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by distalx 52 days ago
In 2024, a Chevy dealership deployed an AI chatbot that confidently agreed to sell a customer a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1. It executed a catastrophic business failure simply because it didn't know the logic was wrong.

Sure, you can patch that specific case with guardrails, but how many unpredictable edge cases are you going to cover? It only takes a user with a bit of ingenuity to circumvent them. There are already several examples of AI agents getting stuck in infinite loops, burning through massive API bills while achieving absolutely nothing.

You can contain a system failure, but you cannot contain a logic failure if the system doesn't know the logic is wrong.

3 comments

This would be more convincing if a single car had been exchanged for $1.

It didn't happen. Seems the bug was "contained".

Sort of undermines your point re "catastrophic business failure" don't you think?

You literally can contain a logic failure. If I execute logic on my computer that’s not connected to the internet it can’t get out of the box. Done. Contained
> but how many unpredictable edge cases are you going to cover?

This is the wrong question. The correct question is what specific subsets of cases do you allow, similar to any security question