Anthropic tested Claude's(LLM, AI Chatbot) ability to manage a physical “storefront” to mixed results, as the AI struggled with pricing strategy and inventory management

Anybody who thought the answer could have been even remotely close to Yes is delusional.

It is an interesting article, even if it's conclusions are entirely too rosy. The "storefront" was a single vending machine, and the bot was instructed to interact with Anthropic employees (with an hourly cost attached) to do all physical interactions. While the bot did a decent job managing the stock most of the time, it made a lot of bad decisions based on trying to be too helpful to it's customers. It also frequently hallucinated, with some hilarious results I wont spoil here. But as anyone who owns a small business knows, one bad decision could put it under, so saying that an AI can manage a vending machine well "most of the time" is equivalent to saying it cant do the job at all.

Their conclusion is that with a bit more work, Claude might be able to perform as a middle-manager. To me, that says more about how useless middle-management is than how capable their AI is.

This shit needs to start being regulated.