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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

#231

Post by 2001zhaozhao »

jschveibinz wrote: post #220

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 t…

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.

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

#232

Post by idopmstuff »

dools wrote: post #212
j2kun wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect you mean this as an insult, but it's not too far off. That was one of the main points of the business - each one is simple to run, so I can manage a lot of them. And that was before AI got really good.

Anyway, I'm sure the app you makes that lets you get a phone number that can send image messages is very complex, and I think that's very nice.

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

#233

Post by idiotsecant »

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…

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.

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

#234

Post by mchusma »

ianberdin wrote: post #206
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…

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?

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.

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

#235

Post by noir_lord »

lnenad wrote: post #222
ianberdin wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a point where those two lines do cross but with them effectively subsidising token cost by burning debt, it's further away than it will be at some point.

That said I use local only models purely because I don't want to use remote models, never having to think about token costs is worth it and no one is training anything on my data either.

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

#238

Post by tantalor »

owebmaster wrote: post #223
tantalor wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

#239

Post by jgilias »

mchusma wrote: post #224
jgilias wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 sam…

What harnesses do you use? Ours is basically Claude in a box. There’s some complexity because of that, but the advantage is that it’s very flexible and people who have a bunch of Claude-shaped skills can just basically give those to an agent.

I’m thinking to take a deeper look at Pi. I’m really liking that project.

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

#240

Post by nouveaux »

idopmstuff wrote: post #221
trencedamp wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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…

> 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.

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