless it's AI after all. HN is mostly the same folk economics content as other forums, where all problems in the world are caused by "profits" accruing to "corporations".
(Mostly problems are caused by other things than that.)
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#269"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 can fault them individually for such corny and groan inducing deceit, but we can't fault them for society's role in rewarding the highest profile and most wealthy founders (OAI/Anthropic) taking the exact same approach with optics.
I am about to go on a long rant, but there is so much money sloshing around the capital allocation machine going towards a vision of the AI managed and optimized future that the propaganda machine for these rose colored delusions must work in overtime. What disappoints me is the question of where the heck are the bears? Did they all go into hibernation 5 years ago when QE gave the retail kindergartener a handgun to pump low quality tickers to the moon? have we just societally accepted that everything should be a hyperreal version of sports gambling now and the world is and ought to be an efficient market of hyperstition?
I may be old and grumpy saying this, but this all sounds dumb and corny. I would like some of the very capable traders who make money repricing mispriced assets to find a way to make money deflating this bubble and bring this environment back to sanity. And I say this as someone who likes the capabilities of AI but continue to see it do little to none of the hard work solving incompressible problems that continue to create and retain enterprise value.
To get off my soapbox for a second and get back to your quoted passage -- what they're really saying is "We are working very hard to make this future coming, and we think so little of your intelligence that we believe you'll fall for the fear tactic of believing it's inevitable, ignoring the fact that it won't happen without someone's hands. And in this case, it is very much our hands, which are incentivized to not just do it but to do it so well that we ensure we do everything possible to make this happen. Part of which means persuading you that it is guaranteed to succeed. If we ever let the honest truth slip that what we're proposing is extremely hard to pull off with pure AI and we're just going to be a any other commercial real estate investor like anyone else, the jig is up."
That's what every single one of these kinds of hypocritical navel gazing faux-concern proclamations amount to for me. Astroturf.