> What this video is really doing is normalising the fact that "even if it is completely stupid, AI will be everywhere, get used to it!"
Techies are finally starting to recognize how framing something as "it's inevitable, get used to it" is a rhetorical device used in mass communications to manufacture consent.
I'm terrified for the future this rhetoric itself will cause. Young people are being told not to go into certain fields because they're going to be replaced by AI by time they graduate.
What happens in 4-5 years when we suddenly have no new engineers, scientists, or doctors?
Young people don't have the life experience to know how unrealistic these claims are, all they can do is act on the information as it's presented. It's irresponsible at best, and evil at worst.
There will still be new engineers, scientists, and doctors by then. But aptitude won't be a factor in who matriculates into those fields anymore. That's the worrying part.
A part of me wants to be dismissive of this blog post
1) because dude, it’s the Wall Street Journal; the entire episode should be viewed as Anthropic preparing to Ollie into an IPO next year.
2) I’m starting to interpret a lot of blog posts like these as rage bait
But I do get the point that the author is trying to make.
I just wish that there were some perspectives on the subject as a whole (AI’s sloptrod into every crevice of human life; modern technology and society and general) that don’t terminate on ironic despair.
> The first thing that blew my mind was how stupid the whole idea is. Think for one second. One full second. Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine?
This feels forced, there are obvious and good reasons for running that experiment. Namely, learning how it fails and to generate some potentially viral content for investor relationship. The second one seems like an extremely good business move. It is also a great business move from WSJ, get access to some of that investor money in an obviously sponsored content bit that could go viral.
Having said that, I do feels the overall premise of the blog - the world dynamics seems exceedingly irrational in recent times. The concerning fact is that irattionality seems to be accelerating, or perhaps it is keeping pace with the scale of civilization... hard to tell.
> This feels forced, there are obvious and good reasons for running that experiment. Namely, learning how it fails and to generate some potentially viral content for investor relationship. The second one seems like an extremely good business move. It is also a great business move from WSJ, get access to some of that investor money in an obviously sponsored content bit that could go viral.
That's... exactly what the author said in the post. But with the argument that those are cynical and terrible reasons. I think it's pretty clear the "you" in "why would you want an AI" vending machine is supposed to be "an actual user of a vending machine."
Douglas Adams was bang on about how comedically unhelpful advanced technology was going to be. Every ridiculously convoluted user interface and neurotic computer he thought up (or worse) is imminently going to be our daily life.
This piece is pretty ineffective. Not that I like the world of "AI", I probably share the author's opinion that its just another evolution in the bullshittification of the human experience.
But, the point of the article is not that you would implement an agent based vending machine business. Humans restock the machine because its a red-team exercise. As a red-team exercise it looks very effective.
> Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine? The video states it clearly: the vending machine must be stocked by humans. Customers must order and take their snack by themselves. The AI has no value at all.
Like this is like watching the simpsons and being like "why are the people in the simpsons yellow? people in real life aren't yellow!!"
The point isn't to run a profitable vending machine, or even validate that an AI business agent could become profitable. The point is to conduct an experiment and gather useful information about how people can pwn LLMs.
At some level the red team guy at Anthropic understands that it is impossible by definition for models to be secure, so long as they accept inputs from the real world. Putting instructions into an LLM to tell it what to do is the equivalent of exposing an `eval()` to a web form: even if you have heuristics to check for bad input, you will eventually be pwned. I think this is actually totally intractable without putting constraints on the model from outside. You'll always need a human in the loop to pull the plug on the vending machine when it starts ordering playstations. The question is how do you improve that capability, and that is the anthropic red-team guy's job.
I’m curious, has the author seen or read any of Joanna Stern’s other reporting before? Her stories are often silly frames that explore the experience of using consumer technology. She’s not an aggressive industry reporter, her purpose is to explain or reveal what the user experience of new technology is, often for an unsophisticated audience. See for example her story about using conversational chatbots while out camping[1] or how to use tech to unplug from tech[2]. This seems like a perfectly fine niche for a writer and the vending machine story is of a piece with her past work.
Prepare for That Stupid World - is actually a very sober advice. Looking at the past few decades, it is easy to see that with each tech innovation, the world only got stupider, childish and lazier.
My Galaxy S20 gallery app had a great search feature that would find any text in any picture. I take lots of screenshots and relied on that search to find them.
I got an S25 recently and when I search for "wife" it tries to find pictures with my wife in them. But before it does that it has to ask me who my wife is. There's no way to get it to search for the word "wife." (If I'm wrong, please tell me how.) Other text searches simply don't work either.
Sometimes it's the small ways in which the world is getting dumber.
Ironically, the S20 had a decent hybrid behavior of searching by either text or object that the text represents. Whatever smarter AI they replaced it with is useless.
It's a bit sparse on details, but it did have what in a human we would call a psychotic break.
I find this very amusing in light of OpenAI's announcement that GPT now solves >70% of their knowledge work benchmark (GDPVal). (Per ArtificialAnalysis, Opus is roughly on par.)
Any information that comes to you for free or is on a screen is an advertisement. All of it. That's the point. Do you think people spend millions and billions of dollars creating and maintaining a content delivery network because they just want you to know about things?
Well, of course almost all information comes with an agenda, but perhaps the more useful distinction is whether the information is presented in good faith, i.e. is honest about the agenda (which actual advertising can also be).
Someday the mcdonalds kiosk will want to be your friend. It will remember who you are and ask you how your kids are doing. It will recommend new specials and maybe even give you "specials friend" deals. And I'll just tell it to shut the fuck up and queue me an order for the egg mcmuffin combo with a coffee and the fried potato patty because this bullshit is fucking obnoxious.
> The first thing that blew my mind was how stupid the whole idea is. Think for one second. One full second. Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine? The video states it clearly: the vending machine must be stocked by humans. Customers must order and take their snack by themselves. The AI has no value at all.
I fear the author has missed the point of the "Project Vend" experiments, the original write-ups of which are available here (and are, IMO, pretty level-headed about the whole thing):
Yeah, I haven't read the WSJ article, but I did read the original Anthropic experiment and I feel like the author is catastrophizing a bit much here. This is effectively just something they did for fun. It's entertaining and a funny read. Not everything has to be the end of the world.
The point is that it's an ad. No company spends money on a joke just to make a joke. Not the end of the world, although it's interesting that all the end of the world stuff comes directly out of that joke and its universe as it were. Take the joke seriously and extend its logic as far as it will go, and you get the end of the world. It's a thought experiment, or that's how I read it anyway.
Sure, but like the other guy said, that's the point of publicity stunts. It doesn't even have to be specific to a company/ad, any silly thing like this is going to sound crazy if you take it seriously and "extend its logic as far as it will go". Like seeing the Sony bouncy balls rolling down the street ad and going "holy shit, these TV companies are going to ruin the world by dropping bouncy balls on all of us". It's a valid thought experiment, but kind of a strange thing to focus on so sternly when it's clearly not taking itself seriously, especially compared to all the real-world concerning uses of AI.
(And it is pretty funny, too. If anything I think we'd all prefer more creative ads like this and the bouncy ball one, and less AI-generated doomer Coke ads or such.)
To be fair they could have done an experiment on a transaction that typically requires a person in the loop. Rather than choosing a vending machine which, already, does not require a person in the loop for the transaction.
You’re thinking of replacing a vending machine with a chatbot which indeed doesn’t make much sense. The experiment was replacing the management of the machine. It’s not crazy to think that, money being no object, it would be great to have a person who hangs around the machine, whose job it is to ask customers what kinds of things people might want to buy from the machine, and conduct trials, tinker with pricing, do promotional deals, etc. But that’s of course impractical to have a FTE per machine to do that. The idea of this experiment was to see if that could be done with Claude. And of course as others have pointed out, it’s a simple and cheap and low-stakes version of “a business” suitable for experimenting with.
If I recall, the idea was the AI taking the role of the vending machine manager, choosing and restocking products and such. Anything on top of that was, I assume, just added for fun.
>I feel like the author is catastrophizing a bit much here.
I feel like he's catastrophizing the ordinary amount for an anti-AI screed. Probably well below what the market expects at this point. At this point you basically have to sound like Ed Zitron or David Gerard to stand out from the crowd.
AI is boiling the oceans, and you're worried about a vending machine?
The partner for these projects has a benchmark that the top frontier LLM labs seem to be running on their new model releases - I think there's _some_ value to these numbers in helping people compare and contrast model performance.
There's no (long term) point getting bent out of shape about this sort of thing. Every time we invent some new, widely applicable technology people will use it for all kinds of weird and seemingly pointless things. Most don't pan out or are simple gimmicks that lose their appeal after a while but some do work and continue on. It's just part of discovering what's possible, what works and what doesn't so being a curmudgeon about it is useless at best or will memorialize you as humorously incorrect for the rest of time.
When electricity was "the hot new thing" people tried all kinds of bizarre and seemingly insane things with it, at least from our modern perspective.
and there were many others whose initial designs were incredibly inefficient or dangerous but which turned into real products that we still use today after refinement. Toasters used to just be the bare heating element and left you in control of handling the toast with a long fork or tongs. The original electric blanket was a metal pan with a lightbulb in it that you used to warm up your bed. Some of the first electric razors just added a vibrating motor to a normal safety razor. The great-grandfather of electric lighters was a fireplace poker that heated up like a soldering iron so you could jam it into your fireplace to light it (and you can actually still buy these! https://www.dopogrf.com/product-p-769347.html).
So let's just laugh at the funny and quirky uses people are coming up with for AI rather than being a grouch. It's entertaining and we will probably get some really useful inventions out of it in the long run.
I had recently contact the official support email (support@bunq.com) of Bunq - a Neobank (like N26 and Revolut). Because they notified me that they changed their T&C and I never really used the account after the kyc (because they rejected my tax filings), I figured I let them know that I do not agree to the new T&C and want to terminate my account and have my data deleted.
Since the T&C update came - of course - from no-reply@bunq.com I went to their website and quickly found out, unless I install their App again, there is no way to do anything. After installing the App, they wanted me to record a selfie, because I was using the app from a new device. I figured that is a lot of work and mostly somewhat unreasonable to record a new selfie just to have my data deleted - so I found their support@bunq.com address.
And, of course, you guessed it, it is 100% a pure AI agent at borderline retard level. Even though it is email, you get AI answers back. My initial inquiry that I decline the T&C and want to terminate my account and my data deleted via GDPR request was answered with a completely hallucinated link: bunq.com/dataprotection which resulted in immediate 404. I replied to that email that it is a 404, and the answer was pretty generic and that - as well as all responses seem to be answered in 5 minutes - made me suspect it is AI. I asked it what 5 plus five 5 is, and yes, I got a swift response with the correct answer. My question which AI version and LLM was cleverly rejected. Needless to say, it was completely impossible to get anything done with that agent. Because I CC'ed their privacy officer (privacy@bunq.com) I did get a response a day later asking me basically for everything again that I had answered to the AI agent.
Now, I never had any money in that account so I don't care much. But I can hardly see trusting a single buck to a bank that would offer that experience.
The author hints at this idea with their title and their closing remarks, but it feels like the folks selling LLM services are selling insurance to white collar workers. I wish they had expanded on this observation more, rather than harp on the WSJ puff piece for being silly.
It was always tasks reaching obsolescence, but now it’s the human organism. But the human as a unit is the only known conscious being in the universe, the only entity capable of generating meaningful goals (even if only to them) not related to the 4fs.
Humans were just not needed anymore, and it terrifies.
This is a great take and one that I align with when it comes to the AI vending machine experiment. Journalism in English has become a mouthpiece for fascist leaders and corporations, nothing more. Places like The New York Times have incredible gaps in their journalism at the price of increasing shareholder value.
It’s a milquetoast rant but I got nothing - the employee is right. You should prepare for the world and stop acting so shocked. You had decades to call out journalists for being paid mouthpieces but you didn’t because they spewed nonsense that you agreed with and benefitted you.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. Prepare for what happens next. FAFO.
> What this video is really doing is normalising the fact that "even if it is completely stupid, AI will be everywhere, get used to it!"
Techies are finally starting to recognize how framing something as "it's inevitable, get used to it" is a rhetorical device used in mass communications to manufacture consent.
See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567857 'LLM Inevitabalism' 5 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288371 'This is not the future' 3 days ago
What happens in 4-5 years when we suddenly have no new engineers, scientists, or doctors?
Young people don't have the life experience to know how unrealistic these claims are, all they can do is act on the information as it's presented. It's irresponsible at best, and evil at worst.
1) because dude, it’s the Wall Street Journal; the entire episode should be viewed as Anthropic preparing to Ollie into an IPO next year.
2) I’m starting to interpret a lot of blog posts like these as rage bait
But I do get the point that the author is trying to make.
I just wish that there were some perspectives on the subject as a whole (AI’s sloptrod into every crevice of human life; modern technology and society and general) that don’t terminate on ironic despair.
This feels forced, there are obvious and good reasons for running that experiment. Namely, learning how it fails and to generate some potentially viral content for investor relationship. The second one seems like an extremely good business move. It is also a great business move from WSJ, get access to some of that investor money in an obviously sponsored content bit that could go viral.
Having said that, I do feels the overall premise of the blog - the world dynamics seems exceedingly irrational in recent times. The concerning fact is that irattionality seems to be accelerating, or perhaps it is keeping pace with the scale of civilization... hard to tell.
That's... exactly what the author said in the post. But with the argument that those are cynical and terrible reasons. I think it's pretty clear the "you" in "why would you want an AI" vending machine is supposed to be "an actual user of a vending machine."
But, the point of the article is not that you would implement an agent based vending machine business. Humans restock the machine because its a red-team exercise. As a red-team exercise it looks very effective.
> Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine? The video states it clearly: the vending machine must be stocked by humans. Customers must order and take their snack by themselves. The AI has no value at all.
Like this is like watching the simpsons and being like "why are the people in the simpsons yellow? people in real life aren't yellow!!"
The point isn't to run a profitable vending machine, or even validate that an AI business agent could become profitable. The point is to conduct an experiment and gather useful information about how people can pwn LLMs.
At some level the red team guy at Anthropic understands that it is impossible by definition for models to be secure, so long as they accept inputs from the real world. Putting instructions into an LLM to tell it what to do is the equivalent of exposing an `eval()` to a web form: even if you have heuristics to check for bad input, you will eventually be pwned. I think this is actually totally intractable without putting constraints on the model from outside. You'll always need a human in the loop to pull the plug on the vending machine when it starts ordering playstations. The question is how do you improve that capability, and that is the anthropic red-team guy's job.
Having an AI run an organization autonomously is exactly the point of Andon Labs [0], who provided the system that WSJ tested.
[0] https://andonlabs.com/
[1] https://youtu.be/hUyj3d-BSh8
[2] https://youtu.be/POl7UYwBpWw
I got an S25 recently and when I search for "wife" it tries to find pictures with my wife in them. But before it does that it has to ask me who my wife is. There's no way to get it to search for the word "wife." (If I'm wrong, please tell me how.) Other text searches simply don't work either.
Sometimes it's the small ways in which the world is getting dumber.
Ironically, the S20 had a decent hybrid behavior of searching by either text or object that the text represents. Whatever smarter AI they replaced it with is useless.
insert obligatory throwback quote from some antique dude complaining about the youth
This has been a trope since literally the beginning of civilisation. I don’t think it’s any more true or insightful in the modern era
Humans do trend toward their natural state, and technology accelerates the trend.
https://youtu.be/5KTHvKCrQ00
It's a bit sparse on details, but it did have what in a human we would call a psychotic break.
I find this very amusing in light of OpenAI's announcement that GPT now solves >70% of their knowledge work benchmark (GDPVal). (Per ArtificialAnalysis, Opus is roughly on par.)
The economy is about to get... Interesting ;)
99.9% of social media comments fail to do this.
I fear the author has missed the point of the "Project Vend" experiments, the original write-ups of which are available here (and are, IMO, pretty level-headed about the whole thing):
https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-2
The former contains a section titled "Why did you have an LLM run a small business?" that attempts to explain the motivation behind the experiment.
Sure, but like the other guy said, that's the point of publicity stunts. It doesn't even have to be specific to a company/ad, any silly thing like this is going to sound crazy if you take it seriously and "extend its logic as far as it will go". Like seeing the Sony bouncy balls rolling down the street ad and going "holy shit, these TV companies are going to ruin the world by dropping bouncy balls on all of us". It's a valid thought experiment, but kind of a strange thing to focus on so sternly when it's clearly not taking itself seriously, especially compared to all the real-world concerning uses of AI.
(And it is pretty funny, too. If anything I think we'd all prefer more creative ads like this and the bouncy ball one, and less AI-generated doomer Coke ads or such.)
I feel like he's catastrophizing the ordinary amount for an anti-AI screed. Probably well below what the market expects at this point. At this point you basically have to sound like Ed Zitron or David Gerard to stand out from the crowd.
AI is boiling the oceans, and you're worried about a vending machine?
https://andonlabs.com/evals/vending-bench
When electricity was "the hot new thing" people tried all kinds of bizarre and seemingly insane things with it, at least from our modern perspective.
Things like:
The Electric Table Cloth, one of the first "wireless" home gadgets https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/hgemyu/an_ele...
The Schnee Bath, because what's better than a bath for healing and relaxation? An electrified bath! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dr._Schnee%27s_four-...
The Solar Bath Apparatus, they say sunlight is good for your health so let's turn it up to 11 https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolRidiculous/comments/15h7ce...
and there were many others whose initial designs were incredibly inefficient or dangerous but which turned into real products that we still use today after refinement. Toasters used to just be the bare heating element and left you in control of handling the toast with a long fork or tongs. The original electric blanket was a metal pan with a lightbulb in it that you used to warm up your bed. Some of the first electric razors just added a vibrating motor to a normal safety razor. The great-grandfather of electric lighters was a fireplace poker that heated up like a soldering iron so you could jam it into your fireplace to light it (and you can actually still buy these! https://www.dopogrf.com/product-p-769347.html).
So let's just laugh at the funny and quirky uses people are coming up with for AI rather than being a grouch. It's entertaining and we will probably get some really useful inventions out of it in the long run.
Since the T&C update came - of course - from no-reply@bunq.com I went to their website and quickly found out, unless I install their App again, there is no way to do anything. After installing the App, they wanted me to record a selfie, because I was using the app from a new device. I figured that is a lot of work and mostly somewhat unreasonable to record a new selfie just to have my data deleted - so I found their support@bunq.com address.
And, of course, you guessed it, it is 100% a pure AI agent at borderline retard level. Even though it is email, you get AI answers back. My initial inquiry that I decline the T&C and want to terminate my account and my data deleted via GDPR request was answered with a completely hallucinated link: bunq.com/dataprotection which resulted in immediate 404. I replied to that email that it is a 404, and the answer was pretty generic and that - as well as all responses seem to be answered in 5 minutes - made me suspect it is AI. I asked it what 5 plus five 5 is, and yes, I got a swift response with the correct answer. My question which AI version and LLM was cleverly rejected. Needless to say, it was completely impossible to get anything done with that agent. Because I CC'ed their privacy officer (privacy@bunq.com) I did get a response a day later asking me basically for everything again that I had answered to the AI agent.
Now, I never had any money in that account so I don't care much. But I can hardly see trusting a single buck to a bank that would offer that experience.
Humans were just not needed anymore, and it terrifies.
Humans were never needed (for what?)
Now the shoe is on the other foot. Prepare for what happens next. FAFO.
It has always exited, but its overt forms are very much in vogue today and even celebrated publicly.
If only I could get any journalists or companies to actually listen to me.