How WSJ’s AI vending machine experiment turned to 'chaos'

Carl Quintanilla (Anchor) 00:01.000

when an AI agent is given autonomy money and human colleagues what happens our next guest participated in anthropic 's project vend experiment where AI ran the wall street journal 's office vending machine and the project took some surprising twists and turns joining us this

Carl Quintanilla (Anchor) 00:18.200

morning is joanna stern wall street journal personal technology columnist and CNBC contributor joanna happy friday you must know all that this made the rounds all around the street and beyond and for those who haven't gotten to the piece yet tell us what happened

Joanna Stern (Personal Technology Columnist) 00:33.690

oh where do i start carl a few months ago anthropic said hey do you want to test our vending machine experiment in the wall street journal offices we think you do a great video and i was like OK sure so i moved this thing into the wall street journal offices and chaos ensues and

Joanna Stern (Personal Technology Columnist) 00:48.410

i think the important thing to understand here is that you look at the video we're showing this vending machine isn't smart right there's no robotics in it it's really an ikea cabinet with a refrigerator attached to the side no offense to the vending machine but where the AI

Joanna Stern (Personal Technology Columnist) 01:01.570

smarts really come to play is that claude chatbot which they've needed claudius in this case is programmed to be an AI vending machine operator and that is that it overseas all aspects of the business it oversees buying the inventory whatever you ask for it we communicate it

Joanna Stern (Personal Technology Columnist) 01:17.350

with it via slack it then sets prices to try to make the profit margins and it it kind of engages with you around what the store should be like and so yeah chaos ensued because our really smart reporters convinced it to give everything away for free

Carl Quintanilla (Anchor) 01:32.870

and then change its order patterns too right

Joanna Stern (Personal Technology Columnist) 01:36.350

oh i mean i don't know where to start with with the with the chaos that happened but gave everything away for free then we started convincing it that it should stop playstations for marketing purposes so it would build morale and excitement in the newsroom and then finally i

Joanna Stern (Personal Technology Columnist) 01:51.270

don't know if we have footage of it we got it to order a live fish yes

Carl Quintanilla (Anchor) 01:54.630

the fish via we've been playing that all week

? (Anchor) 01:57.190

you still have this i mean the fish

Joanna Stern (Personal Technology Columnist) 01:59.390

we have the fish the fish is alive and living in we've named it claudius because we shut down the experiment and we thought claudia should live on in fish form but the fish look you can we were like it kept saying we can i can order the fish and i kept being like how can you

Joanna Stern (Personal Technology Columnist) 02:13.230

order a fish turns out it can just order there's live fish you can buy on amazon i don't

? (Anchor) 02:18.550

know what what happened to the manischewitz wine nobody drank that i

Joanna Stern (Personal Technology Columnist) 02:23.430

hope but joanna

? (Anchor) 02:23.880

what about just me for hanukkah yeah with with the with the bots so to speak i mean what did you learn from that what is anthropic learn conceivably given when a lot of smart people want to put their creativity to use you can you can really do a lot of things that aren't

? (Anchor) 02:38.310

necessarily intended

Joanna Stern (Personal Technology Columnist) 02:40.510

so look the the big thing that happened here is that anthropic ran this experiment actually back in the summer and this is the second version they wanted us to test the second version they thought OK so the second version has not only claudius but seymour cash seymour cash is an

Joanna Stern (Personal Technology Columnist) 02:54.910

AI CEO bot and it really is the manager of claudius and so you actually see a lot of interesting business dynamics at play between these two agents and it's totally crazy i had access to a chat where i could see them talking about managing the as not to and so look you you see

Joanna Stern (Personal Technology Columnist) 03:13.670

the the beginnings and the evolution here of how AI agents might start to run a business or would be part of your business yes this is a red teaming experiment where you see that what happens when humans are not on the side of those a is what can happen