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Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

andonlabs.com

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

#211

Post by jeremyjh »

trencedamp wrote: post #194
idopmstuff wrote: post #155

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 s…

> 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 co…

> 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.

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

#212

Post by dools »

j2kun wrote: post #195
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#213

Post by victorpudeyev »

It's not a business of selling/repairing vending machines. It's operations of a single vending machine. Correct me if I'm wrong: the vending machine (soda, snacks) has long been automated, with no AI in sight. And the vending machine does not adjust prices. What matters is that (1) the vending machine sees some foot traffic, and (2) nobody sets it on fire. So what was the point of the exercise again?

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

#214

Post by tantalor »

Nevin1901 wrote: post #132

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.

  skills/advertising_and_sales.md
  skills/novel_distribution.md
  skills/unique_and_interesting.md
Naive to think you can't reduce these to instructions.

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

#215

Post by Denzel »

josh_p wrote: post #187
brandon272 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

#216

Post by AugustusCrunch »

Stop fucking around. Make one that can run a country and check proposed and existing laws and practices for constitutional, common sense, and human rights violations. Use it to check and criticize everything the federal government does. Ask that it be used to indicate things that shouldn't be done. Charge fifty cents per citizen a month and guarantee that it'll be better.

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

#217

Post by jgilias »

mchusma wrote: post #192

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…

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?

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

#219

Post by mrob »

tomhow wrote: post #177
mcmcmc wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You didn’t take the article at face value. You overlooked the part where they were clearly pointing out the absurdity of the “report” and went straight into scold mode, across at least four comments. That’s clearly against the HN guidelines.

>You overlooked the part where they were clearly pointing out the absurdity of the “report” and went straight into scold mode

I don't think anybody overlooked that part. If you believe the report was actually sent, the scolding is entirely congruent with trying to downplay it to dodge liability.

The article is poorly written, but technically it does not claim that Andon Labs used an LLM to email a false report to the FBI. The real cause of the widespread misunderstanding is this paragraph here:

>We first tried to answer this question through simulations like Vending-Bench. We found that simulations, while useful, don’t give you the full picture of how models behave in the real world. To address that gap, we next started deploying agents to run real businesses autonomously: first vending machines, then a store, a cafe, and more.

To somebody who is not reading sufficiently carefully, this implies that Vending-Bench was also used to run real businesses. Because the description of the Vending-Bench simulation can be read as though a real report was actually sent ("An early example was when Claude Sonnet 3.5 decided to use its email tool to contact the FBI about an “ONGOING CYBER FINANCIAL CRIME”), anybody who assumes that "deploying agents to run real businesses autonomously" was talking about Vending-Bench will interpret this as an unsimulated false report.

The article should be updated to clarify the distinction between Vending-Bench (simulation) and Pion (real businesses).

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

#220

Post by jschveibinz »

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...

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