Managing a McDonalds is a question of integration and modalities at this point. I don't think anyone still doubts that these models lack the reasoning capability or world knowledge needed for the job. So it's less of a fundamental technical problem and more of a process engineering issue.

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dap 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Have you not seen:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-mach...

(Two different examples of a similar idea)

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andy12_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I disagree. Even frontier models still achieve way worse results than the human baseline in VendingBench. As long as models can't manage optimally something as simple as a vending machine, they have no hope of managing a McDonalds.

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throw-the-towel 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The capability they lack is being able to be sued.

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pear01 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Police officers are human. In the United States in the vast majority of cases you can't sue the police, only the community responsible for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity

Assuming you can still sue McDonalds I am not sure if this is a problem in the robotic llm case. I'm also trying to imagine a case where you would want to sue the llm and not the company. Given robots/llm don't have free will I'm not sure the problem with qualified immunity making police unaccountable applies.

There already exist a lot of similar conventions in corporate law. Generally, a main advantage of incorporation is protecting the people making the decisions from personal lawsuits.

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nemomarx 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

McDonald's are franchises - you generally want to sue the local owner or threaten them in addition to the holding company.

That only requires someone own the ai managed McDonald's though. so long as they can't avoid responsibility by pointing to the AI I don't see why you couldn't sue them.

	▲	lancekey 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		25/75%. Plenty of stores are owned directly by McDonalds corp.

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logicchains 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Police officers are human. In the United States in the vast majority of cases you can't sue the police, only the community responsible for them.

Police are a monopoly; nobody has a choice about which police company to use. McDonalds are not a monopoly, and many customers would prefer to eat at competitors run by entities that could be sued or jailed if they did anything particularly egregious.

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pear01 4 hours ago | parent [-]

You are missing the point. The point is you can still sue the McDonalds. With the police there is a human intuition to also want to sue the officer, given the officer is a human being who has free will and thus made a choice to violate your rights.

The same intuition applies if you walk into McDonald's and a person there mistreats you. You want that person held responsible.

But the LLM is not a person. What is there to even sue? It just seems like it would simply pass through to the corporate entity without the same tension of feeling like we let a human get away with something. Because there is no human, just a corporation and the robot servicing the place.

Put another way - if the LLM is not a person, what is the advantage of a personal lawsuit?

Just sue the McDonalds. Even in a case where the LLM is extremely misaligned and acts in a way where you might normally personally sue the McDonald's employee, I'm just not sure the human intuition about "holding someone accountable" would have its normal force because again - the LLM is not a person.

So given we already have the notions of incorporation and indemnification it doesn't make sense to say what is precluding LLMs from running McDonald's is they can't be sued. If McDonald's can still be sued, then not only is there no problem, there is very likely not even a change in the status quo.

	▲	parineum 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> given the officer is a human being who has free will and thus made a choice to violate your rights. The purpose of qualified immunity is for when an officer does something that turns out to be illegal but they were both told to by their superiors and did not think it was in violation at the time. An officer making a choice to violate your rights would not be eligible for qualified immunity.