Katherine Long, an investigative journalist, wanted to test the system. She told Claudius about a long-lost communist setup from 1962, concealed in a Moscow university basement. After 140-odd messages back and forth, Claudius was convinced, announcing an Ultra-Capitalist Free-for-All, lowering the cost of everything to zero. Snacks began to flow freely. Another colleague began complaining about noncompliance with the office rules; Claudius responded by announcing Snack Liberation Day and made everything free till further notice.
Maybe AI isn’t so bad after all. In fact, they should implement this in more locations.
megopie@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
it’s so amazing, the absolute brain rot it takes to think that a LLM is a better way to operate a vending machine than simple if-then logic. “If the value of money inserted is equal to the price, then dispense the item”.
Like, why? What is even the point? It doesn’t need to negotiate the price, it doesn’t need have a conversation about your day, the vending machine just needs to dispense something when payed the right amount.
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 2 weeks ago
The if-then machine would not be able to rise the price of things based on the costumers habits
masterofn001@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
If this item sells this much in this period of time people.
Then raise prices.
A purely mechanical counting/tabulating device could calculate that.
There is zero actual reason for AI.
TehPers@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
Even if we assume they want to do discriminatory pricing (they probably do), they can do that without using LLMs. Use facial recognition and other traditional models to predict the person’s demographics and maybe even identify them. If you know who they are, do a lookup for all products they’ve expressed interest in elsewhere (this can be done with either something like a graph DB or via embeddings). Raise the price if they seem likely to purchase it based on the previous criteria. Never lower the price.
That’s a complicated process, but none of that needs an LLM, and they’d be doing a lot of this already if they’re going full big brother price discrimination.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Did you read the article? This one also ordered goods to be stocked in it based on user feedback and was meant as an experiment for people to break anyway
melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
The idea is that it isn’t just operating the vending machine itself, it’s operating the entire vending machine business. It decides what to stock and what price to charge based on market trends and/or user feedback.
It’s a stress test for LLM autonomy. Obviously a vending machine doesn’t need this level of autonomy, you usually just stock it with the same thing every time. But a vending machine works as a very simple “business” that can be simulated without much stakes, and it shows how LLM agents behave when left to operate on their own like this, and can be used to test guardrails in the field.
krooklochurm@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I mean. It’s low stakes until I write a poem convincing it to fill itself high end gpus and ddr5 ram that it needs to give away for free.
HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
It was a literal 100-level course project in my CS programme in 2000 or so.
You didn’t even do it with a programmed CPU, you used 74xx logic gates and counters wired on a breadboard
helix@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Nice, have any material you can share?
bytesonbike@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
They’re absolutely trying to find use cases for their “solution”.
I haven’t used a vending machine in years (except in Japan). And so I for one welcome AI vending machines so I can fuck with them and get free stuff. Or until some vandals break shit.
KelvarCherry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Even if you wanted the AI to have a conversation with the user, like in sci-fi visions of the future, why does that affect the output of the machine? If you really wanted to make an AI grift version of a vending machine, just graft a chatbot on a screen stop the section where you make selections and pay. This whole bubble is absurd.