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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

#291

Post by frm88 »

mesofile wrote: post #206
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.

Not sure if this is a spoiler, it’s been a while since I read those books, but if memory serves the only reason Zaphod survived the TPV was because he was temporarily the inhabitant of a pocket universe specifically designed to trick him, and naturally for this universe’s version of the TPV he was the most important being in it, and in telling him so the pocket-universe TPV just confirmed ZB’s own view of himself, le…

Tangential: I always pictured Zaphod to look like Frank Zappa. No idea why.

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

#292

Post by wolvesechoes »

palmotea wrote: post #48
bjourne wrote: post #19

Apparently, 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.

> Apparently, 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. No, it's still dark. This is very similar to the initial stages of the capitalist dystopia in Manna ( https://marshallbrain.com/manna ), which seems to be the Torment Nexus SV is excited about building. AI will never replace capitalists, because they're the…

This fantasy of AI replacing C-suites, CEOs or whatever is very symptomatic of naive tech-folk outlook, completely blind towards sociological and political reality.

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

#294

Post by gizajob »

joe_the_user wrote: post #153
pavel_lishin wrote: post #10

> John and Jill are not at risk. This is a controlled experiment and everyone working at Andon Market is formally employed by Andon Labs, with guaranteed pay, fair wages, and full legal protections. No one’s livelihood depends on an AI’s judgment alone. I'm not sure what sort of labor regulations exist in San Francisco, but presumably they can be fired as easily by an AI as a real person, right? If Luna decides to fi…

At this point, legally I don't think an AI can hold a contract with a person and so I don't think an AI could hire human and so they couldn't fire a person. That doesn't mean the AI couldn't be the decision maker for the legal entity that's hiring these people. But the thing is that if this startup is telling these people they are employees of this company, not "Luna", it would give these people the impression that a…

A company holds the contract with the person. If the company has been put in the “hands” of an AI, then legally it shouldn’t make much of a difference. That company though is likely to have some humans on the documentation and articles, an AI can’t own the company.

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

#295

Post by lesostep »

mrweasel wrote: post #161
binarynate wrote: post #93

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).

Also don't do it in San Francisco, I think it's an artificial easier market. The type of store wouldn't work in Bumsville Idaho. Maybe that's for later, if this works out, but I'd love to see the AI attempt to run a moderately successful business in a borderline dysfunctional town in the Midwest. If you don't technically need to pay "the CEO" a salary, could you run e.g. a grocery store in a dying town. One this woul…

>> If you don't technically need to pay "the CEO" a salary, could you run e.g. a grocery store in a dying town

You probably couldn't. I have seen a lot of small town stores that are run and operated by a single person. If somebody could run a business like that for a decent wage, they would be.

Adding AI to the mix on a high level position (for a single employee, who is the actual owner!) wouldn't help, it's just token burning. AI can find a sale on bananas, but a person at the counter can take feedback from the actual customers, and stock based in that.

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

#296

Post by ben_w »

Barbing wrote: post #239
hn_acc1 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially since many of them are some of the brightest minds around.

If (1) many bright and very online people are going to lose their jobs, and (2) the response has not been mass unionization, might I rethink [1] a more likely future of work or rethink [2] the psychology of the average/collective knowledge workforce, or... "where union" in short. Perhaps the concept is too foreign for white collars, or on average folks think they'll be OK and it's the juniors who'll go... maybe too f…

To extend on what Jensson wrote:

A union has the power to organise one thing, to withdraw labour. In the industrial era, the threat of all the workers not showing up was a threat to end a business.

If AI does what is promised, to replace labour, then a threat to withdraw labour is only threatening the owners with a good time.

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

#297

Post by Quarrelsome »

akdev1l wrote: post #257
Quarrelsome wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, they're running this with oversight, the blog states they're ensuring the people employed are actually properly employed with the parent company. You know for sure that someone WILL run this experiment without those oversights, so while their "care" is probably more about liability there is still some truth to what they say.

If these guys succeed and this thing blows up, do you think they would not stop all this oversight and whatever “moral” boundaries they have now to make more money? I do not.

i mean if you're exploring and you find smth cool then you run with it. But I would imagine the people doing it are exploring, its their financial backers who will be looking to monetise.

I feel more comfortable that the people exploring seem to have their head screwed on and don't appear to be dismissive of the harm they might cause.

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

#298

Post by embedding-shape »

famouswaffles wrote: post #287
embedding-shape wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not try to answer my question, instead of asking a different question which I haven't even claimed to have the answer to?

I did answer it, albeit not directly. "Guaranteed to be the motivation" isn't a standard anyone can meet, and so framing it that way doesn't really probe anything meaningful about LLMs specifically. If what you want to hear is No, then sure, have your No, but it doesn't mean anything. There's just not much to the question. Even though you had it up as one borne of a greater understanding of LLMs, the interpretability…

> our current very little understanding of the internal computations of these models does not support your position

Our current understanding is sufficient to know you can not ask the LLM to explain it's behavior and it can correctly do so, I'm not what research you've read to believe this could be possible in the first place, but happy to receive links to read through, if you're sitting on them.

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

#299

Post by franga2000 »

I spent more than half the length of the article wondering a very simple question: what does the store actually sell?

Even after reading the answer, I'm not entirely sure. A handful of specific books, "artisan" snacks and...candles? All in this stupid minimalist hipster high-concept style and almost certainly at an unreasonably high markup. Completely soul-less, but with a "deep" backstory written by an even more soul-less marketing drone (literally this time!).

To put it differently, it's an over-hyped questionably-profitable "business" selling things nobody needs to people who can't see through the marketing copy because "it's the next big thing, everyone else has it".

An honestly excellent metaphor for the entire AI industry!

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

#300

Post by famouswaffles »

embedding-shape wrote: post #298
famouswaffles wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did answer it, albeit not directly. "Guaranteed to be the motivation" isn't a standard anyone can meet, and so framing it that way doesn't really probe anything meaningful about LLMs specifically. If what you want to hear is No, then sure, have your No, but it doesn't mean anything. There's just not much to the question. Even though you had it up as one borne of a greater understanding of LLMs, the interpretability…

> our current very little understanding of the internal computations of these models does not support your position Our current understanding is sufficient to know you can not ask the LLM to explain it's behavior and it can correctly do so, I'm not what research you've read to believe this could be possible in the first place, but happy to receive links to read through, if you're sitting on them.

Explanations can be faithful sometimes. That's the standard we can expect for any intelligence as far as we're aware.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14150

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