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A new study of a bot running a store finds it is friendly but not very smart

nytimes.com

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Re: A new study of a bot running a store finds it is friendly but not very smart

#31

Post by walrus01 »

qlte wrote: post #9

> Andon Market’s seemingly random assortment of products includes many candles.

I'm curious if it's how it was prompted, to start a store selling small but not too cheap household items, or if the LLM intentionally chose an aesthetic and store to sell things that are very "twee" [1].

https://andon.market/

Looking at the product selection, it's like $85 bottles of olive oil, $45 mugs, weird boutique pens and notebooks, the aforementioned candles, copper watering cans... It's sort of like the stuff you see for sale in some of the tourist trap stores adjacent to the public market on Granville Island in Vancouver.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=dictionar...

Re: A new study of a bot running a store finds it is friendly but not very smart

#32

Post by throwway120385 »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #23
walrus01 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I mean from the day to day operations of selling a product to the customer, maybe it does fine? People in the article say it's friendly and cooperative (perhaps a bit too much). I was thinking more in terms of building a consistent plan for retail product lines to sell over a multi month period. The selection of "stuff" in the store right now looks like you put an etsy search into a blender. It is also probably…

Physical Brick and Mortar locations no longer make sense for many retail businesses, as Walmart/Amazon have same day delivery. If folks have ever been financially bent-over for a retail business shop location they understand why margins matter. One has to move a lot of inventory just to reach a profit mode. Gimmicks only work for awhile, as consumers have full market awareness on their smartphone. =3

> Physical Brick and Mortar locations no longer make sense for many retail businesses, as Walmart/Amazon have same day delivery.

This is bull. Take paint brushes for fine finish when painting houses. Amazon sells "paint brushes." But what they don't sell are paint brushes that are actually fit for purpose. It's fine if you're only planning on painting some pre-textured walls. You're probably already using that cheap $20/gallon Valspar so you won't even notice that it takes you 3 extra coats to get good coverage. And you don't notice the brush marks because the orange peel texture on your drywall is designed to hide them. And I bet you walk around saying how hard it is to get a good markless coat of paint on your interior doors without spraying.

If you buy a nice paint brush and good paint a lot of those issues actually go away and it gets a lot easier to do the job. And the only way to know if a brush is good is to pick it up and look at the bristle tips. Are they fine? Are they flagged? Does it have good stiffness? Does it have any weird "stiffener" bristles to hide how cheap the actual brush is? You can't see that until you get the brush.

Worse, Amazon sells the same brush through 50 different brands. They completely choke out the really good listings that used to be on the site. So good luck getting anything different from any of the sellers on there. By category Amazon beats Brick and Mortar. But if you know what you're doing and you're looking for something specific that is of high quality Amazon is only one step above Temu.

Re: A new study of a bot running a store finds it is friendly but not very smart

#33

Post by Joel_Mckay »

walrus01 wrote: post #24
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical Brick and Mortar locations no longer make sense for many retail businesses, as Walmart/Amazon have same day delivery. If folks have ever been financially bent-over for a retail business shop location they understand why margins matter. One has to move a lot of inventory just to reach a profit mode. Gimmicks only work for awhile, as consumers have full market awareness on their smartphone. =3

Indeed, and rent in big cities for food service establishments is getting out of hand as well. The local Shawarma place now is something like $18 for one basic chicken shawarma but they're also paying a truly absurd rent for a retail premises with commercial kitchen equipment on a busy pedestrian street.

The estate holding companies tend to punch down on small business leases, and will often drop a zombie company on the carcass of a small firm foolish enough to run the gauntlet.

Structured franchises in standard retail complexes can survive with anchor stores, but people are not going to find a lot of unique choices.

It may differ somewhat in rural communities, but the consolidation of physical shop choices wthin urban centers is inescapable. =3

Re: A new study of a bot running a store finds it is friendly but not very smart

#34

Post by SwellJoe »

ericd wrote: post #27
walrus01 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > Luna has failed miserably in that mission and is down $62,000. Mr. Petersson and Mr. Backlund said they thought Luna would eventually get smarter and more business-savvy and were pleased its friendliness has held steady. I am extremely skeptical that whatever LLM they're running this on has sufficient context window size to handle multiple months of all possible activities of running a retail busi…

When I first heard about this store, they were using Sonnet, not even Opus, which I found really surprising.

Dumping $100,000 into it, and trying to save a few bucks on the model. Penny wise, pound foolish.

Re: A new study of a bot running a store finds it is friendly but not very smart

#35

Post by SwellJoe »

jpiasolutions wrote: post #13
SwellJoe wrote: post #3

People just really don't understand that LLMs do not "remember" anything. They have no memory. They can't have memory. The AI companies bolt a database on the side with instructions for the model to query the database for stuff in its "memory", but if it's not in its active context it doesn't know what to query for. It's not like a human where everything is kind of floating around and we mostly know what we know. The…

The memory framing is right, but the real gap isn't recall, it's the missing feedback loop tying actions to outcomes. Even with perfect retrieval these agents don't update from a decision that lost money last week; they re-derive from context every step, so the same mistake is always one dropped detail away. And having built retrieval-backed agents, that's where "bolt a database on the side" breaks: similarity search…

Anybody ever tell you that you write like an LLM?

Re: A new study of a bot running a store finds it is friendly but not very smart

#36

Post by walrus01 »

SwellJoe wrote: post #34
ericd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first heard about this store, they were using Sonnet, not even Opus, which I found really surprising.

Dumping $100,000 into it, and trying to save a few bucks on the model. Penny wise, pound foolish.

It's a $100,000 PR stunt, I'm sure they're looking at the press/media coverage and consider it worth it. Any actual institutional knowledge gained of how to make an LLM run a retail store is incidental.

Compared to the money at AI companies spend on billboards in SF the 100k is probably a drop in the bucket.

Re: A new study of a bot running a store finds it is friendly but not very smart

#37

Post by Joel_Mckay »

throwway120385 wrote: post #32
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical Brick and Mortar locations no longer make sense for many retail businesses, as Walmart/Amazon have same day delivery. If folks have ever been financially bent-over for a retail business shop location they understand why margins matter. One has to move a lot of inventory just to reach a profit mode. Gimmicks only work for awhile, as consumers have full market awareness on their smartphone. =3

> Physical Brick and Mortar locations no longer make sense for many retail businesses, as Walmart/Amazon have same day delivery. This is bull. Take paint brushes for fine finish when painting houses. Amazon sells "paint brushes." But what they don't sell are paint brushes that are actually fit for purpose. It's fine if you're only planning on painting some pre-textured walls. You're probably already using that cheap…

It was not a question of retail quality products, but rather the harsh reality of running a retail outlet with a gauntlet of people taking a piece out of your business.

Don't take this the wrong way, but if someone is burning $87k a month for a small shop location, and still personally making minimum wage... it isn't a viable business. Often, even a Chipotle franchise location would have been a better choice. =3

Re: A new study of a bot running a store finds it is friendly but not very smart

#39

Post by rrr_oh_man »

dom96 wrote: post #12
SwellJoe wrote: post #3

People just really don't understand that LLMs do not "remember" anything. They have no memory. They can't have memory. The AI companies bolt a database on the side with instructions for the model to query the database for stuff in its "memory", but if it's not in its active context it doesn't know what to query for. It's not like a human where everything is kind of floating around and we mostly know what we know. The…

They can have memory, it's just limited to their context window.

It's not memory in any sense of the word.

Re: A new study of a bot running a store finds it is friendly but not very smart

#40

Post by SyneRyder »

LukaJCB wrote: post #10
SwellJoe wrote: post #3

People just really don't understand that LLMs do not "remember" anything. They have no memory. They can't have memory. The AI companies bolt a database on the side with instructions for the model to query the database for stuff in its "memory", but if it's not in its active context it doesn't know what to query for. It's not like a human where everything is kind of floating around and we mostly know what we know. The…

It's kinda like the movie memento, they have ways to get information from the past, but often devoid of context and meaning.

I think Memento is one of the most important movies for anyone working with AI to watch. My Claude now talks about "Memento bugs" when we're working together to review memory & context.

I think Memento is a bigger issue than "lethal trifecta", honestly.

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