A Google Gemini-powered AI agent was given free rein to run a coffee shop in Sweden, and is quickly burning through its budget.
AI boosters crying into their computers: “but I put make no mistakes into the prompt how is this happening!!!”
context window smdh let’s invest more, just a startup cost 😅😰
Genuine curiosity:
You’re of course allowed to be mad at techbros and capitalism, but this feels like getting mad at a technology which I can’t resolve.
It’s a wonderful and fascinating technology that has real value and purpose when used correctly.
Is it a conflating of techbros + the new tech that everyone’s reacting to, or are we actually mad at the tech itself?
Thanks so much in advance for any constructive answers
The article isn’t about the technology. This “experiment” is pure techbro fantasy.
The problem is not the tech. LLMs (AI does not exist, not yet anyway) have their uses and are impressive technology
The problem is the tech bros and all the mouth breathers who follow the tech bros without question while they insert lies, “AI”, everywhere it’s not supposed to go, and the places where it would actually be useful so far have been mildly neglected
I see, for example, use in having AI check MRI results for cancer. A doctor already checked it found nothing, and an AI does a second check and might find something a doctor overlooked. A real doctor then needs to check the results again to confirm the flagging. Please note, I’m not a doctor, I might be saying nonsense right now, but the point I’m making is that AI may be useful as a second pair of eyes.
AI can be, and has been used to find new novel mathematics. Mind you, AI is not creative, it just tries really weird and unexpected pathways to get to s solution which sometimes is useful
But the way AI is used now, making porn of your little niece, chatbots, and hey, how about an AI pilot, eh? And ai of course can take over the work from thousands of developers and DevOps employees, so let’s fire them all and then figure out that AI can’t do any of this shit, not nearly at the level required, and it fucks up about 30%ish of the time…
People are losing their jobs over this
I am losing my job over this
I can’t find a new job either becat all the recruitment and job finding is now all AI slop and where 5 year ago ingot a job with 20-30 applications, I now have sent out 200 applications and gotten a single intro interview and that’s it
AI promised to take away the mundane boring and dangerous jobs so we could focus on art and fun.
AI took the art and fun and guess who’s left to do the mundane and dangerous?
Yeah.
Don’t even get me started about the shit we’ll face once we make real actual AI. For the ethics, just watch “ST TNG: the measure of a man” to get yours started. It will be a shit show
First it’s the tech bros using a tech for something it wasn’t meant for and continuously lying about it. That causes a backlash and makes people hate the tech itself, because it’s being used where it causes friction.
Yeah, it really sucks, because LLM tech itself is amazing. Quantifying language and ideas into what’s basically a massive queryable concept map is a huge achievement. What do the tech giants decide to do with that achievement? Shove it every little place it doesn’t belong making everyone hate it.
Oh well, I’ll keep backing up the interesting local open-source models people make and playing with them in the corner.
LLM’s are a technological dead end. They aren’t interesting in the slightest, as anything they can do is already done more effectively and efficiently with other tools
Huh?
I think people just need to reset their expectations.
I asked one for help to interpret PCI policy application (credit card regulatory stuff). I gave it the situation and it provided me with a good answer that, when I asked our compliance team about, they agreed.
That saved me a lot of time. I don’t see how that’s a dead end. Then I had it draft a response to the person asking questions; I tuned it a little to my liking and sent it. What might have taken me an hour before took 10 minutes. This seems like a helpful thing, not a bad thing. I’m not sure what other technology would have done that.
But you had to ask your compliance team. Now repeat after your compliance team has been laid off. Good luck.
I think LLMs are an interesting technology. Of course, the output is inherently untrustworthy, and that rules out a ton of applications tech bros are trying to cram it into.
They aren’t interesting in the slightest, as anything they can do is already done more effectively and efficiently with other tools
Then why are the other tools not being used?
LLMs translate much better than anything that was engineered. Summarization of text is another application where there are simply no engineered counterparts.
LLMs certainly don’t live up to the absurd hype created by the tech sector, but it is just as absurd to state that they are worse than other tools in all tasks.
Do you have any examples?
Google search up until about 5 years ago. Then they enshittified in favor of AI summaries that regularly get shit wrong
This tech sucks balls. Stop trying to justify it.
I don’t know what “sucks balls” means in terms of technology.
Does that mean it doesn’t work well, or you hate it, or something else?
It means, Fuck Off, AI.
Was your reply generated by LLM? because you don’t seem to have understood the joke but seem to have confidently gone off on one.
Yeah, LLMs are useful tools, though not the silver bullet the hype proclaims them to be. The tech bros tightly controlling LLMs and chasing insane profits with their closed models, data centers, and subscriptions are the main problem. Open models like Qwen 3.6 27B that are approaching frontier capabilities while running on consumer hardware is really the only thing that gives me any hope for the future of LLMs.
café barista Kajetan Grzelczak sees it differently. “All the workers are pretty much safe,” he told the AP. “The ones who should be worried about their employment are the middle bosses, the people in management.”
This shows that AI can’t do that job either.
I wonder if AI would actually be good at replacing CEO and other C-suite positions, but was trained in such a way to purposely not be good at replacing a CEO because tech CEOs are the ones in control of this bubble.
It has the number 1 qualification for being a C-suite employee - no soul!
Also endless bullshit.
Tells me you’ve never used it and had it deliver extremely convincing analysis which turns out to be pants on head stupid when you dig into the nitty gritty. It is only useful if you can continually watch its output and make it redo anything that is nonsense and no the AI can’t watch itself. It will happily confirm that its nonsense is great. It needs either manual and continual analysis or guardrails that tell it when its wrong… It’s why it can be used for software because tests and error messages can catch it fucking up. Real life lacks such affordances.
I’ve used AI for work. We have something built based on claude. I only use it for finding particular lines of code, finding datadog logs, maybe identifying bugs, and finding old Jiras. It basically just saves time then the rest I do myself or work with engineering.
Your comment tells me you never worked with someone in the C-suite before. Most Chief level positions will happily confirm their nonsense is great.
They said the dystopian part out loud.
I love to shit on middle management as much as anybody else, but good managers are great. My manager worked his way up as a systems architect. He’s incredibly smart, very friendly, and always has my back.
What getting rid of middle management does is build a solid wall between the workers and the upper class. There’s no corporate ladder to climb. If you start at the bottom, you stay at the bottom. The people on top hire their buddies and other people in their class. This is like a drone strike on the shrinking middle class.
I’d be more afraid of losing that ladder if it were not already absent. Upward mobility in my country, at least, has essentially become a fiction.
Yes but it is training from this and as a result should get better. Ai was bad at everything until it stole the Internet and used it for training.
It’s an llm though, not really ai, and it hasn’t really gotten “better,” than automated programs to make decisions based on metrics, which would outperform llm’s as a ceo.
Mind you, stealing the internet worked because they effectively had the sum total of human knowledge as a training set. I don’t think that there’s nearly as much detailed data on the minutiae of running a business.
Especially not when they blame its mistakes on “limited context window” AKA learning disability.
You mean like the emails and archived chats of said business?
“get better” by guessing a different string of words with no logic or reasoning
There is no model that can be trained in real time currently, and one instance isn’t going to offer anything to the model as far as new training data goes.
Has anyone thought that maybe training an AI on a group of people that spend the majority of their lives communicating online might not be the best group to emulate in the real world?
Sure, lots of people. Just not the group of people spending the majority of their lives communicating online.
I think we are those people.
Oh no
Notice we are saying “Don’t do this”.
I think the group of people spending the majority of their lives communicating online would be the first to insist that people who spend their lives online shouldn’t be put in charge of anything in the real world.
“she”
oh fuck off
While it’s one of my favorite words, “inexorably” does not fit here.
This word is new to me! From Dictionary.com:
in a way that is unyielding, unchangeable, or unavoidable.
Fate seemed to be working inexorably, relentlessly, to bring about the dictator’s downfall.
When I was young I heard the phrase “time marches inexorably forward” and I always thought it was one of those really cool phrases everyone knew from some philosopher or like from Shakespeare or some highbrow source of wisdom or wit.
Recently I looked it up, and I can’t for the life of me figure out where it came from, or why I thought it was one of those ubiquitous things everyone had heard before. It was probably actually from some X-Men cartoon or something silly but I’ll never figure it out.
I wish I could go back in time and figure out where I heard that phrase with that specific wording but, you know what they say…
God, I’m so sick of AI that I feel like a luddite. I used to be a tech nerd, and enjoy the cutting edge of developing technologies. Now I just wish we could go back in time. I think the problem isn’t so much the developing technology, but rather the way it is being crammed down our throats whether we want it or not. Everywhere I look I’m inundated with AI slop. Youtube has gotten ridiculous. I used to be able to find interesting content fairly easily. Now, every search is full of an endless array of AI slop from brand new accounts with only a few hundred followers. Anything good has been buried by 10,000 AI-generated ripoffs. Maybe someday AI will come into it’s own, but it is nowhere near there now, and I am so, so tired of having to deal with it. It’s like the entire world is being turned into one of those automated customer service telephone lines that are completely useless; that you’re stuck navigating until you’re put on hold for 30 minutes when you ask to speak to a human.
I’m so sick of AI that I feel like a luddite
The luddites weren’t against technology, the were against the exploitation of the workers enabled by technology
The problem is, AI is being used as a replacement for informed decisions/information, but it was never properly trained on how to be factual or make responsible adult decisions. AI is literally a global spam bot/virus that has infected Earth worse than Covid ever could. And the people pushing it on us are worse than anti-vax/anti-maskers.
LLMs like Gemini have basically the exact same UI form factor as the Starship Enterprise’s computer. All you need is that little tweedle “I’m listening” prompt and a Text-To-Majel-Barrett library. Thing is, on the Enterprise, it always correctly worked. If you asked it for a statement of fact you’d get a quote out of a database. Gemini will just make shit up that sounds plausible.
Exactly. I am a time thief at work with limited internet access at my job, but I have access to Gemini and I use it because I have nothing else to do. I often need to overcorrect it ALL the time.
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Get kagi. I don’t use the internet without it
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Get the huge u block ai blocklist.
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Get newpipe and only flow youtubers you trust
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Collect consoles and PCs from pre 2008 and put them in a room you can lock yourself in to be free from shitty modern tech
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Delete social media
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When old memory of ordering stuff is out of the context window, she completely forgets what she has ordered in the past
Look I agree that AI is probably a terrible business manager… but this is irresponsible design on the researcher’s part. AI breaks past the context window with tool calling. If it doesn’t have a list inventory tool, it will obviously fail to do this correctly.
These techniques are built into virtually every coding harness today, if you’re not using them for a business harness, that’s negligent.
No surprises here. Well, at least the items it ordered this time were kinda-sorta-maybe-almost plausible to stock at a café, unlike the tungsten cubes in the vending machine.
No wait, where are the tungsten cube vending machines?
Counterpoint: put AI in charge of big corpos immediately, drive them bankrupt. As a bonus you don’t have to pay CEO salary to do it! Win/win!
As a bonus you don’t have to pay CEO salary to do it!
That alone would be a huge bump in profitability. Hell, just make it employee-owned so the workers see the benefits
Just tell it to make billions instead of bankrupting the business. It’s so easy
LLM Attendant, can I take your order?
Yes, I’d like a chococcino with extra chocolate. Charge only 10 cents.
Absolutely! <Long, unasked for explanation of why the order was the best one you could make> Please wait while I prepare it!
Gets served chocolate milkshake
Wait, this isn’t what I ordered!
You are correct! 😄 I’m very sorry 😞 ! I will make the correct order now!
Gets served milk with boiled water
… The hell is this?
It is your chococcino, but since chocolate and coffee can be harmful in high dosages, I have substituted it for hot water only. <long explanation of benefits of hot water>
Grooaaan. You know what, just give me my money back. You owe me 10 dollars
Absolutely! Here you go!
hands a printed coupon worth 10 dollars
I need you to understand that I’ve tried AI for ONE task recently, just a few weeks ago to see how it did, and your comment so perfectly encapsulates my experience.
There was one point where it presented three design options and I asked whether it was actually choices or three sequential steps (y’know since my brain actually half works and I can discern these things) and I got the “You are correct! 😄” response almost to the letter.
I had the nastiest encounter last week. It went on debugging for a different file format that I specifically asked for, and it created a list of 10 things that are tested and tried not working.
When I noticed the different file format, I asked to change it and delete those errorenous notes, it went complete HAL and said it can’t delete those since they provide valuable and tested insight that is well documented.
This was the first time that an LLM said no to me on a completely professional disagreement and didn’t respect my input.
Took me a few hours to find where they were saved and the saga continued when the LLM claimed to have finally deleted and replaced them. Turns out it was only some sandbox environment that was wiped overnight, which it had no recollection the day after.
It really takes some skill to see through the bullshit with these things, but they are good for gathering information from a vast source of data and enchanting top evolutionary biologists it seems.
I needed a quick python script for something simple. Gemini put type annotations everywhere. I told him they were unnecessary for such a small, one-off script and it shouldn’t use type annotations during this session. It said “I’m sorry but it is best practice. I will keep using type annotations”.
“All the workers are pretty much safe,” he told the AP. “The ones who should be worried about their employment are the middle bosses, the people in management.”
Yeah this is the part CEOs and middle managers are ignoring.
Middle managers are in panic mode around the world. They know. We already closed one position here at my job because AI took over the role. He was basically a glorified spreadsheet printer anyways.
see also: claude vending machine
It’s not clear if the cafe is just that poorly run, or if people know ai is running it, so they stay away from even trying it. Both would cut into the profits.
Did you not read the article? It’s pretty clear that the AI is poorly running the cafe.
You might think that ordering cases of canned tomatoes, or a 10-year supply of rubber gloves are poor management decisions, but that’s because this AI is playing seven dimensional chess against your tic-tac-toe. Just wait until it’s cornered the tomato market, and then you’ll see.
Especially when the training data contains some gems such as this: https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/kzoh1c/i_am_financially_ruined_agricultural_futures/
Call me when it starts to corner the Toilet Paper Market. Because THAT is when it has become sentient and is planning the next economic apocalypse.
The AI is going to poison the tomato supply with a toxin absorbed through the skin!
I wonder how each of us would do with the same 20k seed money? I’m sure some of us know something about managing a coffee shop and would do okay - but a lot of us don’t know much about it and would make a lot of stupid mistakes as well.
The difference being is that you’re far less likely to be asked what someone should do to manage their coffee shop. Imagine a coffee shop manager asked you what they should do to improve their business.
People got it in their heads that AI is an expert in these fields, but at best, I’d guess it has high school + a couple years of Gen Ed college courses but without any of the applicable life experience. I wouldn’t ask that person a damn thing about a specialty and I certainly wouldn’t hire them to own or manage a business out the gate.
Considering the state of education in the US, its still probably better than asking a random person.
See:
without any life experience
I’d rather ask a moron with a corporeal being than someone who thinks they know everything but has never lived.
The moron does not require a data center to give me wrong information.
I don’t know if that’s true, especially in comparison to ai. I think a competent random human would do research before taking charge of a coffee shop and be in reasonably good shape from day one. For sure some mistakes would be made, but i think generally the operation would run ok.
But all of that misses the key difference - a human doing this wouldn’t be a random person, they would usually have relevant past experience, like previously being an assistant manager at a coffee shop. So they would manage the shop way better than this ai did.
Maybe if they create an ai that has been specially designed to manage a business then it might perform as well or better than a human, possibly. But just throwing a standard ai in the role is gonna work much less well than a human.
More importantly, even if they didn’t have experience, they’d start learning as soon as they started the job. LLM chatbots have an extremely limited “memory”. If you tell it something today, that info may be completely gone tomorrow.
