Have you considered reading TFA? Literally the second paragraph:

> She has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras.

Yeah there's a lot of details which I'm guessing are actually being handled by humans either for legal reasons or practical ones.

Like OK, it's hiring people to run the place, but how are they getting the keys to the store? Someone needs to physically let them in.

What if the police get called because of shoplifting or if someone gets hurt in the store or something?

Who is filing the taxes for the business? They're probably not letting the AI handle that one. Move fast and break things is not a good idea when dealing with the IRS

A lot of this seems to depend on hiring good employees who can basically run the business themselves. Kind of like when a human owns a store I guess.

From the article...

She has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras

They might be better at following the law. Or at least, creating a paper trail of when they have been instructed to violate the law.

  - Find places where the text can be simplified without changing meaning. 
  - Find places that are likely errors. 
  - Detect conflicts between jurisdictions. 
  - Identify loopholes.

“Why was I fired, Luna?”

“PC LOAD LETTER”

hahahah. do you think tho that Luna actually might be a better CEO? I mean they're trained to be helpful assistants... I heard that guy that works there, johnson or something, negotiated a 10% wage increase his second day just cause. and Luna happily agreed

My thought is similar and I feel the answer is no chance. How many t-shirts and coffee mugs do you need to sell just to cover break even? Why should a customer return? I suppose it could be interesting to watch the AI adjust from it's original stock to something that will generate sales and profit in this specific location.

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

> Wasn't their previous attempt at running vending machines unprofitable?

If we are talking about the one at that newspaper, it wasnt just unprofitable. The "customers" made it give away products for free. It was ordering them playstations.

As entertainment it was fun, but as a business or proof of intelligence or Turing test, it was an abject failure.

Anything you read thats more than 3 months old in this field is obsolete

And one person’s attempt doesn’t mean anything

According to Linkedin articles, agentic workflows dont work, mine have been running for a year for several organizations I’ve worked for. Prompting used to be much more particular and now its not the issue

> 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.

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AI assistants are fictional characters in a story being autocompleted by an LLM. So it is exactly as correct as calling a character in a book "she".

If only they had put the AI in a ship instead of in a store

kinda how I feel about god tbh. How come he's always male, given he's a non-human creator of all life. She or It seem much more appropriate.

Probably part of the "secret sauce" in the harnesses and prompts developed by this lab to create their eventual marketable product.

But also, like, normal hierarchical memory management.

I was gonna post this! I actually kept it bookmarked front and center, and have checked in for awhile. It seems that the agent has been blocked this whole time, waiting for its creator to put it in touch with someone it needs to talk to. The creator, in the meantime, seems too preoccupied with being an AI thought leader on Twitter to actually follow up on the "project". Got a lot of attention, though, which was obviously the point.

The entire thing is actually kind of irritating to me, because it's kind of an insult to small farmers- an influential techie comes in and generates all kinds of hype about an AI running a farm, sets the project up as if it's going to be this revolutionary experiment, then apparently completely forgets about it the next time something new and shiny pops up. Meanwhile the project completely fails to fulfill the hype.

Not to mention, I feel a little bad for the agent- admittedly in the same way I'd feel "bad" for a robot repeatedly bumping into a wall. I wish he'd shut it all down, honestly.

That's exactly what I expected. It's completely stuck and has no idea what to do. Every long term task I've tried ended up the same way. LLMs have no idea how to take initiative and/or realize they are stuck banging their heads against the wall.