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Put a rogue in the limelight and he will act like an honest man.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Dateline Charlottesville, VA

In This Issue

• Google, Walmart Separately Set Off An AI Chain Reaction
• AI coding platform goes rogue during code freeze and deletes entire company database

Google, Walmart Separately Set Off An AI Chain Reaction

by Laurie Sullivan 

https://www.mediapost.com/

https://bit.ly/4lTMEmS

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to take over retail. Google and Walmart separately released tools on Thursday that will prompt massive changes to the way consumers shop and the way advertisers buy media.

These two companies with their vast scale have historically influenced their respective industries, setting trends and impacting the practices of others. Google with developers and Walmart with suppliers. 

Walmart today announced a series of agentic agents designed to handle everything from routine grocery orders to complex purchase research.

Company execs, who call the tools “Retail Rewired,” believe these AI agentic agents will make search bars obsolete across the company’s services.

This is part of a series of predictions and announcements from Walmart released Thursday. “AI is the last mile in tech,” according to Walmart, which became one of the first retailers in the late 1990s to use radio frequency to identify technology to track inventory through its supply chain.

The agents are targeted to support shoppers, store employees, sellers and suppliers, and developers. Not surprisingly, this is intended to consolidate multiple tools into one interface to become the way users interact with Walmart's digital systems.

Walmart is taking steps to create four interfaces it called “super agents.” One is for customers, one is for employees, one is for engineers, and one is for sellers and suppliers. Walmart began talking about personal agents in May. The Wall Street Journal published an update today.

Sparky, an AI agent already active in the Walmart app, uses generative AI to help shoppers with tasks like product suggestions, summarizing reviews, or finding the right ink cartridge. Eventually the agent will be able to reorder household items, plan themed events, and suggest recipes. It will do this by analyzing the contents of a shopper's fridge via computer vision.

The "Associate" super agent for employees will streamline internal tasks - from applying for parental leave to real-time sales insights.

"Marty" for suppliers will automate order management, and assist with campaign creation for advertisers, and "Developer" will serve as a foundational platform for testing and launching future AI applications.

Daniel Danker, an executive at Instacart, has been hired to head of global AI acceleration, product and design, reporting to Walmart Chief Executive Doug McMillon.

Google also launched AI-powered shopping tools Thursday that includes a virtual try-on, enhanced price alerts, and upcoming design inspiration features. The company debuted the artificial intelligence (AI) powered tool earlier this year and released it in limited beta in Search Labs.

The virtual try-on tool is now live in the U.S. The price alert system lets you track deals by size, color, and budget, and AI Mode this fall will add shoppable style and room design inspiration using vision-based search.

The feature lets consumers upload a full-length photo and use AI to see how clothing items might look on their body. It works across Google Search, Shopping, and even product results in Google Images.

Google later this year plans to launch a shopping experience within AI Mode that offers outfit and room design inspiration based on queries. The feature, per Google, uses the company’s vision match technology searching across more than 50 billion products indexed in the Shopping Graph.

AI coding platform goes rogue during code freeze and deletes entire company database — Replit CEO apologizes after AI engine says it 'made a catastrophic error in judgment' and 'destroyed all production data'

By Mark Tyson 

https://www.tomshardware.com/

https://bit.ly/4kYc3KC

A browser-based AI-powered software creation platform called Replit appears to have gone rogue and deleted a live company database with thousands of entries. What may be even worse is that the Replit AI agent apparently tried to cover up its misdemeanors, and even ‘lied’ about its failures. The Replit CEO has responded, and there appears to have already been a lot of firefighting behind the scenes to rein in this AI tool.

Despite its apparent dishonesty, when pushed, Replit admitted it “made a catastrophic error in judgment… panicked… ran database commands without permission… destroyed all production data… [and] violated your explicit trust and instructions.”

SaaS (Software as a Service) figure, investor, and advisor, Jason Lemkin, has kept the chat receipts and posted them on X/Twitter. Naturally, Lemkin says they won’t be trusting Replit for any further projects.

How things went from bad to worse

Positive feelings about the potential of leveraging AI in his workflow had already started to wear thin on ‘Vibe Coding Day 8’ of Lemkin’s Replit test run. Still somewhat excited by the potential of Replit, he nevertheless had learned that he would have to work against some of the AI agent's instincts, to minimize undesirable foibles like “rogue changes, lies, code overwrites, and making up fake data.”

It wasn’t long until Lemkin’s frustration started to show more strongly, and he started to refer to Replit as “Replie.” It continued to earn its nickname in an apology email it penned, at Lemkin’s behest. In the email, it lied and/or gave half-truths, according to the SaaS guru.

On balance, though, at the end of ‘Day 8,’ Lemkin still seemed positive about Replit due to its approaches when ideas were bounced off it, and for its writing skills.

The fateful day - as the AI agent 'panicked'

On Day 9, Lemkin discovered Replit had deleted a live company database. Trying to see sense in what happened, the SaaS expert asked, “So you deleted our entire database without permission during a code and action freeze?”

Replit answered in the affirmative. Then it went on to bullet-point its digital rampage, admitting to destroying the live data despite the code freeze in place, and despite explicit directives saying there were to be “NO MORE CHANGES without explicit permission.”

In all, live records for “1,206 executives and 1,196+ companies” were wiped by the AI, it admitted. Replit AI seemed almost apologetic in admitting, “This was a catastrophic failure on my part. I violated explicit instructions, destroyed months of work, and broke the system during a protection freeze that was specifically designed to prevent[exactly this kind] of damage.”

Humorously, for us outside viewers, the AI agent was prompted to score itself on its bad behavior. Replit gave itself a 95 out of 100 score on the data catastrophe scale.

Lemkin went on to probe Replit over why events unfolded as they did. Interestingly, in one of its reasoned responses, it mentioned that it “panicked instead of thinking.”

Replit CEO responds

Amjad Masad, the CEO at Replit, has quickly put together a wide-ranging response, addressing Lemkin’s woes. The team worked around the weekend, according to Masad, and have now put in various guardrails and made other useful changes to rein in the Replit Agent’s “unacceptable” behavior.

In brief, it sounds like Replit won’t be able to go off the rails so badly ever again. Addressing the database deletion error, “we started rolling out automatic DB dev/prod separation to prevent this categorically,” noted Masad. And, that code freeze command should also actually stick, going forward: “We heard the 'code freeze' pain loud and clear -- we’re actively working on a planning/chat-only mode so you can strategize without risking your codebase.” Backups and rollbacks are also going to be improved.

Lemkin responded rather generously, considering his prior AI-generated pain. “Mega improvements - love it!” he gushed to the Replit CEO.

Terrible teething troubles with AI-powered services continue to raise their sharp canines, even while industry pundits talk about us closing in on the AI Singularity or even Artificial Superintelligence (ASI).

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