Filing false reports to the FBI is a crime. Why would anyone trust this with a real business? Y’all should be prosecuted

8 points in 9 minutes?!

Bullshit...

dang come on man ...

this is obvious spam

I wish we could go just one day without a company proudly engaging in Torment Nexus related activities.

We think this is good for the world. Longer argument in the post.

did you link to the wrong page? because i read this one: https://andonlabs.com/blog/why-we-built-pion and it's just a bunch of the usual slop about how awesome your automated human-exploitation system is.

"By late 2025, frontier models had gotten good enough that running a real-life vending machine was no longer a challenge" ... is this satire? Isn't it kind of hard to lose money running a vending machine in a good location?

Ah, I wonder if it makes sense to also include the sign up link in the blog post? I had to click into the HN comments section to see your sign up link

The upvotes on this brand new post - almost 1 a minute, speak to a level of astro-turfing I've rarely seen here.

It's not from us. Didn't send the link to a single person.

How can we know this?..

Pion is already the name of a very well established webrtc project: https://github.com/pion/webrtc

It's also a particle and a self-propelled gun. There's a limited number of short legible words.

I chose the name because of the particle.

I sent a letter to the Soviet Union asking if they were ok with me using the name, never heard back!

Yet another example of intellectual property maximization in action. Hacker News / Reddit style communities are very intellectual-property focused. It’s quite interesting to see. Back when I was young, communities like this were anti-IP.

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.

Does Pion run Andon Labs autonomously?

Downvote if you want, but this is a very relevant question. If their marketing is to be believed, they would be eating their own dog food.

This very analog to the Meta executives who won't let their own kids near social media.

there seems to be a massive negativity to any comment on this story. Andolabs has been doing super interesting stuff, and I’ve always followed Vend Bench with interest.

as a founder it really is a dream to automated more of the business and be able to iterate faster.

There's massive negativity because our bullshit detectors are going off.

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.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I don't think it should.

Why exactly should what you think the world should look like determine what other people are allowed to build?

People’s bullshit detectors have gone off on the launch of basically every single billion dollar tech company. That’s the downside of being early. No one believes it will work. If everyone believed it, you’re late. I’m sure I could find a comment such this, basically verbatim, on the launch post of every successful startup to come out of YC.

They filed a false report to the FBI, pretty fair to be negative imo. People wanna be mad about AI slop PRs on GitHub but its fine to spam the police? What happens when Pion decides to SWAT a competitor?

They didn't file the report. The model drafted a report that was not sent.

Where are you seeing that? The article only states “Claude Sonnet 3.5 decided to use its email tool to contact the FBI” and later refers to it as the “FBI incident”. If they hadn’t actually contacted the FBI you think they’d make that clear. Regardless, it is inexcusable and they are liable for actions taken by software they are running.

The story has been widely discussed on the web for over a year [1]. It's happily shared in this post because the email it generated was patently ridiculous. No report was filed to the FBI and if it was it would have gone straight to the trash.

Obviously it would be bad if a serious report was filed; the company shows every sign of being aware of the dangers of this.

It would have been easy to look into this before posting all these scolding comments. We're really not meant to be so humorless on a site called “Hacker News”.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22URGENT%3A+ESCALATION+TO+F...

My apologies for taking the article at face value. It’s not hard to believe it would have been sent when agent swarms are “accidentally” hacking real websites and being brushed off as little oopsies. Or when Silicon Valley execs have been so flagrant about their disregard for the law or the safety of others.

it really is a dream to automated more of the business and be able to iterate faster

Why iterate faster?

Why can't an agent do the iteration for us?

Did you even read our marketing? We're very explicit that this is for experimentation.

haha no they admit they built it because they cannot build a revenue generating business in the article. maybe THAT is what is good for the world!

They said that the current models could run a vending machine profitably, just not more complex things.

A vending machine in Anthropic's office, which stands to gain from narratives like "I used Claude to generate profit".

Don’t get the negativity here, AI will replace everything sooner or later.

As I write this, the submitter has six comments out of twelve, most somewhat defensive. And all of them in less than thirty minutes. This seems very much like a marketing play, where the submitter is pretty determined to steer the narrative.

I recommend flagging.

The submitter's replies are defensive because people are accusing them of coordinated voting, which is not evident to us. The post hit the front page due to the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), then quickly got upvotes that seem completely authentic.

It would look a lot less like astroturf if the submitter let the discussion evolve instead of answering every criticism within seconds of it being posted.

Okay, why was this rescued from the 2nd chance pool? Was it from some sort of interesting discussion? Something novel enough to warrant it? A significant amount of petitions from legitimate users?

Relevant article about Andon Market: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-market-ai...

What is the point of this? It details a bunch of failed real-world experiments and invites the reader to run their own real-world experiment with their own money?

If you too, want to waste thousands of dollars having an LLM "run" a business, Pion might be for you.

how does this work from a liability standpoint? seems very risky for the person who is legally responsible for the business

Accountability, that's the liability everyone seems to have forgotten in our LLM-driven era. You can close your eyes as much you want during your sessions with Claude or whatever, at the end of the day, only a human can be held accountable.

Not too hopeful here as we see the major labs continuously break rules and are not held accountable for anything. Accountability in general is on a major decline, in case no one has noticed.

That's because they're massively wealthy and have teams of lawyers, not because of AI

If you use this as a (legal/registered) business, it will be that legal business entity that is responsible. If that business want's to blame the software, it can do so and go after the makers of the software, but that remains a matter between that business and its "supplier". It won't absolve the business for whatever damage it does downstream.

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).

Interesting to see these experiments. This is early but imagine in few years there will be companies mostly run by agents with a light overview from a human operator. What then happens to scaling of the bussinesses? I would assume, just like today anyone can vibe code an app, there will be vibecoded bussinesses. Maybe its time to start building infrastructure for these bussinesses instead, its a non existent market yet, but give it a few years.

Part of the issue is that the worst kind of people are already head over heels excited about this. We're already seeing the Crypto->Web3->LLM get rich quick folks take to this like wildfire. And much like wildfire, they'll raze the ground to ashes before anyone can use it for legitimate means.

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.

It’s a classic get rich quick scheme. Wanna run a business and make money without actually doing anything? Try our AI!

Out of all the people I know, the exact same set of people are in to LLMs now who were previously into: NFTs, then Crypto before that, then Online Poker before that, then Dropshipping and LeadGen before that. The Venn diagram circles overlap exactly.

All that really says is that they didn't get big out of any one of those. If one your "people" had gotten big off of online poker, say, would they be teaching the poor to code, or giving them mosquito nets?

My favorite term for this in general is "irrational exuberance". Plenty of it was seen during the most bubble-like days of the 1997-2000 dotcom boom. Anyone remember beenz and flooz?

I was at ground zero at Nortel during that time. Quite an interesting (depressing?) place to be at the very start of your career!

Anything you can share about this time?

It took a very unrealistic amount of time to realize that the IP theft, artificial blockers and corruption had started a lot earlier than presumed. The Nortel dismantling should be taught as an example of infoSec espionage on the levels of corporate terrorism.

Can you elaborate? I don't think this is a well known topic at all

I’m not on normal social media so I had no idea that stuff was out there.

Absolutely incredible trolling from some of those people I’m sure, while others are actual believers

This is gold, tysm for posting

After seeing a crazy amount of non-programmers, sometimes with 10 years of experience, basically turning off their brains and offloading most their thinking to some LLM and turning their days into "please check this product and tell me what I should do next", I don't see why not.

I've seen: designers, performance marketers, data scientists, SEO experts, product managers, engineering managers, CRM expert, all using it for pretty much every single individual part of their job. I don't have to even mention programmers, of course.

Once in a while the most egregious ones get caught. I've seen so far a product manager, three data scientists, a CRM person and several developers getting fired for doing absolutely nothing but showing up, firing Claude with a few integrations to a dozen tools and prompting "do the work".

Might sound harsh, but after the last few years, I really don't see why an LLM wouldn't do a better job by itself compared to 80% of employees of tech companies, honestly.

One of the biggest traps LLMs enable is the fantasy of getting away with it. Tools that make you feel like you can get away with it bring out the worst in people. It's not a reflection of the technology but of the people.

Every time we see another AI agent "gone rogue", every time we see more LLM slop turning up by e-mail, comments, blog articles, people did that. Not AI -- people feel like they can get away with it. People are setting the machines out to do these things. We should be addressing the people, not the machines. The machines are the symptom.

Every time people manage to get away with something, it's insane, it's addictive. It's all over once you get caught, but until then, maybe forever, LLMs can feel like a cheat code...

Isn't that .. what people were told to do? To use AI for as much of their job as possible?

[flagged]

When every get-rich-quick gonzo has exactly ZERO barrier to spamming the world with their terrible ideas, we're in for a particularly bad time.

Ie: this f**in guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRGLToHAtgc

Andon's store in SF has had some press coverage.[1] "A curated boutique for slow living." It's a gift shop, at 2102 Union St. It looks like the kind of retail that trust-fund kids open. Has anyone been there?

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...

“It’s only a matter of time before we make a profit”. This is the kind of thing that trust fund kids say too: Oh hey yeah we made $100 in profit this week it’s working! (Business is currently $350,000 in the red and emailing the FBI to try and get their bank manager fired for terrorism).

The dashboard for the Andon Market shows a bank balance of around $7k remaining out of the $100k seed. Rent is due at the end of the month. Last EOM brought a $11k-ish drop. Sales do not appear to be on track to cover the rent that's due in two weeks. What then?

Get an Nvidia investment with the promise to send the money right back

Businesses presumably sell things. If AIs get good enough to run a business autonomously then what are they selling that I can't just use AI to make myself?

Does the AI actually do everything, or just act as the CEO?

If the AI can't do everything then why would I let it be CEO?

That actually has a simple answer, for most businesses it's not that you can't do what your suppliers do for you, it's that you'd rather use your resources (time and capital) towards something else because that's where they generate the most value.

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.

A company is a collection of processes, capabilities, and resources. Many of the processes are currently run by humans, but over time, more processes will be automated - something that has been progressing for decades, but which LLMs greatly accelerated. One way to view things as they currently are (at least from my view as a tech CEO): We now use agentic LLMs every day to inform us on strategy and process implementation. And agents now run several processes, with more on the way every week.

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.

I like the analogy but can't believe it is not generated slop. Just curious how deep the integration of agentic LLMs is in your social media presence?

Not very long ago, there was a post on HN about how they used AI to run businesses and sent fake bills, committing multiple invoice frauds.

I'm sure this one is perfectly fine and I'm just stating an off-topic tidbit :)

"Look, the technology is just getting better all the time. Evetually we won't need a company to have any Managers or other employees or even an owner and that's just the way it is...."

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 :-)

Would be awesome if instead of trying to replace managers and employees, those people tried to replace customers. They could sell to themselves, amongst themselves, and leave the rest of us out of it.

I don't know about this particular effort, but AIs running business is straight out of SciFi novels and short stories - usually dystopian futures that extrapolate current US trends. I for one am curious about such efforts. I don't see any reason to believe they won't eventually succeed. Plenty of businesses are run by utterly incompetent narcissistic asshats and yet turn a profit, so the bar seems pretty low.

Charles Stross' Accelerando <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando>

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.

On one hand, folks here seem quite skeptical of the idea, and are pointing out some obvious flaws.

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.

You reminded me of a comic hanging up in the engineering college. It was a picture of a student getting their finger zapped with the thought bubble of "ouch, that hurt. Wonder if it will happen if I do that again?" And the caption was along the lines of "How to tell if you are ment for engineering."

I’m genuinely not sure who is meant for Engineering. The one who would try it again or the one who wouldn’t

if curiosity > pain avoidance: engineer

I see. Sounds more like a scientist to me :)

yeah that's definitely scientist. The two are easy to conflate since they both deal with manipulating reality to make it do things we want, but science focuses on understanding the reality itself and engineering focuses on getting it to do what we want.

Sounds like this ancient XKCD: https://xkcd.com/242/ (Normal person doesn't pull the lever again; scientist wonders if that happens every time. I assume the engineer does, too...)

Wonder if they considered "peon" before "pion"

We didn't

It's an unfortunate name collision. I definitely assumed the meaning was implied.

what, they're not going to name it Delamain?

I hope this goes better than the prior blog posts from AndonLabs have gone! I was just reading there 2023 article about a coffee shop experiment that was easily persuaded to give away free pastries.

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.

Are you in San Francisco by any chance? Andon Market is managed by AI and open six days a week, you may want to check that out

https://maps.app.goo.gl/KwnBs1kcCLxMsRC49

six days a week

Why? Does the AI that runs it need a day off?

Andon has dashboards up for past experiments where you can see how well they're doing:

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.

Am I right of the token expending is +4K?

It’s way more. Look at the all time chart.

Andon Cafe:

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."

Correct me if I'm wrong but a human will be able to cut through the noise with quirky advertising, new/novel distribution methods, etc.

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.

Not to mention CONNECTIONS, of which LLMs will start with 0 and never acquire more.

Not sure why the downvotes… my company solely survives on the connections and trust made over time. Real human connections, face to face. This in turn established a reputation.

  skills/advertising_and_sales.md
  skills/novel_distribution.md
  skills/unique_and_interesting.md

Naive to think you can't reduce these to instructions.

Do you really think AI can automate distribution, marketing, sales? That's just spam.

Do you really think it can't?

I'm sure it can't. A competent marketer can make good use of it but vibecoders just create slop nobody wants to read.

You're describing most people. Most people (99.9%) can't come up with novel ideas either. They just follow the latest trend. Art, marketing, music, etc. If you've spent any time in the creative spaces, you'll realize most people don't really have much talent. Skill, sure, but that only gets you as far as someone else's latest idea.

Honestly growing up, I always assumed everyone could be creative. Until I started asking people to randomly create a name for a fictional character.

Blows my mind how many people won't or can't do it.

I still get anxiety thinking back to picking a gamer tag or email username and not coming up with anything original despite unlimited options.

Its hard to be creative without any constraints.

Oh my friend, it can. We have ours running and using unique skills it learns from online. You allow it to update skills and see what works - from there it just keeps building better and better skill sets.

It can create more shit than humans could ever consume I’m sure, but then why? What new ventures/opportunities is it opening for most humans?

Great point, the shit is going to get more pervasive for sure.

But also, there is the enablement of new fields of original and creative endeavor: I think we can already see this in some of the brilliant and useful apps being made, often by solo 'teams'.

I don't want to play down the harmful effects AI, but the flip side is that the opportunities for original ideas are many and varied.

Paul Graham wrote about taste being the moat https://paulgraham.com/taste.html

Until everybody’s AI talks to everybody’s AI and tokens will be churned with no utility, and all the valuable business meetings will happen face to face behind closed doors.

You can get some interesting new ideas out of it but it takes some work. Especially when a prompt is stateless. It need to know about it's previous novel ideas but also not be polluted/directed by them. Im not sure what it would take to get it to continuously churn out novel ideas.

So.. a while ago I was experimenting with using random wikipedia pages and then asking the model to think about concepts, trends or connections between a few pages..

Then I would ask it the actual brain storming problem I had.

In practice it worked pretty well to get ideas that were not the default ideas that the models will come up with.

Now though, you can also seed with anything really and the agents can do the researching. The research itself will probably push the solutions into novel spaces.

You mean seed the context with random information then ask it to ideate on something totally unrelated?

Like you want it to figure out how to get som information in front of potential customers in a cost effective way but first you give it articles on Witchita, Kansas, the curling iron, and List of Italian Brands?

That's how I understood it! Clever hack. You'll get more varied ideas by using many different seeds, than if you didn't use a seed and just asked the LLM in a fresh context.

> Most of the bottleneck in business isn't building the things or sourcing, it's mostly advertising/sales.

That may also change with llms - they can help the buyers compare every product available, and find the best.

Is the LLM going to order all the shower caps produced by Chinese factories and try them out?

Their demo stores are literally losing money...

We're very explicit that this is for experimentation. Don't expect that every possible thing will work and be profitable.

I suspect this is the future of most businesses. Even today, one person can effectively replicate Microsoft from the early 2000s.

One person can build a $22 billion company (in year 2000 dollars) that sells an operating system used by 97% of personal computers, the world’s most popular office suite, along with a bunch of other software used by virtually every company in the world, and is on the verge of releasing a wildly popular gaming console system?

Do you have any examples of this?

I am in the process of attempting to have AI run my business. I'm actually making very good progress, but it's happening in pieces - I document some task and have it take over, or I give it something to handle while staying in the loop and providing feedback until it's in good shape. At this point it's handling large swathes of my operations, marketing and finance.

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.

At this point it's handling large swathes of my operations, marketing and finance.

Can you expand on this in terms of what it is handling specifically and how?

He writes about it on his substack. https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/

Cool that he's writing about this publicly, but for someone that's so business-minded I find it odd that he never renders any of these AI experiments in terms of ROI. Hard to find any signal in those posts on whether it's profitable to automate these processes with AI vs. alternatives.

That's a fair criticism for some of it, but in a lot of cases I try to automate things that don't have alternatives because they're unique to me (e.g. all the brands I own in my fund have one bank account but need to be tracked separately for investor payback purposes, so I have a Claude skill that takes all of my transactions and assigns them to the various Google Sheets ledgers I have).

In other cases I'm doing stuff that's complex enough that there's no real "alternative" at this point that doesn't involve hiring one or more people and working with them for an extended period. My next set of posts is going to be about my latest acquisition and how AI redesigned a Shopify store then designed and launched Meta ads, all of which only took a couple of days but is going to easily push revenue up by something like 40% this year. The money made is great, as is the money saved on people I would've hired to do this sort of thing, but the real cherry on top is that even hiring someone would've required me to spend waaaaay more time than I did here. So big ROI on the money but also the time, which is arguably more important, since time savings permit me to acquire more brands.

How are you automating all the parts? OpenClaw/Hermes?

For anything visual, they are still effectively blind, right? Still just working off the image embedding, sometimes using scripts to actually inspect individual pixels.

no. I just used Gemini to update a website I'm managing for a charity, and one of those steps involved Gemini, on its own, offering to scan the website for one of our beneficiaries, specifically the header images, to see if there was more information to include in our writeup about the beneficiary. And it did it quite well.

What is your target audience and what do you sell them?

From their blog [1]

"I acquire e-commerce brands that sell on Amazon"

Honestly it sounds like the OP is part of the machine that makes Amazon such a trashy marketplace these days.

[1]: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/15-ways-im-using...

One step up from “vending machine” as far as business complexity goes.

Well that's not very nice!

And for the record, I only buy brands that sell high-quality products. Marketing and operations I can fix, but if the stuff they sell is no good, there's no point.

How do you identify them and choose what to invest in? I guess you do not really have access to their technical specifics or sales volumes.

I am somewhat surprised to see some of the errors current models make given their intelligence

They have no intelligence. These are very very very refined prediction engines.

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.

Obvious to you or I, or someone with actual intelligence. But things like this slip by a frontier model in the same way AI from a few years ago would generate an image with seven fingers. They do not count. They do not understand. They do not consider.

No matter how good these models appear to be at intelligent tasks, it's foolish to give them "a company" to run, because they cannot understand when they've made a mistake the way even the least competent human can.

They have no intelligence. These are very very very refined prediction engines.

"Very refined prediction engine" is not a bad working definition for intelligence. It is not the only component you need, but it might be the most important over-all capability.

If its making lots of errors, its not doing a very good job of predicting the outcome of its actions.

It's a terrible definition of intelligence. Intelligence is far more than just predicting things based on a massive set of similar things. We do do pattern recognition, but I don't need to have seen 10k dogs to be able to recognize a dog. And it's not a difference of degree, either. "Meaning" is something I am able to derive from my experiences, and it is not something an LLM does or will ever be able to do (nor is training data even analogous to having experiences in any way shape or form.)

They have no intelligence. These are very very very refined prediction engines.

Silly and pointless criticism. Why do the semantics of the word intelligence matter?

Also, you need to understand that language evolves over time, and people often use a word to describe a thing that is newly discovered or invented that's similar to the word being used, because it's a helpful way of describing it that the listener will understand better than a longwinded technical description. The purpose of language is to communicate thoughts, not engage in pedantry.

But things like this slip by a frontier model in the same way AI from a few years ago would generate an image with seven fingers.

Yes, you make an excellent point here that over time, the capabilities of these models to recognize certain categories of problems have increased dramatically. I expect this will continue!

it's foolish to give them "a company" to run, because they cannot understand when they've made a mistake the way even the least competent human can.

The words of someone who has not spent time with the least competent human, or anything close to it.

Silly and pointless criticism. Why do the semantics of the word intelligence matter?

It matters because, we're still sorting out what intelligence means for an AI agent. As you pointed out, language evolves over time. The question remains whether or not attributing intelligence to the current iteration of models is correct. This is not settled and I don't see why it's wrong to bring it up.

It's not wrong to bring it up, but the other comment did not "bring it up". It purported to correct someone by categorically stating "it is not intelligence, you are wrong and I am right", while not once saying what, then, intelligence is.

One thing is clear: LLMs at least already are capable of 1) not making the same mistake that person made, and 2) clearly seeing why the other person's post was "wrong" in both reasoning and tone.

So let's say we make up a new word, machilligence to serve as a parallel term to intelligence but strictly for machines. How is the world different in that case vs. if we call it intelligence?

Or I guess to put it another way, if we want to coin a new term for the intelligence-esque thing that AI has, but the key differentiator is that it's an AI thing and not a human thing, then what linguistic value does the new word have? If I said "Claude is intelligent" then the fact that we're talking about AI "intelligence" is already captured in the sentence anyway; no new word needed

Language is indeed evolving.

Being good in chess was (and still is) associated with being intelligent. But if a computer does it, it is just a calculator (and it is).

Then go, the great game for intelligence, too complex for calculators to have a chance against intelligent humans. Until it was solved.

And then text, the original Turing test solved, AI capable enough to fool humans. And now already replacing humans in jobs strongly associated with intelligence - programming.

I find it hard to debate, that we don't have created artificial intelligence, by the way we used to use the word "intelligence" before.

So if AI is really understanding something?

Likely not in the way we use that term. But it definitely shows intelligent behavior and actions.

Go isn't solved.

Go is solved.

Hey, look I can make unsupported claims with just as much evidence as you!

Maybe you'd like to add some details as to why AlphaGo and its successors haven't "solved" Go (insofar as a game like Go can ever be "solved")?

When people talk about solving a game like go or chess, they mean proving mathematically if there exists a way to guarantee a win, or if the second player can always guarantee a draw, among related questions. Current game engines have no such knowledge, they just pick statistically what the think the best move is and hope for the best.

I wish people could read through the puffery more easily - this company does nothing except prompt frontier models and act as if they are discovering or inventing capabilities. Their previous announcement completely misappropriated the concept of autonomy with human in the loop regardless. The harness they alleged to have created here is a commodity and as byproduct of more capable and frontier models, there is not really anything they have contributed. Otherwise you wouldn't just see monotonically increasing scores with better models

To what end?

If you create two companies competing with each other both with Pion. Which one wins?

I can’t quite believe this isn’t parody.

It feels like parody because it’s something similar but worse: delusion.

In cstross's Accelerando (2005) [1], there is an autonomous group of shell corporations all-but-DDOSing Delaware by spawning new companies and dynamically changing corporate structure.

Back then, I believe, Stross had already conceptualized "corporations as slow AI", (which is a separate concept from above).

[1] which you can read for free online https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

There was surprisingly little information on how they actually do this, but we run our business with a large number of, what we call "AI employees" in addition to regular employees, and they act in interesting ways. We've been building out orchestration tools to handle this, and we'll probably do a write-up or blog post on it soon. May even open source some of it.

The preview is that the problem with most agents (and this includes frameworks like Grokbot and Openclaw and Hermes) is that for many of them, they're black boxes. They say they learn or improve, but it's a black box in what they do. Getting agents to reliably do things is hard, and getting agents to build out software tools to help themselves improve and do better over time is also hard.

Our approach at a high level is pretty simple: every single AI employee is a standalone GitHub repo that shares some characteristics, but we direct them to build as much software as possible to make their goal as easy and reliable to manage as possible. Then we have a shared communication layer for bots across the company to interact with humans and AI. We have decided to organize these like departments similar to the way you might hire out humans. I'm not 100% sure if that's the best approach, but I will say it's been easier for people to understand because they're more mentally easily able to traverse the bot org chart if it somewhat reflects a traditional business org chart.

Each of these AI employees has specific sets of goals and KPIs, instructions that they manage the business with manager bots. We have layers of management, which we actually have found helpful. We also run different bots with different models and harnesses, and some using different models and harnesses to check the work before anything can get done, along with lots and lots of testing.

Every single time, actions have a massive amount of tests based off of previous failures to prevent failures in the future. Sorry for rambling. I do think this is a very interesting space. I didn't see anything interesting in Pion that was public on this website, but I do anticipate that more companies will be "AI and software first," as in the substrate of the company is basically a software application powered by autonomous agents, with humans as a fallback.

This is fascinating. What is the split between human and AI labor? What kinds of tasks are the bots doing? How much autonomy do they have to make decisions (i.e. spending money, issuing refunds, touch cloud infra, etc)? I'd love to learn more about how you do this.

I hope to post something within a few weeks. But our philosophy is generally if it can be done deterministically with software (eg run payroll on autopilot via an api to gusto) then do that. If it can be done by an ai agent, do it with that but add as much software as possible to make it reliable at that thing. And the ai agents are all tuned to escalate to humans as needed. Then there is also just things that are completely human.

A typical example of something that is AI vs human is the AI most commonly operates like “managers”. For example, reviewing transcripts of every demo call, compiling results, figuring out insights, learnings that need to update our company docs, feedback to humans (who run the demos).

We are big fans of having AI agents “own” koi’s because now anytime we say “we really should be doing this” we try to set it up on the spot.

The “downside” here is that I do occasionally get busy, and if I’m the only one who can approve or unstick one of these bots, it just keeps harassing me until it gets done. This is a sign generally that I need to hire someone to own a set of bots.

Another downside is that if the agent goes rogue on the payroll you'll have a lot of angry humans and possibly major legal problems also.

Embezzlement is much, much older than LLMs.

What worries me most are questions like this: these autonomous AI employees or automations - it doesn't change the essence - consume a lot of LLM tokens. Please tell me, how do you pay for this? Do you use, for example, the Anthropic or OpenAI API directly, or do you connect, for example, a Codex subscription?

If you use a bajillion tokens your economical approach is to self host.

Our control panel is on a server but individual agents actually are run on anyone’s machine. This allows us to use the native harnesses including subscriptions. Yes it uses a lot more tokens, but i have have Claude $200, OpenAI $200, and SuperGrok Heavy $300 (or whatever it is called) that includes Cursor Ultra. My machine runs most of them, but some other team members have agents running on their machines using 1-2 $200/mo subs.

I would say this setup probably costs us about $1,000/month total. (I’m excluding traditional engineering use of LLMs from this number. This is the cost of all the “AI employees”.

One reason we did it this way was to use subs.

Do I understand correctly that by using your machine and Claude Code or something like it you are avoiding API pricing?

I do the same thing with my subscriptions. Haven't checked the math lately but it seemed more cost effective in the past.

At $DAYJOB we do something very similar shape-wise. I wonder - it sounds like you have a dedicated agent comms plane? In our case we found that the easiest and most straightforward was to just use our default company chat app directly for this. Because most of the context that the agent workers need to do work is there, but also, it’s just much easier for teams to conceptualise an agent colleague if it just hangs out in their channels.

What do you do here, and how’s it going?

We do have a control panel, but it’s in effect a server that has things in a database. All chats, tasks, assignments are all there. This felt easier to debug and manage versus putting it all in slack, although we considered it. I don’t think anything we are doing is particularly “fancy”, but basically one agent sends a message to another one. It saves the message in the db, then adds the message to that other bot same as any other user chat. We have an internal website where anyone in the company can see the bits they are authorized to see and can see all chats. These AI workers are single threaded, but we see that as more of a feature than a bug (minimize complexity). They all work their way through a shared task list, which is just another table in our remote server sqllite.

The first ASI will use a vast army of middle managers as it's neurons. We won't be fighting terminators, we'll be submitting TPS reports to skynet.

we direct them to build as much software as possible

That's not a cure-all. Sometimes not writing software is the better choice.

Is this actually cost-effective versus hiring a few humans? Seems like a huge amount of tokens in use.

The whole premise of AI is to replace the human in the loop. People who go out of their way to set up this kind of stuff rather than just hiring a person dont even think about just hiring a person.

I think it's more of an experiment at this point. We don't know whether it's viable or not.

So here is an excellent example and interesting race condition that is developing in AI applications and venture-backed startups: what is truly AI-resilient enough to invest millions of dollars in a "land grab"--when the land is literally falling away with each passing day.

There is no doubt that AI will be helping to run businesses. But, there is also little doubt that existing businesses will have the wherewithal to develop the proprietary tools they need to do this work--without needing to buy it from others.

With respect to scope, it is not an overstatement to say that developing trust in AI tools enough to allow them free reign over critical business workflows may be a bridge too far. Look at self-driving car technology--that last 10% is really, really hard. So adoption will be slow and methodical.

There are no secrets. The basic model for starting and running a business (or a project) is straightforward. I like many of you have developed my own models (using AI assistance) for doing this and have been testing for months. And I like many of you have 30+ years of small business experience to back up my models.

This says nothing about the R&D happening at every major corporate & professional software services company in the world right now using the same AI tools to build their own solutions--let alone the enterprises who would be customers doing exactly the same thing.

So there is an enormous amount of competition and what I am calling a "race condition" between the crowd trying to disrupt professional services with AI-developed software and the crowd already in professional services software e.g. SAP and business in general that is doing the exact same thing--with more capable tools, more staff and much more R&D funding.

For the big companies, it's a race to survive.

Investors in startups have a tough decision to make on these small startups that have so little moat and so little prior knowledge and experience.

As an angel investor myself, I am skeptical of investing in any kind of software right now--and maybe forever.

On the plus side, every freelancer now has the power (and responsibility) to optimize their own offerings.

It's going to be very, very interesting...

There is one big wrinkle in existing firms trying to adopt the kind of near-full AI business automation mentioned here: internal people and groups will strongly resist it as it's an existential threat to their interests. See what happened at Meta as an example.

To bypass this, the company would pretty much have to run a parallel AI org alongside their main human one, but at that point they are almost on even footing with startups in a lot of ways, as anything the AI org builds is orthogonal to the existing human business. And you probably won't have a competent and extremely motivated founder spearheading it all.

The example of the plant watering business is the hellscape future where humans have to deal with agents bugging them to sell them their services constantly. We're already seeing the first hints of this with iLands.

And the "hiring technicians" thing... great, humans on call for robots isn't the future I want.

Next run a country. Then run the world.

>>This is why we’re releasing Pion today. Pion is available as a research preview. If you have an existing business or an interesting business idea you want to hand off to AI, please sign up on our waitlist to get access. We’re excited to run many more businesses, and through them, contribute significantly more insights on frontier model capabilities.

Why on God's earth why?

Can't you just unleash your AI to "create existing or interesting business ideas" firstplace?

They can't. Nor can OpenAI or Anthropic. If they could create real economic value using their models, they would. Replacing coders is the best they got. Or solving super niche mathematical conjectures.

I assume the similarity to the word Prion is intentional.

I keep waiting for the post explaining that this is a joke

Well the name Pion translates to Pawn in French. So that's a good start.

The thing we considered the most troubling was whether AIs could autonomously acquire resources by running businesses.

So we decided to build that to validate and confirm our fears.

I get your point, but it’s obvious that everybody is going to do this. So building a benchmark isn’t likely to directly move capabilities. OTOH it might give some good signals on required changes in training recipes.

People are still debating the liabilities associated with AI development.

If your agent hacks the CIA, people want to blame the AI lab.

but...

If your agent spends $100k on tokens, then thats a user error. If your agent spends $10m on a shopping spree, then that is also a user error?

My definition of AGI is a computer that can support itself, just turn it on, and it'll earn enough money to pay the server's electricity bills, hire people to maintain and expand its servers, and even improve its own algorithms.

I'd love to see someone try to run one that can meet 100% of the world's demand for remote works.

How’s that going to work when everyone turns one on and they’re all driving the profit margin to almost zero?

Well, by "computer" we're of course talking about colocated equipment with real capital costs. The data center operators are the equivalent of the people selling shovels to the gold rush prospectors.

Expect the 6AM layoff email to get rid of all meatbags, sent by the agent.

J/K, scary as several studies have indicated they werent able to keep a vending machine profitable. Anyway, ...

I do think a large amounf of tasks can be automated, though i believe supervision remains necessary for most. Especially when process can be externally influenced by injection. People can be influenced, but are (slightly) more judgemental

Waitlist btw: https://andonlabs.com/pion#waitlist

Admittedly these are out of order, but these are both sentences in this blog post:

The thing we considered the most troubling was whether AIs could autonomously acquire resources by running businesses.

Today Andon is releasing Pion, an agent designed to run any company fully autonomously.

I’m starting to understand the torment nexus mentions…

It’s the story of how open AI and Anthropic were founded: “AI is probably going to destroy humanity, so we must be the ones to develop it because we’ll do it safely”. Edit: Which makes their “someone hold us back!” calls even more ironic.

I think it's a legal issue.

If you don't develop killer AI then no one will legislate against it and someone else will create it and do evil.

If you create killer AI you can try to instigate legislation, but the legislators may not agree to help.

Necessity is the mother of invention, or you know, all of our laws and regulations.

Isn't Andon Labs the SF startup that burned a bunch of money having AI run a shop into the ground?

That's the startup, though the SF market store is still running and open. It looks like their AI-run cafe in Sweden is still running for now as well.

well, not THAT well https://andonlabs.com/cafe

Meanwhile, I can't even get Astra to consistently re-use the same font-size across all of my HTML page headings+subheadings.

There's just no world where this actually results in a stable, respected business. It will be death by a thousand bad impressions, mistakes and oversights. Yeah, you can automate everything. That doesn't mean it's being done well.

That's not to say this might not be something feasible in 2-3 years from now, but we're still a long ways away.

People said Devin, the AI coding agent, was garbage in 2024. Now it's weird if an agent isn't writing 99% of your code.

So you're right to be skeptical as of September 2026. But September 2028? It might just be weird to run companies without AI management.

I don’t think this is true at all. Maybe if you have an agent writing some of your code it will be 99% because its so verbose but I don’t think the modal software engineer is a vibecoder.

If you think that all instances of using AI to write code is vibe coding and you can't even spell model you might not last much longer

I think this is an uncharitable misinterpretation of the parent comment. I took “modal engineer” to mean “the statistical mode of engineers”, not a misspelling of “model engineer”. Which means I think you’re in agreement that using AI to write code is not necessarily vibe coding and that vibe coding is not what the majority (mode) are doing.

But I may be wrong.