US EditionHere’s What Happened when AI Was Put in Charge of Running a Small Shop
- Last Friday, Anthropic published Project Vend results showing Claude ran a store for a month and lost money managing sales.
- Anthropic's Project Vend aimed to test large language models as autonomous business agents by giving Claude full control of an in-office store, exploring AI's role in operations.
- Evidence shows Claudius priced items below cost, offered discounts, and hallucinated fake Venmo transactions, demonstrating critical operational failures.
- Despite the failures, Anthropic decided not to hire Claude but remains optimistic about refining AI management tools, citing potential with better scaffolding and prompts.
- Beyond this trial, the experiment suggests AI middle managers are plausibly on the horizon, highlighting potential economic shifts and debates over job displacement versus new business models.
19 Articles
19 Articles
Anthropic Let an AI Agent Run a Small Shop and the Result Was Unintentionally Hilarious
Anthropic ran an experiment where its Claude chatbot was put in charge of a tiny, automated "shop" inside its San Francisco headquarters — and the results were nothing short of hilarious. Despite claims in an Anthropic post that "Claudius," the name given to the AI agent in charge of stocking the shop's shelves, was "close to success," everything about the gambit seems to demonstrate just how bad AI is at managing things in the real world. Dubbe…
Here’s what happened when AI was put in charge of running a small shop
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) -- Selling useless metal cubes, being talked into offering discounts and directing payments to a nonexistent Venmo account were just a few of the things that artificial intelligence did when it was put in charge of running a small shop. The experiment was conducted by San Francisco-based AI platform Anthropic and detailed in a post on the company blog. In the experiment, which Anthropic dubbed "Project Vend," the company put…
Anthropic's Claude stocked a fridge with metal cubes when it was put in charge of a snacks business
If you're worried your local bodega or convivence store may soon be replaced by an AI storefront, you can rest easy — at least for the time being. Anthropic recently concluded an experiment, dubbed Project Vend, that saw the company task an offshoot of its Claude chatbot with running a refreshments business out of its San Francisco office at a profit, and things went about as well as you would expect. The agent, named Claudius to differentiate i…
Anthropic let Claude run a shop. Let's just say the AI agent is not a business tycoon.
What happens when an AI agent tries to run a store? Let's just say Anthropic's Claude won't be up for a promotion any time soon. Last Friday, Anthropic shared the results of Project Vend, an experiment it ran for about a month to see how Claude Sonnet 3.7 would do running its own little shop. In this instance the shop was essentially a mini fridge, a basket of snacks, and an iPad for self-checkout. Claude, named "Claudius" for this experiment, c…
der Standard AT
der Standard DEExcessive discounts, loss sales and a veritable identity crisis caused a lot of loss business at Project Vend
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