If this interest you, Proof of Corn might also interest you.
300+ comments, 3 months ago:
We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
31–40 of 312 posts
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#32The last I heard about their vending machine it was a total failure and it was giving everything for free. Did it ever actually succeed?
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#33This is not impossible but the detail level here is somewhere between vague and secretive. It reads like a marketing peice intended to sell more AI.
In a most "damning with faint praise" way, all AI pieces read like marketing pieces to sell AI.
It writes code okay, scaling up to pretty well depending on the model. It's writing is boring but serviceable for corporate communicative content you don't care about. It's images are ugly. It's music is repetitive and dull.
I think the biggest problem with LLMs is that they were perfected and are shockingly good at writing code. And based on that, AI engineers, who find writing code to be hard/rewarding, have decided it can do anything. And it's proving more and more that it cannot.
Unfortunately the Business Class has decided it does everything fine enough as to not cause riots, so we're all getting it shoved into our shit anyway.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#34@AlexBlechman
tweeted:
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#35Apparently, 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.
Until the robots get good enough and cheap enough but then hopefully capitalism balances the market. After all, if everyone is out of work then either we have communism or companies cannot sell anything.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#36I'd be very curious to know how it does financially
I imagine the data won't be very useful considering it's public knowledge the store is run by AI and most of the customers will be people specifically interested in that aspect of the business. Much like that meetup organised in Manchester, where the people who showed up were there for the novelty: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/05/ai-bot-pa...
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#37Curious if Andon has gone one level higher and has the AI decide what next real-world experiment it should do.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#38A bit of a non sequitur, but am I the only one finding the use of "she" to refer to the AI in the post jarring?
Probably not the only one, but it's pretty much the least interesting thing to find jarring about the whole experiment.
People anthropomorphize. Nobody really finds it "jarring" in most contexts.
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#39Cool experiment! But the "CEO" agent picked the most boring possible items to sell: t-shirts and some bland art prints designed by AI. I would have loved to see more creativity given that they could have picked anything.
I expect earlier iterations successfully circumvented local regulations and created high street bookies
Re: We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
#40> But frontier models have become really good, and running vending machines is too easy for them now. Wasn't their previous attempt at running vending machines unprofitable? Not aware of any demonstration that it can actually run that business successfully.
> Wasn't their previous attempt at running vending machines unprofitable? Not aware of any demonstration that it can actually run that business successfully.
It doesn't look like this one will be any better. Did you look at the merchandise selection? It's only chance is pity purchases from AI bros.