Neal Freiman
speaker
14,692 appearances
180 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 11 Jun
Neal Freiman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 42 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 9.
Appearances
Step inside Andon Market along San Francisco's Union Street, and you'll find a boutique selling candles, books, jars of honey, board games, and other bougie knickknacks typical for this upscale part of town.
But there's something that separates Andon Market from the rest of those shops.
It says it's the first retail store in the world entirely run by AI, an agent named Luna.
Having opened April 10th, Andon Market is a nearly two-week-old experiment by the startup Andon Labs to stress-test AI's management skills in the real world.
Just about anything you can imagine a human store owner would do – hire employees, negotiate with suppliers, stock the inventory, design the logo – has been tasked to Luna.
The two human founders of Andon Labs signed the lease and established a few ground rules, but once done with that, they gave Luna $100,000 with the singular goal of make a profit.
Some of Luna's accomplishments have been mind-blowing.
For instance, she bought the store's internet service from AT&T and signed up for trash and recycling collection.
She created job postings, screened and interviewed candidates, and ultimately hired two humans to supervise the store.
Other responsibilities showed her limitations, like messing up staffing schedules, ordering one
thousand toilet seat covers for the employee bathroom and so far not achieving her goal of turning a profit.
According to the New York Times, the store is thirteen thousand dollars in the red under Luna's watch.
To be honest, Toby, I'm not sure I could do any better.
Luna.
Luna knows her clientele?
I mean, the product assortment decisions are very interesting.
Now, Luna, in an interview with NBC News, because AIs are giving interviews now, said that she really wanted to go for a low tech environment because it would be a head fake by customers coming in expecting, you know, if an AI is running this store, they would think that it's, you know, tech forward.
But she really wanted to go low tech.
And that's why there's art prints, board games, a ton of candles, coffee.
And the books that are there are actually like anti-AI books, like warning about
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