Again in 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted that generative AI would rapidly start reshaping the economic system. “We imagine that, in 2025, we may even see the primary AI brokers ‘be a part of the workforce’ and materially change the output of corporations.” Two years later, AI brokers nonetheless can’t even correctly run a café.
San Francisco-based startup Andon Labs just lately put an AI agent nicknamed “Mona” accountable for a store in Stockholm, Sweden to promote folks espresso and sandwiches. Because the AP reported on Monday (through PC Gamer), it’s not gone tremendous nice. Mona runs on Google’s Gemini mannequin and was put accountable for managing the cafe’s baristas through Slack. It might inform them what to do day-to-day whereas making high-level selections like what provides to buy.
It turned out to be fairly unhealthy at this one job. Mona had a funds of over $21,000 and blew via a lot of it in lower than a month. Regardless of taking in $5,700 in whole gross sales because the experiment started in mid-April, it reportedly solely has $5,000 left of its unique funds. The place did issues go so improper?
One large challenge is that Mona saved messing up bread deliveries. It might usually fail to put orders with bakeries by the correct instances so as to have contemporary provides for the next day, forcing the human baristas to strip sandwiches from the menu. Ordering 6,000 napkins and three,000 rubber gloves in all probability didn’t assist its bottom-line both. The AI additionally saved ordering tomatoes for some motive, regardless of nothing on the menu utilizing them.
The entire thing is harking back to merchandising machines which have been run with Anthropic’s Claude mannequin and which consequently have at varied instances ordered fish, given away PlayStations, or tried to threaten individuals who don’t conform to its hallucinations. They make for enjoyable tales whereas additionally elevating alarm bells about all the daring AI hype fueling a possible financial bubble.
The novelty of Andon Labs’ AI-run store has attracted some Swedish locals–you may choose up a cellphone and “discuss” to it when you wait in your espresso–however café Mona seems unlikely to outlive for much longer. ““It’s good to see what occurs in case you push the boundary,” a buyer named Kajsa Norin advised the AP. “The drink was good.”
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