Launch HN: Halluminate (YC S25) – Simulating the internet to train computer use

This is very interesting. I think a lot of people may be quick to overlook the value of such simulators when thinking about AI agents at the extremes. (Either they're not good enough to trust or they're so good they'll leapfrog over any economic value here.)

My own experience makes me lean toward thinking that the truth is somewhere in the middle in this situation, and that simulators like these will be valuable. I've been experimenting a lot with computer use on my website Bingeclock, passing through different prompts along the lines of "make a movie marathon based on X." The newest agents are consistently impressive, while also being consistently imperfect in surprising and interesting ways.

Whether or not all the labs are already running this kind of thing internally for themselves, you would know better than I. But it's an idea that seems very useful nonetheless. Congratulations on the launch!

We agree that as a demo flight booking is probably overused.

However, in talking with my AI Labs, their perspective on flight booking is a little different. "Solving" flight booking requires the AI agent to solve a LOT of hard problems. Namely, personalization, context, weighing multiple options, interacting with the UI, math, then wrapping that all up into a coherent response. The thought process is IF a computer use agent is able to solve flight booking well, then we will have developed many other powerful primitives that will scale to other problems.

So as a standalone use case, I'm inclined to agree this might not be where the most agent traction is seen. However, as a research/capability goal, there are some generalizations that could apply to other very important use cases.

A few common ones we've heard

Engineering: QA automation is huge, closes the loop on "fully automated" software engineering if another computer use system is able to click around and help identify bugs in software

Deep Research: probably the biggest use case for computer use right now, finding information that isn't easily indexed or accessible via APIs.

General RPA: This is industry specific, but lots of just everyday knowledge work involves data transfer between many platforms that sucks and no one wants to do. A great example is Epic in Healthcare. SO much labor is employed just to write and read information from this desktop app that isn't easily accessible. Imagine a computer use system that can do automated data pulls at scale for legacy desktop apps. This is a huge huge use case, and something that we're excited to try and improve with simulators of things like Epic, SAP, Salesforce, etc.

Consumer: Lots of just general everyday tasks. I would recommend checking out https://yutori.com/ if you're interested in seeing how a computer use agent can be helpful in your day to day. Its fun for daily news reports, restaurant reservation checking, etc.

Computer use agents are starting to perform well on websites/apps that are in their training distribution, but still struggle a lot when dealing with tasks outside their distribution. A big reason why is because many more niche/enterprise applications are really hard to test on in the real world, hence the need for sims!

re: labs doing this internally. They definitely are! However, the scale of sims buildout is going to be massive, probably many orders of magnitude above what we have today. We think it makes sense for one central player to do this because a really good simulator can be used by multiple people at once. It doesn’t make sense for every AI lab/company to build out their own environments if an industry standard catalog exists.

Not too late to change the logo to a friendly piece of halloumi :) (best i could find from a quick google image search https://www.redbubble.com/i/poster/Halloumi-by-PaulSDesign/1...)