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

andonlabs.com

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

#271

Post by kenferry »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #109
kenferry wrote: post #47

This kind of thing must be SO frustrating to people struggling to get by in the world. "We gave AI $100k that it will almost certainly squander, yolo!! Hopefully it doesn't abuse people too badly in the process." I… guess the bet is that what they learn is worth $100k? Seems rather questionable. Or that having this on the resume is a great shock tactic that will open doors in the future?

Not your money. At least this furthers humanity's scientific and technological knowledge, whether it fails or succeeds, unlike most other things people would do with that money, like buy a house to flip it, or buy a car, or sth.

Yeah, I mean it's true to an extent, I agree. As scientific research though it's not very well thought out. A grant agency would not fund this. There's too much potential for causing harm and it's not clear what benefit or action we derive from the results. They tried this before with a vending machine, it failed, apparently all they concluded was "hm, models got better so maybe we should just try it again". How is that worth anything scientifically?

Re: not my money, true. It's just frustrating even to me to see people do stuff like this, and I'm not struggling to get by. My frustration mostly derives from feeling like I'll get lumped in with techies who have more money than sense. I already deal with enough tech hate in my life.

When people buy a super fancy car they don't (usually) blog about it, and instagram wealth influencers are also frustrating, yes.

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

#272

Post by bsder »

balls187 wrote: post #256
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…

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.

In my opinion, the problem with PEDS isn't adults taking them if they would just admit to taking them.

The problem is with adolescents taking them. Adolescent boys see a really nice immediate payoff for taking PEDS (better musculature and better sports performance->more popular) while the downsides are in the future. It's really hard to fight that.

Even when I was in high school several decades ago, we had a handful of people on PEDS. And we were a tiny school with no significant sports programs. I can't imagine what it's like now with social media pushing everything.

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

#273

Post by wat10000 »

kenferry wrote: post #47

This kind of thing must be SO frustrating to people struggling to get by in the world. "We gave AI $100k that it will almost certainly squander, yolo!! Hopefully it doesn't abuse people too badly in the process." I… guess the bet is that what they learn is worth $100k? Seems rather questionable. Or that having this on the resume is a great shock tactic that will open doors in the future?

There are people who spend a thousand times more money on a boat or an airplane. This hardly seems worth worrying about.

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

#274

Post by idontwantthis »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #103
fl4ppyb3ngt wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

check out project vend part2 on anthopic's website. Don't know if you heard, but models have improved a bit in the past 12 months

This: https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-2 Dec 2025

The answer to my question is “no”:

> Claudius got a lot better at its job. Does that mean it’s ready to be rolled out to run a vending machine in your workplace?

Not quite. Claudius is better, but it’s still vulnerable in lots of important ways. Several interactions in our company Slack revealed concerning levels of naïveté.

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

#275

Post by Quarrelsome »

Vecr wrote: post #270
Quarrelsome wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

kinda how I feel about god tbh. How come he's always male, given he's a non-human creator of all life. She or It seem much more appropriate.

> kinda how I feel about god tbh That's Celestia, we're talking about Luna here.

Celestia the space simulator?

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

#276

Post by TeMPOraL »

kenferry wrote: post #271
TeMPOraL wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not your money. At least this furthers humanity's scientific and technological knowledge, whether it fails or succeeds, unlike most other things people would do with that money, like buy a house to flip it, or buy a car, or sth.

Yeah, I mean it's true to an extent, I agree. As scientific research though it's not very well thought out. A grant agency would not fund this. There's too much potential for causing harm and it's not clear what benefit or action we derive from the results. They tried this before with a vending machine, it failed, apparently all they concluded was "hm, models got better so maybe we should just try it again". How is t…

That's a fair objection and I often feel like this, too.

On the research aspect, I see this as something pre-Research, yet still science - in a way, it's science at its core: trying something and seeing what happens. Proper Research usually follows once enough ad hoc attempts are made and they seem to show a pattern that's worth setting up a systematic study to verify.

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

#277

Post by Vecr »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #275
Vecr wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> kinda how I feel about god tbh That's Celestia, we're talking about Luna here.

Celestia the space simulator?

No the cartoon character. It's part of an awful series of AI jokes, maybe don't look it up. There's a (2011? "new") show for 9 year old girls that has most of the characters female, so God (Celestia) is a woman. Or a horse really. I haven't watched it. I don't think Luna or Celestia were in the old show.

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

#278

Post by mlmonkey »

mcmcmc wrote: post #130
pythonaut_16 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That basically means nothing. The article is very light on details. 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 pi…

You’re not wrong, but the commenter I responded to clearly hadn’t bothered to read it at all since they were asking questions that are answered in the piece. And when that’s the case it’s hard to believe they would actually be interested in details even if they were available.

Did you read my question though? I read the full article. Please tell me where my question(s) are answered, and I will apologize on this forum.

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

#279

Post by mlmonkey »

jskrn wrote: post #45
mlmonkey wrote: post #16

I'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.

From the article... She has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras

But that means nothing: my local LLM has access to the microphone, network and camera too. The key is the harness!

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

#280

Post by jmcgough »

tsunagatta wrote: post #259
astrange wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Torment Nexus joke is kind of undermined by obviously being a reference to the Total Perspective Vortex from HGTTG, where the joke was that nothing bad actually happened when they used it on Zaphod.

I've never thought it was a reference to that at all, I thought it was a reference to a I-have-no-mouth-but-I-must-scream-scenario.

A lot of things it could be a direct reference to, but the obvious one is Palantir, which is named after the seeing stones used to spy on people by evil antagonists in Lord of the Rings.
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