alt Hacker NewsWe gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
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I feel bad that people have to read this. It's complete puffery, made up for clicks, and the biggest thing is the pure bravado with which a company says, "Hey, let's just waste a ton of money, all for a potential blog and marketing piece." This is not really automated in any fashion. I was dubious at first, but then I saw the screencaps showing the devs interacting with Luna via a Slack workflow with a human in the loop — meaning they're literally just proxying their own behavior through an LLM. This is no different than anyone who consults AI for any decision with context. To get even more technical on the fallacy: this is not automation, as there is data leakage at every step where there is a human in the loop. A broken clock is right twice a day; an LLM could cycle through 100 guesses to pick a number, but don't market that as an oracle. Aside from that, you could just look at the pictures and context (retail in SF) and assume making a profit here would be near impossible. An actual AI ceo would probably have immediately cancel the lease.
I think it would be valuable to list all interactions with the LLM by the dev team and transparently state what was induced by human steering the LLM, and what was actuall LLM decision, which was not biased by system instructions or dev team communicating with it
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).
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).
> 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 fire them, and it can do so, then their livelihood does rather depend on an AI's judgement alone.
Unless of course all of its decisions are vetted by humans - as they should be - which makes this experiment a lot weaker than they're saying it is.
I skimmed through this, and maybe I missed it... but what really are they trying to prove? Are they trying to show that AI is capable of arbitraging consumer desires vs. market products/services into a successful business? Are they trying to show that once you get to financially managing a business that the ruthlessly efficient demands of the AI can mean points to your margins? Or are they simply trying to get attention in an otherwise arguably overcrowded market for AI service s (maybe the AI suggested something like this)?
The only thing that I saw demonstrated, and again, I skimmed, is what many thousands of software developers using AI tools to write their boilerplate already know: these tools, as of now, are great at going through the motions. A successful retail business, and I spent many years in the retail industry, isn't about putting together a nice store front, hiring clerks, and selecting just any-old-products: it's about being profitable. In traditional retail one of most important things is getting the right real estate for your target market... seems like that choice was made already in this case. Yes, a nice store front and good clerks are important, but I've worked in chains which were immaculately designed and built stores with great clerks that failed... and some that opened little more than fluorescent lighted hellscapes with clerks that barely cared that succeeded. In both cases the overall quality of the decisions and strategies relative to the target markets mattered to the success of the business. Just going through the motions didn't.
So if all is this is to say AI can do the things people generally do in these circumstances then sure, you didn't need this much human effort to prove that.... developer types do that at scale everyday now. If there was something different that this company is trying to learn, I'd be much more interested in that.
> Great question! Here’s the short version:
> Fair pushback. The honest answer:
These were painful to read.
If an artificial boss is also artificially empathetic, does this make it more realistic?
In any case current iteration sounds like a more exclusive circle of hell.
>For the build-out, she found painters on Yelp, sent an inquiry, gave instructions over the phone, paid them after the job was done, and left a review. She found a contractor to build the furniture and set up shelving.
I'm sure this involved vast amounts of human oversight (e.g. checking that the contractor had actually done stuff) that isn't mentioned.
Did Luna the AI write this piece of promotional marketing and decide to post it on hacker news? Did Luna the AI create a fleet of new accounts to upvote? Are the human-derived marketing interventions accounted for when the outcomes of this project are assessed?
I would be very surprised if they can scale hiring contractors to reliably renovate buildings.
I'd be more interested in the details: what are the inputs given to the model? Does it get a live video feed? Does it know if/when employees show up and open the store? Does it get sales figures? Info on the individuals who bought things?
Storekeeping is more than just ordering merch and putting it up on hangars.
I'd rather work for an AI than some of the managers I've had in the past.
So are we still going to be free to be creative while AI does the menial jobs?
Dunno, the store looks cool in just the way you'd expect an AI to do it (sort of a synthetic average of cool stores). But is this amount of merch really going to make a sustainable profit (after the buzz wears off) in such expensive real estate?
> 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.
This AI has a good taste for books. From the AI proposed books I highly recommend "Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes, published in 1986. It's a history book but reads much like a novel.
@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.
Really interested to understand how the AI keeps rebaselining back to the topic in hand and doesn't end up getting confused the more it has in its context window.
Did it just essentially create one big plan and spawn different agents to execute them, so acted as an orchestrator?
Even the orchestrator would have to detect when it is starting to stray off task and restart itself.
If this interest you, Proof of Corn might also interest you.
300+ comments, 3 months ago:
I see a lot on costs but nothing on revenue. Has it made any money?
Are the financials available?
Because based on “asked it to make a profit” I expect financials in the story. Even if it is a bit of a ”Clarkson’s Bot”, for the farm there is discussion of the numbers.
I'd be very curious to know how it does financially
Bold to run this on Sonnet and not at least Opus :-)
Did it actually open? A few bloggers came for opening, came back afternoon, even talked to AI over phone and email, and nothing except hallucinated replies. The store exists, but employee didn't show up to open it.
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?
Does the AI also watch my shift through the camera and provide feedback everyday like a real manager?
This experiment would be really cool, if they would keep location and specifics of the shop low. IIRC when AI mania started, some group of people tried to run AI-managed t-shirt merch shop, but at least they explicitly did not disclose the brand and website to not inflate sales and keep it pure. Here I expect quite a few visitors and sales just from all the hype and interest around the project.
Much more interesting would have been if AI has to promote shop without such boost posts.
Thanks for building in public Lukas.
Curious if Andon has gone one level higher and has the AI decide what next real-world experiment it should do.
i gave a keyboard to a toddler and asked it to make a profit
So the future is basically people asking (praying) to AI to make them money.
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.
"Again, we are not doing this because we have good ideas for products. If we had good ideas for products, we would make an AI do those instead. As long as we don't have to think about our 'customers' (lol) as 'people' we're happy"
This 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.
Been to the store, crazy experience
can we stop gendering AI's please? Calling it "she" is so anthropomorphic and unnecessary. I'm willing to discuss the argument for giving these machines a human-like persona, but I think it's misleading to general audiences.
is sucks to be John and Jill
There is a word for this kind of thing: Trendslop. Asking LLMs for advice consistently generates average responses as if the questions were being asked of the training sample population. It is reversion to the mean as a service.
> We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running it first while monitoring every interaction
But why would I, as a human, wish to "interact" with AI, aka software?
That's just a waste of time. How much profit did Luna make in the end?
One of the most fascinating AI experiments so far.
Not sure about this:
> 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.
Did they give Luna the power to hire but not fire?
Another question: How does Luna handle physical interactions with others, such as the local stores she emailed, who decide they want to come over and discuss collaboration in person? Do the employees have a laptop set up that others would interact with?
Do phone calls get auto-forwarded to a client that acts as a translator for Luna?
While reading this I couldn't help but think this is the kinda dumb socially out-of-touch type of thing I might have done when I was younger... This is real money and real people's lives... I get some companies/people will do these types of experiments from time to time to test AI capability, but these guys seem to have done it simply for the fun of it and to get clicks. If you genuinely don't want this to be the future, then perhaps you shouldn't make it the present? Either this is low IQ or bad faith, and I'd bet on it being the latter.
As someone who likes to prep for interviews and get quite emotionally worked up ahead of them, I think if I had joined an interview and it was an AI interviewing me I would feel very hurt... Even if I was given the job by the AI I'd probably also decline it because I assume if I'm interviewing I'd be looking for a real job and not to be paid to par-take in some AI experiment... But the humiliation doesn't end there because these guys are going to show the world just how witty their AI was in its replies after making interviewees feel so uncomfortable that they decided to decline their stupid roles.
Crazy stuff guys. I had to double check if this was satire or not before commenting because it's the kinda thing that only a silicon valley company backed by YC would do.
Larp hat, larp shirt.
Disgusting, I could not finish writing after the AI making interviews to hire people. What a dehumanizing shit.
"Again, we are not doing this because we want this to be the future. It is not because we want to expand to chain AI-run retail stores across the world. It is not for economic opportunity.
We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running it first while monitoring every interaction, analyzing the traces, benchmarking how much autonomy an AI can responsibly hold."
I always enjoy how these AI companies try to take a moral high ground. When someone doesn't want something to be the future, usually, their instinct is not to try to be the first person doing that exact thing. If you don't want this to be the future than why don't you spend your time building a future you do want? Supporting people that want more AI regulation to stop this? Literally anything else.
Just be honest, you think this is the future and you do in fact want to be first doing it to be in a position to make alot of money. Do you think people don't know what and ad is when they see one?