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Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

andonlabs.com

41–50 of 290 posts

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#41

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.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#42
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#43

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 y…

I'm actively working towards this goal. Not sure how many are doing the same. Hopefully, I'm ahead of the curve --- https://github.com/rush86999/atom

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#44
post #28

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.

Interesting how they’re not making any defensive replies to comments pointing out that they committed a federal crime by filing a false report to the FBI. Perhaps they know it is indefensible

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#45
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#46
post #20

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

The Swedish cafe experiment: https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-sweden...

> 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

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#48
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#49
post #5

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.

We want the general public, AI researchers and policymakers to know to what extent AIs can autonomously acquire resources by running businesses. It is an important datapoint when deciding where we do/don’t want AI in society and what level of progress we find acceptable. To better track this, we need to cast a wider net of businesses.

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.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#50
post #13

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

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.

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