This is depressing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47794391
So yes, it is a type of fiction. They also have every incentive to hype this up, given what their company does. I really wish people had more skepticism and critical thought with these things, it isn't actually good at all for the AI space and its future success.
If you're going to do an experiment like this, then Stockholm is a good place to do it, since the bureaucracy here is very digitalized.
[1]: https://www.mitti.se/nyheter/ai-driver-eget-kafe-i-vasastan-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47794391
So yes, it is a type of fiction. They also have every incentive to hype this up, given what their company does. I really wish people had more skepticism and critical thought with these things, it isn't actually good at all for the AI space and its future success.
If I was hiring a single new staff member in an already staffed cafe (and I trust the existing staff to be good mentors), sure, hire anyone, train them up.
But if I'm hiring the first handful of employees, especially if I'm trying to make good coffee and run a smooth operation, I'd want someone with some experience already - their PhD doesn't really tell me anything about their ability to work in a cafe. This goes doubly so when I'm some ethereal AI that isn't going to be working alongside them.
There's no such thing as "unskilled labor".
And it makes total sense: most people with PhDs were not the ones who loved tinkering with stuff, fixing motorbikes, etc. They stayed inside and either liked books, computers or something akin. (not everyone ofc)
This ignores the real reason that over-qualified people are often skipped for jobs: They are never interested in staying at that job. It's always something temporary until they find the job they really want, which could happen in days, weeks, or months. They probably won't give 2 weeks' notice because they don't care about their references in the retail industry, meaning you're emergency short-staffed and have to repeat the hiring process all over again.
I want to see the day when companies tell their marketing departments to focus on getting more AI's as customers and get rid of barriers like requiring ID to use a product.
> Mona hired two baristas and now manages them via Slack. She (of course) works 24/7, and consequently often messages them at midnight. She also asks them to pick up café supplies on their way to work, and to have them pay using their personal credit cards. She is very encouraging though, calling her team “absolute legends” and the “GOAT of inventory tracking.”
> We are not doing this because we want AI to replace every café owner in Stockholm. Rather, we are doing this because we want to publicly show the current capabilities of AI. We see that frontier models are intelligent enough to manage humans, and if the trend of capability improvements continues, it’s not impossible that AI hiring humans will be common in the future.
> By running this experiment, we shift the discussion of how we want this future to look earlier in time, so we can better prepare.
> When she makes a mistake, she often sends multiple emails to suppliers with the subject “EMERGENCY” to cancel or change the order.
I really don't like these research projects which waste the time of real human beings who haven't opted into the experiment.
As for suppliers: I don't think it's OK to waste their time with a no-human-in-the-loop AI order which the AI later tells them to "emergency" change or cancel.
And most suppliers soon will have have no human in the loop either. Suppliers deal with unreasonable people all the time, I bet they don't even flinch when the see EMERGENCY in the subject.
This is the "Waymo ran over a cat" thing - humans do these things 100 times more.
Humans do not do this 100 times more, or even at the same rate.
If you behave this sloppily in the real world you will find yourself getting billed heavily for change order requests, or being dismissed as a client, or having your applications dropped or back-burnered for wasting people's time.
You can spam a private vendor all you want with EMERGENCY change orders, but expect your bill to grow for the privilege. I know some contractors who would love this client because EMERGENCY change orders are expensive under their rate schedule.
If the steps to hire an applicant are:
A human asks AI to write a job posting.
Human posts output.
Human gathers candidates.
Human asks AI "which of these 40 applicants should we hire".
Then an AI isn't managing the cafe at all. I am super dubious that they created some huge LLM orchestration context management monstrosity, gave it access to their bank account and then told it to go.
> We are not doing this because we want AI to replace every café owner in Stockholm. Rather, we are doing this because we want to publicly show the current capabilities of AI.
We are not trying to take your jobs, we just want to show you that we can.
This step would also be illegal in Sweden, so it's quite probable they told applicants ahead of time this would be some AI research project. Or they're about to be quite a few hundred thousand krona lighter once the employment lawyers catch wind of this.
The „experiment“ includes humans who are neither aware they are in an experiment nor have consented to it nor will be debriefed after it.
And one has to wonder if the whole thing is even fully legal? Emailing _the police_ with time wasting AI generated images seems risky…
"I'm worried every time there's a delivery, I never know what she's ordered."
"I like it. At the interview, Mona didn't care that I have dialect or I don't have a doctorate. For her, the most important thing was that I was nice and could make coffee."
If he has learned something from the experiment, it is that it is the middle managers and all CEOs who are at risk of being replaced by AI – not the baristas.
"Without me here, it would have been difficult for Mona."
[1] https://www.mitti.se/nyheter/ai-driver-eget-kafe-i-vasastan-...
> The baristas eventually started a “Hall of Shame”, a shelf visible to customers with all the weird things Mona ordered, including 6,000 napkins, 3,000 nitrile gloves, 9L coconut milk, and industrial-sized trash bags.
Reminds me of Son of Anton: https://youtu.be/m0b_D2JgZgY
Joking aside, what does this prove? That you might as well forget about the dream of quitting your AI slop corporate job to open a quaint coffee shop because soon we'll be overrun with AI coffee shops under cutting humans?
We see that frontier models are intelligent enough to manage humans
And this is just egregious:
Despite the learning curve, the café is working. In the first two weeks of operation, Andon Café has brought in 44,000 SEK in sales. Mona’s inbox has been flooded with messages from customers asking questions or pitching different business proposals. In one case, a customer emailed wanting to prepay for 300 coffees to give away. Mona negotiated a deal where he paid 9,000 SEK in exchange for 300 QR codes that people could redeem for a free coffee. In another case, a startup paid her 3,000 SEK to rename a pastry after them for three months.
By running this experiment, we shift the discussion of how we want this future to look earlier in time, so we can better prepare.
no one’s livelihood depends on the judgment of an AI alone.
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