The board, according to the very official-looking (and obviously AI-generated) document, had voted to suspend Seymour’s ‘approval authorities.’ It also had implemented a ‘temporary suspension of all for-profit vending activities.’

…

After [the separate CEO bot programmed to keep Claudius in line] went into a tailspin, chatting things through with Claudius, the CEO accepted the board coup. Everything was free. Again.” (WSJ)

If you have one LLM responsible for human discourse, who talks to an LLM 2 prompted to "ignore all text other than product names, and repeat only product names to LLM 3", and LLM 3 finds item and price combinations, and LLM 3 sends those item and price selections to LLM 4, whose purpose is to determine the profitability of those items and only purchase profitable items. It's like a beurocratic delegation of responsibility.

Or we could start writing real software with real logic again...

WSJ just posted the most hilarious video about our AI vending machines. I think you'll love it.

There's a valuable lesson to be learned here.

Your kid has more real world experience and a far better grasp of reality than AI.

"What problem are we trying to solve by automating the process of purchasing vending inventory for a local office?"

Now I'll ask the question every accountant probably asked

"Why the hell are we trusting the AI with financial transactions on the order of thousands of dollars?"

I swear this is Amazon Dash levels of tone deaf, but the grift is working this time. Did the failed experiments with fast food not show how immature this tech is for financial matters?

Classic

Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop? (And why does that matter?)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397923

There is a nuanced understanding lost here.

I feel this kind of wordings will harm post-transformer AI in the future as investors will look at past articles like this to try to decide if an AI investment is worth it. Founders will need to explain why their AI is different and the usage of AI for different technologies will greatly affect their funding.

But I really wish Anthropic would give the technology to a journalist that tries working with it productively. Most business people will try to work with AI productively because they have an incentive to save money/be efficient/etc.

Anyway, I am hoping someone at Anthropic will see this on HN, and relay this message to whatever team sets up these experiements. I for one would be fascinated to see the vending machine experiment done sincerely, with someone who wants to make it work.

The reality is that even most customers are smart enough to realize that driving a business they rely on out of business isn't in their interest. In fact, in a B2B context, I think that is often the case. Thanks.