It is an interesting article, even if it’s conclusions are entirely too rosy. The “storefront” was a single vending machine, and the bot was instructed to interact with Anthropic employees (with an hourly cost attached) to do all physical interactions. While the bot did a decent job managing the stock most of the time, it made a lot of bad decisions based on trying to be too helpful to it’s customers. It also frequently hallucinated, with some hilarious results I wont spoil here. But as anyone who owns a small business knows, one bad decision could put it under, so saying that an AI can manage a vending machine well “most of the time” is equivalent to saying it cant do the job at all.
Their conclusion is that with a bit more work, Claude might be able to perform as a middle-manager. To me, that says more about how useless middle-management is than how capable their AI is.
Anybody who thought the answer could have been even remotely close to Yes is delusional.
I doubt anyone expected it to work completely, but it is interesting to see to what extent it worked and how it failed (halucinations and sycophancy)
True; I just hate headlines that ask stupid questions.
But then again, there’s always the premise that it could work, in such attempts, which annoys me no less.
This shit needs to start being regulated.
How so?
AI needs to be regulated. It’s already creeping everywhere. People getting fired and replaced with sloppy AI, holding petabytes of people’s data and work hostage, the list goes on. You can’t even ask a question without being asked for personal data to the AI and you certainly can’t do whatever you want with it.
If it’s going to replace humans, it needs to be regulated like one.
There is currently no regulation against humans creating slop or making bad business decisions. Prohibiting the use of tools for certain tasks to save jobs is a recipe for disaster, which is actually what you are saying I think.
