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Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

andonlabs.com

391–400 of 451 posts

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

#391

Isn't Andon Labs the SF startup that burned a bunch of money having AI run a shop into the ground?

This seems like one of those ideas that is intentionally ahead of its time. All of the "Real-world" demos they have are deeply unprofitable, but have drummed up excitement and news coverage (and investor money, likely).

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

#392
post #344

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.

>> Most of the bottleneck in business isn't building the things or sourcing, it's mostly advertising/sales. That may also change with llms - they can help the buyers compare every product available, and find the best.

So due to self-bias, people who shop absently with LLMs will mostly be the ones buying products from LLM-run businesses. Fitting.

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

#393

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.

[deleted]

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

#394
post #374
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Most of the bottleneck in business isn't building the things or sourcing, it's mostly advertising/sales. That may also change with llms - they can help the buyers compare every product available, and find the best.

Is the LLM going to order all the shower caps produced by Chinese factories and try them out?

You're thinking about this all wrong. Just step into this cranial MRI scanning booth to livestream the structure and composition of your skull straight to the cloud, then we'll fire up 10000 agents to find the perfect cap for you.

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

#395

> 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.

I was happy surprised to see the Swedish term "skräckblandad förtjusning" in the article. I've always loved that expression and I think it's a wonderful explanation to this seemingly crazy behavior.

"Wow, that's terrifying! So exciting!"

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

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can create more shit than humans could ever consume I’m sure, but then why? What new ventures/opportunities is it opening for most humans?

Great point, the shit is going to get more pervasive for sure. But also, there is the enablement of new fields of original and creative endeavor: I think we can already see this in some of the brilliant and useful apps being made, often by solo 'teams'. I don't want to play down the harmful effects AI, but the flip side is that the opportunities for original ideas are many and varied. Paul Graham wrote about taste be…

I get the feeling a lot of people who build things with AI think they are in on the ground floor of something when in fact they are on the top floor.

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

#398

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.

It's still spam when a human does it.

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

#399

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…

> We have layers of management, which we actually have found helpful

Interesting discovery.

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

#400
Meanwhile, I can't even get Astra to consistently re-use the same font-size across all of my HTML page headings+subheadings.

There's just no world where this actually results in a stable, respected business. It will be death by a thousand bad impressions, mistakes and oversights. Yeah, you can automate everything. That doesn't mean it's being done well.

That's not to say this might not be something feasible in 2-3 years from now, but we're still a long ways away.

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