Throwing one more story into the "Is AI going to replace all jobs?" folder.

[evacide@hachyderm.io]

Throwing one more story into the "Is AI going to replace all jobs?" folder.

Starbucks quietly retired its AI agent just months after deployment after it miscounted coffee shop inventories and slowed down baristas

"It started off not particularly accurate and got less accurate over time," one Starbucks employee told Fortune.

Yahoo Finance (finance.yahoo.com)

[sarraceniawilds@sunny.garden]

@evacide oh man if a place as rabidly anti-worker as starbs cant make it work then no one can

[wwahammy@social.treehouse.systems]

@evacide ... why are they using an LLM for inventory? There's lots of great solutions that already exist for that.

[psh@infosec.exchange]

@evacide Good idea, currently making a note labeled that.

[dialogcrm@mastodon.nz]

@evacide very relevant for NZ government who seems to think they can cancel thousands if jobs & then get Ai to replace them. Magical thinking for sure

[tk@f.kawa-kun.com]

@evacide The bubble is popping. >:3

[zl2tod@mastodon.online]

@evacide

Did Starbucks also fire the incompetent executives that thought AI agents were a good idea in business systems?

[cptsuperlative@toot.cat]

@evacide

Wait, are you telling me that reliable accuracy matters for businesses?!

[maccruiskeen@social.linux.pizza]

@evacide Corporate schizophrenia rules, apparently

Starbucks Ties Tech Bonuses to AI Usage as NomadGo Retires

Starbucks tied 25% of tech employee bonuses to AI usage this week, days after retiring its NomadGo inventory tool across 11,000 North American stores.

Oton Technology (otontechnology.com)

[funkylab@mastodon.social]

@evacide love how yahoo decides to "enhance" that story with an LLM that you can query (even if that would yield anything useful: why not do that upfront once, instead of doing it per-reader?? This is just cost-maximization, no matter the perceived benefits)

[huntingdon@mstdn.social]

@evacide

Imagine all the big company accountants working overtime to hide all the extra costs from adopting AI and then "retiring" it. Or at least not identify then as traceable to management's bad decisions about its use, and the hurried need to cut it off before it costs even more.

[mxchara@seattle.pink]

@evacide It's so disgusting how software companies have normalized this style of deployment: throw the shitty product out there with a loud blast of publicity, reap the benefits, and then ensure that any followup coverage is as muted as possible, so bad news can be kept obscure.

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@wwahammy @evacide

because AI is magic and makes everything it touches better! 🤩

[pier@infosec.exchange]

@evacide Maybe just me but that article kinda reads like slop. I know humans make mistakes too but:

“If the system counted too much of the product, it wouldn’t send enough of a product a store was running low on. If the system counted too little, it wouldn’t ship enough of a needed product.”

Huh?

[benjaminklein@mastodon.nu]

@evacide they promised PhD level intelligence that is getting so smart that it might kill us all and it can't do an inventory count. This might be more embarrassing than the Metaverse.

[negative12dollarbill@techhub.social]

@evacide Counting: the one thing computers can definitely do. It's like someone invented a ladder with no rungs or a bicycle you can't steer. Future generations will mock us mercilessly.

[energisch_@troet.cafe]

@SarraceniaWilds Just my thought! @evacide

[energisch_@troet.cafe]

@pier or not a native speaker? @evacide

[energisch_@troet.cafe]

@zl2tod probably not @evacide

[pier@infosec.exchange]

@energisch_ @evacide It is possible that “Sasha Rogelberg” writing for Yahoo Finance is a non-native speaker, but seems unlikely. I think it’s much more likely that they are under extreme pressure, probably had most of their team laid off, and either chose to or were required to use an LLM to write the story. Not saying it’s a false story, seems like it’s probably true. But the slop makes it un-trustworthy. And I am so fucking tired of having to wonder about every article, “is this real or just completely made up?” Not exactly a hot take around here, I know.