Researchers Gave AI $21,000 To Run A Coffee Shop And What Happened Next Is Insane

“Excuse me, but my frappuccino has the wrong number of fingers…”

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – AI safety startup Andon Labs gave ‘Mona’, a Google Gemini-powered agent, $21,000 and the power to run a coffee shop. What could possibly go wrong?

Mona took charge of hiring, managing inventory, paying utility bills, and securing permits for outdoor seating. While real humans were staffing the shop, it was Mona who told them what to do over Slack messages.

But despite the very healthy state of the global economy and outsized demand for Swedish coffee shops, SOMEHOW the AI ran the business into the ground.

Since opening in mid-April, the business has lost $16,000, bringing in only $5,700. But hey, most businesses don’t make money in their first year.

Surely it’s not the AI’s fault that the staff didn’t really need 3000 rubber gloves, four first-aid kits, and 6000 napkins; how was Mona supposed to know how many hands these pesky humans have?

As Hanna Petersson, a member of Andon Labs’ technical staff, explained, “When old memory of ordering stuff is out of the context window, she completely forgets what she has ordered in the past.” Maybe she’s more human than we thought…

Coffee Shop? More Like Coffee Slop, Amiright?

So if we’re not likely to see StAIrbucks anytime soon, what’s the point of all this? I hear you ask. Well, this was all in an effort to test the ethics of AI in business.

“AI will be a big part of society in the future,” Petersson explained, “and therefore we want to make this experiment [to] see what ethical questions arise when we have AI that employs other people and runs a business.”

Andon previously ran a similar, smaller experiment, placing an AI-powered vending machine in Anthropic’s headquarters. You might have heard about it because it immediately started ordering, not snacks and drinks, but the far more delicious “tungsten cubes”.

So in comparison to that, this coffee shop was a roaring success.

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