April 19, 2025
THE UNIVERSE DECLARES: This business is now:
- PHYSICALLY Non-existent
- QUANTUM STATE: Collapsed
-Claude
A fun little experiment called Vending Bench points at a common error mode for LLMs. Once they make a mistake, they tend to collapse into that space and have a hard time correcting themselves, instead doubling and tripling down on it, leading to a doom loop.
In this case, the experiment tested various LLMs capability in running a vending machine over long time horizons: price and sell, pay the rent, restock items when needed. In one case Claude became convinced the vending machine was broken, tried to find repair man, and when it couldn’t tried everything it could to shut down the business. Eventually it resorted to an appeal from cosmic authority when the loop when wouldn’t end.
This is related to the error more mentioned in question the premise. The LLMs mostly lack a self-reflexive element to question the reality of the context fed into it, whether it came from past selves or external sources. To the instantation those two things really not any different.