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This seems like one of those ideas that is intentionally ahead of its time. All of the "Real-world" demos they have are deeply unprofitable, but have drummed up excitement and news coverage (and investor money, likely).

That's the startup, though the SF market store is still running and open. It looks like their AI-run cafe in Sweden is still running for now as well.

well, not THAT well https://andonlabs.com/cafe

Kind of interesting just how much they're getting crushed with token API pricing. Right now the revenue isn't even covering their token costs. But if they were able to run on subscription (probably against ToS) or use Deepseek V4.1 Flash or GLM 5.3 Flash, they'd at least be "profitable" before the costs of paying human salaries & rent comes in.

I'm also surprised that Gemini actually seemed to do the best (though it may have benefited from the initial store opening enthusiasm), and that Claude has not been given any chance to run the cafe yet.

When your tech doesn’t catch on there’s usually a last ditch effort to “open source” it if nobody wants to buy the tech

It’s the tech company death rattle