> 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.
Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
331–340 of 378 posts
Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
#332Interesting 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…
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…
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...
Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
#333Next run a country. Then run the world.
I saw a Twitter guy advocating for AI senators. Said the voters would vote on the prompt.
I'm not gonna lie, would be an upgrade from some senators. I heard ol' Mitch is back today, though. I didn't think he was alive.
Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 re…
At some point you or the agent has to pick the one it thinks will land with the target market.
Some markets you can brute force, like mass-mailing and online display ads, and hope you find something that converts sooner or later.
So I'd suggest people find areas to play in where that doesn't really work. Where selection cost and changing cost are high, and sales is played on extra-hard mode. (Tricky thing is... those sales are hard, of course.)
If you want to beat the model you have to go where feedback isn't fast enough for it to converge on the thing that resonates with actual people before they write it off.
Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
#335Correct 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.
They're doing pretty well on OnlyFans though. You know what they say? Start where you are you. If the only way you can make connections initially is through AI thirst traps, and you're really good at it, then... you got your ins.
Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
#336Interesting 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…
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 th…
>Part of the issue is that the worst kind of people are already head over heels excited about this.
This. Not only this but it has expanded this pool of people. Now you don't just have to be malicious, you can just be lazy and excited about not having to lift a finger, and/or you could just be dumb and excited about doing things you were never able to before.
Competent, well meaning people need not apply. Grifters, sloths and bozos will do just fine.
Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
#337[flagged]
Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
#338Correct 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.
> skills/unique_and_interesting.md
Yes, I’m sure the thousands of LLMs running the exact same instructions will all be unique.
Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
#339Pion is going to get scammed, and it will be funny to watch.
Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
#340When I see stuff like this, I am really starting to be concerned. How long will it take until AI runs something security critical autonomously? The temptation to save costs by doing this will be too much in the long run.