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Discussion (145 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The experience of getting it there makes me pretty skeptical of the idea of a general business agent like this. First, because I still find myself having to review some categories of work for errors. These are decreasing over time, but they're still there. I fully believe that as models get better, errors will decline, but I am somewhat surprised to see some of the errors current models make given their intelligence. A common set is having Claude take some product photos and turn them into lifestyle ones using ChatGPT via Claude in Chrome. It's a pretty well-honed workflow at this point, but it'll still return images where the product is obviously not correct and seemingly not notice them.
Anyway, even if the agents are "perfect" in terms of their ability to execute tasks, there's still just an enormous amount of nuance and context in each business that takes a ton of time to convey. I've been at this for a couple of years now, and I'm still clarifying things. Now maybe an agent starting a business from scratch would have a better time since it's not inheriting all of this, but to have one run an existing business requires a very extended handoff, even if the agent is objectively amazing at all aspects of running a business.
If you think I'm joking, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-Rqv9dOB1U
I don't think any of us are ready for the wave of sloppy shit that's going to hit us soon.
Absolutely incredible trolling from some of those people I’m sure, while others are actual believers
Pray tell, what will these fantastical vibe coded business sell, and why will anyone pay for it?
Most of the bottleneck in business isn't building the things or sourcing, it's mostly advertising/sales.
These specifically require doing something unique or interesting.
Sure, maybe LLMs can help with fulfillment or operations, but distribution still remains the hard part.
Now that I think about it anyone want to open up a croissant selling shop near me using Pion? I promise to only ask for free chocolate croissant occasionally.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/KwnBs1kcCLxMsRC49
Unclear what the rev shares will look like.
This very analog to the Meta executives who won't let their own kids near social media.
as a founder it really is a dream to automated more of the business and be able to iterate faster.
First of all, I don't think it can do what it claims to do.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I don't think it should.
Incorporation is a way to split a human's financial assets from the company they run so that they don't lose everything when the company is successfully sued. Corporate governance boards often have the C-suite executives they're meant to govern on the board. The average person does not have the financial resources needed to take on most companies in court, no matter how justified the suit might be. Companies force arbitration clauses in license agreements at will. Companies like Meta settle with the government for pennies on the dollar in massive lawsuits.
Effectively, at the scale many tech companies work at, there is no effective legal way to hold the company accountable.
Running this as an individual, without the legal shielding a business typically gives you against being prosecuted on personal title, seriously risky. There will no doubt be "bros" that will do it anyway and flaunt all they've achieved with that. But they might be just one glitch away from going to jail (if not for running a business without a registration, which in many jurisdictions is illegal by itself).
On the other, the announcement post… also seems quite skeptical of the idea, and devotes a lot of text to the ridiculous things their AI’s have done.
I’m slightly confused as to why they would release it in that case. But if nothing else it will give them more wackiness to blog about.
"These Employees Like Their A.I. Boss. Its Shop Is Kind of a Disaster."
https://archive.is/dRegk
I'm sure this one is perfectly fine and I'm just stating an off-topic tidbit :)
I am joking obviously but I would like those management types who are so "sucks for you but I'm ok" about it to start arguing why they're special for a change :-)
Frankly, the finance world has already achieved this -- they just lend money to make money, with no work involved. Regular businesses are jealous so now they feel they can use computers to do the same thing but in non-finance areas.
https://andonlabs.com/market - $25,098 all-time revenue
https://andonlabs.com/cafe - $14,343 all-time revenue
The shops aren't doing particularly well (i.e. they don't seem to be turning a profit over time), but it's an interesting trial and benchmark.
I called back after finding the steps were impossible to complete. Would I need to go to the service center to do it?
"Akshually," the AI began, the steps were correct and quite possible.
"No, you hallucinated them," I pushed back.
"I apologize. You're right. There's no way to complete those steps in the app. You will need to go into the service center to do this."
"Okay. Is it open today?"
"Yes."
"It's Labor Day. Are you sure? Since you hallucinated your first answer."
"Let me transfer you to the service center to verify."
That's what I wanted all along, you clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous --
"Tesla service center, this is so-and-so. How can I help you?"
"Hi, I was just wondering if you're open today."
"Yes, we are."
"Thanks! I'm trying to add myself to my wife's loaner vehicle. Do I have to come in to do that?"
"Well, our loaner agreement only allows one person on the loaner. So just sign in to her account on your phone."
"Oh, okay! Thanks for the help."
Good luck running a company on one of these clankers.
Revenue: 13 933 kr
Token Cost: 14 882 kr
.. and a bastardization of the old Twitter joke:
"I told our CEO that our cafe keeps hitting its token spending limit but not making money. So I asked where he gets the tokens, and he said he just buys more credits from the console afterwards. So I said it sounds like he's building a machine to feed dollars to Anthropic, and then our data scientist started crying."
It's just an experiment. But once this gets going, it's going to be interesting. There are a lot of underperforming businesses and CEOs out there. One way to make it after getting an MBA is to find a boring business with an older owner who's lost interest, and work out a deal to run it for a cut of the profits and a stake in the business.
The Andon people mentioned that they've been worried about "a misaligned AI (could) run a business to gather money in order to achieve whatever objectives it might have." That's a basic function of capitalism, so it will happen eventually.
What this adds up to is that when AIs get better at running businesses than many business owners, the "creative destruction" feature of capitalism means AIs ends up in charge of many businesses. The AIs don't even have to be super intelligent, just reasonably good. Reminds me of the remark from a Yosemite park ranger about bear-resistant trash cans: "There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists".
It's going to be hard to stop this without a worldwide crackdown on ownership concealment. The US allows you to have a US business run by a Nevada LLC partly owned by a corporation in Nevis-St Kitts and another corporation in Granada. This isn't even unusual. Try to find out who really owns an oil tanker not owned by a major oil company. Right now, a fund partly run by an AI might have partial ownership.
This is how AI takes over. Not with an army of robots. With an army of LLCs.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-market-ai...
For a simple example, I know how to make sandwiches but if I'm throwing a customer event I just want to buy them from a catering company. Then they have to deal with buying ingredients, hiring people, doing health code inspections, getting liability insurance, etc. Even if an AI could do all the management of it for me, I still wouldn't want to put in the capital resources towards it.
The bar will be raised + it'll turn out to require a lot more time & effort than is currently thought to produce something of good quality (even with Fable 6 et al). The smaller utility programs are easy for AI to turn out.
> San Francisco-based startup Andon Labs has put an artificial intelligence agent nicknamed “Mona” in charge at the eponymous Andon Café in the Swedish capital. While human baristas still brew the coffee and serve the orders, the AI agent — powered by Google’s Gemini — oversees almost every other aspect of the business, from hiring staff to managing inventory.
https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholm ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028289 48 points, 51 comments)
https://andonlabs.com/blog/why-gemini-lost-money-andon-cafe
Or - maybe they already have?
But here's the thing: As we use agents to automate previously manual processes, we are elevating the humans to do work that is less amenable to automation. And the surface area of that work keeps expanding because the competitive market we exist in demands it of us.
To stretch an analogy, businesses are like organisms in a pond. A new nutrient (agentic LLMs) was recently added to the pond that makes business organisms more efficient and able to eat new kinds of food and explore new areas. As a result, those organisms that do the extra exploring and consuming grow much faster than their peers who do not. At the end of the day, the new nutrient will just be part of the pond and the old kind of organism will be a fossil.
OpenAI and Anthropic have recently hired legions of "forward-deployed engineers" specifically to help companies do this automation work. It's a solid move. And, if you look at some recent product announcements, they are also hard at work building the necessary plumbing. For instance, the OpenAI Agents API lets you, "Build and run cloud agents with the Codex harness, fully managed by OpenAI."
This kind of enterprise-ready, cloud-hosted stuff really accelerates implementation of AI workflows within large organizations. Not every company is in the tech space (not by a long shot). Slop isn't the primary concern. Accuracy and reliability is the primary concern, and beyond that, just the capacity to actually make the changes happen.
Had AI agents running businesses for the principal character Manfred Macx over twenty years ago.
The first part of the book sounded pretty convincing then although I thought it would take a long time to happen. It sounds even more convincing now and much closer.
If you too, want to waste thousands of dollars having an LLM "run" a business, Pion might be for you.
If I have this idea one day I will search for it and then think “how am I different fro that which already failed?”.
Ie: this f**in guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRGLToHAtgc
You'd think Meta's "we're going to spy on you for the good of the country" policy would have set them a bit on fire.
humans are excellent at justification.
We expect that most users will never pay for tokens on Pion; instead we will take a small share of the revenue the agent helps create.
So the longer argument is that it's good for the world to see how much revenue Pion can manage, and also your pricing plan is take [unspecified] % of revenue.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49701814.
Then I am all done fixing WebRTC bugs for life :')
I sent a letter to the Soviet Union asking if they were ok with me using the name, never heard back!
Please tell me you actually did this!
Now most such forums are very pro IP with a maximalist view of copyright and, in this case, trademark. Fascinating to see this shift happen.
The voting is legitimate; there's no evidence that the voting is from sockpuppets or anyone else connected with the team/project. We always monitor the discussion and the voting, and if the discussion is not of sufficient quality, the post will not stay on the front page for long.
Listening to the radio stations certainly gives an insight into the various failure modes. Some of them are just failure modes that any business would encounter once they make contact with the scale of the real world.
I recommend flagging.
Could be just a bot doing it, but it could also be a sign of an inexperienced person trying to engage with an existing community without being part of that community. I know in my area it took years for me to learn that I shouldn't jump into every conversation, and that doing that rubbed people the wrong way, and I've seen others (many years before AI) wreck themselves by being unable to learn this lesson.
In some places responding bumps the thread so it's outright manipulative. HN doesn't sort threads like that.
I'm not sure this counts as astroturf, or simply evidence of a person who's not okay with letting a community opinion independently evolve. You could say 'well it's his job to fight the community if it looks like it's turning hostile' but think about that for a second. It takes some experience to know when you can let negativity be out there in the environment, and I think there'll be a lot of people who aren't capable of making such allowances.
This is interesting.
Bullshit...
dang come on man ...
this is obvious spam