601–610 of 648 posts
Isn't Andon Labs the SF startup that burned a bunch of money having AI run a shop into the ground?
That's the startup, though the SF market store is still running and open. It looks like their AI-run cafe in Sweden is still running for now as well.
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Well that's not very nice! And for the record, I only buy brands that sell high-quality products. Marketing and operations I can fix, but if the stuff they sell is no good, there's no point.
How do you identify them and choose what to invest in? I guess you do not really have access to their technical specifics or sales volumes.
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…
Very cool! What's been the hardest part? Have you successfully automated non-trivial communications? (for example with prospects, customers, vendors, partners, etc.)
> maybe an agent starting a business from scratch would have a better time
This describes the project I've been working on since last year, with agents in company roles, deciding on strategy, collaborating, and making progress (admittedly nonlinear). Some parts of the platform are stronger than others. So far the company agents have developed a company strategy and plans for executing it, launched a website and blog, and built and operate two products, one free and one paid.
But I would be wary of using a third party like Pion as a platform for running a business. It's one thing to know that your prompts and responses will be used to train models in the future, by companies that have a huge sea of relatively unstructured data. But it's another to hand over to another company every aspect of your strategy and operations, available to that company in real time and structured in such a way it's quick and easy to understand what you're up to and where you are going. Especially if it's being offered for free and at scale. With a free offering, value creation will likely come from either customer data or from escalating prices once customers are locked in. And even if neither of those happen, you now have a huge single point of failure for your entire organization. Seems like there are lots of strategic risks in there for the users.
If you have an agent that can run a business, then… why not… run a business? Why does YC bother financing startups led by founders, if the AI can just do it? (This startup proudly remarks that it’s backed by YC)
I own a bookstore and about 90% of back office work is automated by software and AI. Probably most fulfilling project I've worked on in the past few years after taking a long break from tech.
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 ye…
People said Devin, the AI coding agent, was garbage in 2024. Now it's weird if an agent isn't writing 99% of your code. So you're right to be skeptical as of September 2026. But September 2028? It might just be weird to run companies without AI management.
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It's probably 99.99%. 99% means I write 1 line for every 100 AI lines. It's probably 1 human line for every 10,000 AI lines right now.
What is you are writing, what is the problem domain? What does need tens of thousands of lines of code written each day? Because 100 lines of (debugged, reviewed) code per day is a good speed for seasoned software engineer. I assume that you can produce more than 100 lines of something per day as a prompt. So, what is the problem domain that requires one to write several thousands of lines of code per day?
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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…
You mean seed the context with random information then ask it to ideate on something totally unrelated? Like you want it to figure out how to get som information in front of potential customers in a cost effective way but first you give it articles on Witchita, Kansas, the curling iron, and List of Italian Brands?
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> 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.
It's a terrible definition of intelligence. Intelligence is far more than just predicting things based on a massive set of similar things. We do do pattern recognition, but I don't need to have seen 10k dogs to be able to recognize a dog. And it's not a difference of degree, either. "Meaning" is something I am able to derive from my experiences, and it is not something an LLM does or will ever be able to do (nor is t…
Your other point that humans need very few examples for learning vs. what LLMs need is an interesting one. A few researchers talked about this very thing on the most recent episode of Dwarkesh's podcast.
My own view is that it seems unfair to compare an LLM's training with just what a human gets over the course of a lifetime, because our brains have been trained by a billion years of evolution for pattern matching. I'm not at all confident that AI models won't catch up.
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…