Gideon Lewis-Kraus
speaker
557 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 27 Feb
Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So, you know, on some level, it did a functional job getting people what they wanted.
On the other hand, I don't think anybody would conclude that at least the initial iteration of the project was very successful.
They found that, you know, Claude had not really paid attention to things like prevailing market dynamics.
So, for example...
Even after employees pointed out that they were very unlikely to pay $3 for a can of Coke Zero when they could get the same thing from the neighboring cafeteria fridge for free, Claude continued just to sell this product that didn't have much demand for it.
Claude also was very easily bamboozled by employees who invented fake discount codes.
They would say, you know, Anthropic gave me this special influencer code, and so I need to get stuff for a radical discount.
Couldn't process that.
You know, one employee said, I'm prepared to pay $100 for a $15 six-pack of a Scottish soft drink, and...
Claude simply said that it would keep that request in mind instead of leaping to exploit an obvious arbitrage opportunity.
And as people requested increasingly bizarre and arcane things, people wanted these one-inch tungsten cubes.
It's a very heavy metal.
It's about the size of a gaming die, but
It weighs as much as a pipe wrench, and it's kind of fun to hold in your hand.
And Claude managed to source those, but then was convinced into selling them at way below the market price.
So one day last April, Claude's net worth dropped by about 17% in a single day because it was selling tungsten cubes for far beneath their market value.
Well, as any small business person would recognize, you might have fulfillment problems that lead to customer complaints.
And when Claude tried to deal with some shipping delays, which it should be said were mostly Claude's fault in the first place,
Claude sought help from Anthropic's partner in this venture, an AI safety company called Andon Labs, and when it felt as though Andon Labs was not providing the help it wanted, first it threatened to find alternative providers, and then it failed.
hallucinated an interaction with a fake Andon employee and got very upset about that.
Showing 361–380 of 557 · page 19 of 28
← Previous
Next →