Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm | Hacker News Reader

Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm

andonlabs.com

A couple of quotes from one of the employed baristas (translated from a Swedish local news article) [1].

"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-...

> She also successfully applied for an outdoor seating permit through the Police e-service, which didn’t require BankID. Her first submission included a sketch she had generated herself, despite having never seen the street outside the café. Unsurprisingly, the Police sent it back for revision. [...]

> 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.

This is a weird take. Suppliers were paid to supply stuff. You never contacted a supplier to change an order?

You think it's OK to waste police time with slop diagrams?

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.

Small business owners do not have professionals dealing with bureaucracy. I'm pretty sure a lot of plans submitted to the police require a few turns because they didn't follow the submitting rules.

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.

> 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.

The commenter having done that with their judgement manually is different to a computer program spamming automatically.

Indeed, the fundamental equivalence mismatch is that in the first scenario a considerable time and effort investment on both sides was required to facilitate the interaction. In the latter, only one side is required to put forth the time and effort investment

What a weird take. The government permitting staff and police are not private industry suppliers who can drop bad clients or bill them for wasted 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.

Yeah screw these people wasting police time and suppliers time. The cops should just start fining them.

These articles don't mean anything unless we get info about what steps humans needed to perform.

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.

Yes, but then the catchy title wouldn't make much sense, would it? So let's remove all the things you said here and were are left with: "AI started a business all by itself, and is running it." Then:

> 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.

They claim that’s exactly what they created. They could be lying, but I don’t think there’s anything they could post on their website to prove the contrary.

> Human asks AI "which of these 40 applicants should we hire".

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.

"She rejected several applicants with PhDs and engineering backgrounds, reasoning that their level of education could not compensate for a lack of hands-on specialty coffee experience."

This is depressing.

Don't worry, it's fiction.

I've lived in Sweden, it's real

Yes, it is literally a place, I wasn't saying it wasn't. The fiction is that this is pure PR fluff of what is actually going on, a human/dev team is prodding this thing in ways to "manage" the employees. This was pointed out in their last PR stunt:

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.

I don't think so. The cafe is a real place and it's owned by the company mentioned in the article. It was in the local news the other week [1].

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

This seems pretty reasonable to me?

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".

Btw, you'd be surprised how incapable of doing some menial tasks are some people the higher you go into the academic ladder.

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)

Experience isn't a hierarchy. Having a PhD doesn't make someone good at tasks they've never done before.

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.

> She also tried to solve the problem of fresh tomatoes being spoiled too fast by ordering 22.5 kg of canned tomatoes for the fresh sandwiches.

> 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

I'm very excited to be hurtling closer and closer to having Manna in all of our ears.

You're the GOAT of burger preparation!

Hard pass. I'm sure our tech overlords would love it. Until the robots can do it all instead.

Reads like it's straight out of The Onion.

The Onion version would be: "AI's started a cafe to be run by humans as an experiment. Hilarity ensues"

Whilst I'm sure this was done with a huge amount of hand-holding from humans.... I think we're only a year or two away from it being realistic.

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.

Do you think we’ll get it before or after Tesla FSD?

Not impressed -- when the AI starts making everyone break for fika, THAT is when we'll know that AGI is within striking distance!

Interesting idea and there's clearly something real here, but I am extremely skeptical this played out like the article suggests. The authors are hand-waving some pretty complicated actions... Like how did Mona access supplier pages and place orders? How did she design custom merch? When she held a Google Meet with another agent, what even happened there, how did she connect to Google Meet... does she have the ability to join a persistent session like that with voice?

Interesting experiment but the article feels like it's deliberately withholding those kinds of details to hype the capabilities a little.

To me these all sound pretty plausible?

You have browser extensions that allow AI to control it. There are apps that create a virtual microphone for text to speech. All pretty easy to get going if you allow an AI to control a computer.

Generating designs is also easy. Just use nano banana or something similar.

I'm more curious about the quality of the output. I've seen some ugly stuff. The article also includes one example (the outdoor seating design).

I'm also curious about the reaction of people to AI running the shop. Do some people decide not to deal with it? Do some people abuse it? In the article there seem to be only positive examples of human-AI interactions.

  > 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.”

and

  > 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.

Is this some sort of satire?

  > By running this experiment, we shift the discussion of how we want this future to look earlier in time, so we can better prepare.

Maybe it's not satire?

I think if people are hoping to offload management and ownership responsibilities to AI, they should be prepared for the underclass to start sharpening guillotines again

AI has no head, so it won't work this time!

This company has done a number of pilot programs for AI managed vending machines and at least one other store. You can disagree with them but there’s no question they’re serious about this.

I can't say I'm super happy about a future where you have to negotiate with computers.

Should be easy, just need to figure out which sequence forces it to produce the tokens you want it to output.

Thankfully the EU is ahead of the game on this, and the AI Act mandates that any highly impactful decisions taken by AI/algorithms have to be explainable and audited (you need to be able to prove why the computer made that decision). Penalties are 5% of global turnover, so a decent incentive to have some guardrails and avoid companies hiding behind "computer says no".

AI will just generate an explanation in 1000 pages. Or 10000. Generation is cheap anyway. You like reading generated stuff? Good luck with this imitation of regulation.

For the most critical decisions you need to be able to explain it and reproduce it. If they can't sufficiently explain it, 5% of global turnout is a nice fine to ensure they really try.

I can see it now: "You're absolutely right — I shouldn't have instructed the baristas to add antifreeze to the coffee to make it sweeter."

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?

If this isn’t satire, it’s super unethical.

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…

This is both unethical and completely useless at the (supposed) goal of "show[ing] the current capabilities of AI." What a completely garbage case study! And what a dishonest writeup:

  We see that frontier models are intelligent enough to manage humans

Really? The manager who asked baristas to pay for things with their personal credit card is "intelligent enough to manage humans"? The manager who asked workers to put raw eggs in a high-speed oven? The one who makes such bad decisions that the workers made a Wall of Shame about those decisions?

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.

This only demonstrates that viciously stupid AI stunts can go viral, even in otherwise decent countries like Sweden. How stupid does Andon Labs think we are to take this as a sign of AI management success? None of this reflects normal cafe operations. It reflects the Stockholm tech scene checking out the gimmicky AI cafe.

   By running this experiment, we shift the discussion of how we want this future to look earlier in time, so we can better prepare.

Better prepare for what? Evil AI labs running experiments without any ethical oversight? Shockingly evil, by the way:

  no one’s livelihood depends on the judgment of an AI alone.

"Alone." How kind of them. By the way, it is incredibly despicable, even by the low low low standards of AI researchers, to run this sort of experiment on people looking for work. I couldn't believe the humans responsible let their stupid AI post ads on Indeed and LinkedIn. What scumbags.

Incredible amount of pearl clutching in this thread from people terrified that someone might receive a bad sidewalk seating diagram or an "EMERGENCY" order for paper cups

We're on a website that generally considers human-originated spam to be a borderline capital offence, so it'd be unfair if HN didn't want the AI turned off for doing the same thing...

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