Its very much NOT running a store. They took an employee fridge and added a LARP to it.
That they are framing this as a legitimate business is either misunderstanding their current position in the economy, or deliberate misdirection. We're not playing around with role playing chatbots anymore. This shit was supposed to be displacing actual humans.
None of the problems highlighted in the blogpost or in the WSJ video are problems that are automatically solved "in a little while". They are in fact the same exact problems people had when using this shit for pretend sexting 4 years ago.
Excuse me if I find it incredibly irresponsible to be plowing billions into what is essentially a bad LARPing machine, and then going: "well we certainly had fun".
That they are framing this as a legitimate business is either misunderstanding their current position in the economy, or deliberate misdirection. We're not playing around with role playing chatbots anymore. This shit was supposed to be displacing actual humans.