A Google Gemini-powered AI agent was given free rein to run a coffee shop in Sweden, and is quickly burning through its budget.

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[–] 208 points 4 months ago (26 children)

AI boosters crying into their computers: "but I put make no mistakes into the prompt how is this happening!!!"

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    [–] 98 points 4 months ago (14 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 31 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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    [–] 75 points 4 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 63 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 41 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Sure, lots of people. Just not the group of people spending the majority of their lives communicating online.

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    [–] 44 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    While it's one of my favorite words, "inexorably" does not fit here.

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    [–] 41 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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    [–] 36 points 4 months ago

    Just tell it to make billions instead of bankrupting the business. It's so easy

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  • [–] 33 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    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.

    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

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  • [–] 20 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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    [–] 31 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    It's funny to read about LLMs running businesses. IIRC, Anthropic put one of their LLMs in charge of a vending machine and it kept trying to scam people to increase profits 😆

    Not a surprise that Gemini is running it into the ground though. Every time I try Gemini, it reminds me about how much dumber LLMs used to be

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    [+] 29 points 4 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)
    [–] 21 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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!

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    [–] 19 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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    [–] 19 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    “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.

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    [–] 18 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Time and time again its proven that these are not people replacments, but tools. A great tool, but only if its used properly.

    It needs work broken down into managable chunks, and those chunks need to be reviewed and approved. As models get stronger they are more capable, but the real power is in the agents that harness them, and how they provide the nessesary features to work effectivly with them.

    Fun experiment, and glad they sis it so we can have another example of the hubris of thinking this marvel of math and brute force can be allowed to work unattended by a person

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    [–] 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Replacing CEOs might be the only good use case for AI. Both are terribly incompetent and easily replaced.

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    [–] 15 points 4 months ago*

    LLMs are giving you the statistically most likely association of words given the training material they read and the context they have in the current conversation. Their answers are, in a way, mathematically correct by definition. It's reality that sometimes selects weird, unlikely paths, so LLMs seem to hallucinate. But it's reality that we have to fix! Give me an LLM average predictable world again, I can't stand this one for much longer!

    /s (but not conpletely....)

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