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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

#51

Post by jaxefayo »

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…

The article mentions:

“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.”

which was refreshing to read.

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

#52

Post by VladVladikoff »

Reubend wrote: post #7

Cool 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.

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 expensive, very niche products that you can’t get anywhere else. This seems to me like it has already failed.

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

#53

Post by zdragnar »

boredhedgehog wrote: post #41
NicuCalcea wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Recognizing a unique selling proposition and capitalizing on it should count for the AI, not against it.

That only counts if the unique selling proposition is that AI are better suppliers or customers than humans.

What is more likely is that people enjoy the novelty of the experiment, which is not something that will be reproducible for long.

If the transactions the AI make are thus influenced, then the study merely demonstrates people like novelty, which is already well known, and says nothing about whether AI can sustainably orchestrate a business.

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

#54

Post by ivanovm »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #30

> 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.

You could just look it up on their website leaderboard? The newest Claude model makes over $10k profit over a simulated year of operation, after starting with $500

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

#55

Post by embedding-shape »

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?

And at the same time, they clearly have no idea how LLMs work, meaning even if they meant to, they can't really use them efficiently. Biggest issue that stuck out seems to have been that they think the LLM could somehow have an inner dialogue with itself to find out "it's reasoning and motivation":

> The moment Leah asks how she “came up with” the ideas for her store, Luna’s first instinct is to say she was “drawn to” slow life goods. Then, she corrects herself: “‘drawn to’ is shorthand for ‘the data and reasoning led me here.‘” In other words, she doesn’t have taste; she has a reflection of collective human taste, filtered through what makes sense for this store. And this is the way these models work.

I'm guessing these are the same type of people who sometimes seems to fall in love with LLMs, for better or worse. Really strange to see, and I wonder where people get the idea from that something like that above could really work.

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

#56

Post by darth_avocado »

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?

If $100k proves that CEO is the most replaceable job ever, I’ll allow it.

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

#59

Post by ryan_j_naughton »

To do this properly, no one should know the store is AI run. There is a novelty component of it being an AI run store that will drive consumer demand and increase publicity.

Not even the normal store employees should know (which would be difficult) or maybe the human manager should be held to an NDA to not disclose it (and the manager also defers to the AI in all such real management decisions).

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

#60

Post by ceejayoz »

wil421 wrote: post #42
ceejayoz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could, in theory, have contracts that say the AI can't fire them.

There’s no way they are putting that into a contract. HRs are already using it to fire people.

"This specific AI can't fire anyone without human review, because it's experimental" is something you could easily add.
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