Brave ended up being the secret weapon in a crazy AI takeout race

More than 100 engineers spent the day last week in San Francisco trying to convince an AI agent to perform a relatively innocuous task: order a pizza and have it delivered before a 90-minute clock runs out. AlphaSignal, the company that organized the hackathon, had a $2,500 prize pool.

Getting your model to write code or draft an email is no longer impressive, but getting it to perform a commercial transaction, with a real business and real money, appears to still be a thing. AlphaSignal claimed that “Checkout is where most of them got stuck, because the agent had to place a real order with real money against a real merchant.”

The winning team just used a command-line interface from the delivery service DoorDash to create an order directly. The runners-up got a lot more creative, though, since they relied on Brave to get their orders through.

Preston Kwei, the winner in second place, demonstrated that his bot could use Brave Search to find out which of the local pizzerias was open. This way, the model wouldn’t try to order from a restaurant that would be closed at the moment of the trial.

Brave, the browser, has recently positioned itself as an alternative to Google Maps and has been developing its own maps. Thus, the necessary data for the bot to work was available to it in the search results. The agent then needed to make the order directly in the browser via the command line.

Rohan Gandotra, the third-place winner, took a different approach. Instead of having Brave parse restaurant reviews, he asked it to compile a list of local addresses and rank them by distance. This meant the bot didn’t have to make guesses about which links to follow to get the needed data.

Recently, the browser introduced support for WebMCP in its Nightly builds to perform browser tasks more efficiently. In addition, Brave has begun to provide live search results to Claude Cowork on AWS. This hackathon experiment with pizza is similar to the described technology, but works on a smaller scale.

Perhaps in the future, we will see more of such assistants, performing various tasks for us. However, seeing how a bot managed to survive the checkout process and pay for food with real money is much more impressive than yet another coding show.

Via: Brave

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