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

andonlabs.com

71–80 of 312 posts

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

#71
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you kidding me? Who’s going to align synergy and hold accountable KPIs and vision plan the 3rd quarter and.. and.. other MBA talk. Certainly AI could never.

large language models are great at language tasks like "bullshittify this message"

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

#72
post #54

> 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

So in other words, no, an LLM has never made profit.

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

#73
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They've never translated it to the real world though. So saying the problem is "too easy" when they have no public (as far as I know) demonstration that they've solved that problem is a stretch.

Yes, they did. You could also find this information easily. A company like Andon creates value by exposing interesting AI failure modes, so it makes perfect sense for them to move on to harder problems when the previous ones get saturated. I think you're just being overly cynical.

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

#74
post #63

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?

My first guess would be a MrBeast style stunt, in which (it is hoped) blowing a huge wad on something obviously stupid will attract enough attention and interest to be convertible into a net-positive ROI.

Where in this case roi means attracting investments that will make the founders rich while making most of the investors lose money

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

#76

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.

Only counts if the AI did it. This was a human, who recognized a unique selling proposition ("store run by AI") and capitalized on it.

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

#78

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…

The choice to refer to it as "she" is also dubious, especially in a context like this. Doubling down on anthropomorphization seems likely to reinforce false beliefs about models.

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

#79

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…

> 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":

> 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.

It's a fetishistic cargo-cult rooted in Peter Thiel's 2AM hot tub party. I still believe the LLM approach won't yield true AGI; despite the very real applications, the majority signal is noise.

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

#80
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've never translated it to the real world though. So saying the problem is "too easy" when they have no public (as far as I know) demonstration that they've solved that problem is a stretch.

Yes, they did. You could also find this information easily. A company like Andon creates value by exposing interesting AI failure modes, so it makes perfect sense for them to move on to harder problems when the previous ones get saturated. I think you're just being overly cynical.

Can you point me to an example then? It's not linked in the article as far as I can tell and it's not easy to find on their website if it's there. I don't count simulations because I used to work with simulations regularly and they often fail to translate to the real world.
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