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For fun last month I decided to see if i could build a fully functional business of agents. It's 175 python files (employees) build up of internal roles within
by neom 1y ago
For fun last month I decided to see if i could build a fully functional business of agents. It's 175 python files (employees) build up of internal roles within those files (tasks). So what I have is 175 employees who are able to pass output around each other, understand the work, complete the work, understand where to send the output. The whole system has the ability to do around 275 base processes (same as a business at > 100MM arr) I started on a Friday afternoon and slept a little bit and finished on Monday afternoon. After I had it running I sent it to a VC friend to show them and they sent back the deck of a startup that is in stealth with $25MM doing it the exact same way. With 1 month and a designer and an engineer, I could have it mvp functional for anyone to use ($40k?). Times are changing. Here is kinda how it looks: https://s.h4x.club/9ZuO4XQR https://s.h4x.club/9ZuO4XQR / https://s.h4x.club/jkuB8ZED https://s.h4x.club/jkuB8ZED (I've evolved it a little since this, and if you're an engineer and look at my files and think, this guy is a moron: I know!:))
- literalAardvark 1y agoEngineers who would judge someone's frontier MVP like that are not even worth worrying about. This is epic work. Would love to see more of it but I guess you're gonna take it the startup route since you have connections. Best of luck.
- neom 1y agoThanks!!! I decided not to build it, that space is already too busy, there is a startup with $25MM in stealth, who else is in stealth? On top of that, this method will get stale very very quickly, foundation model businesses are just too hard to work around right now, it's a silly way to do business. My magic is I've build a startup from scratch to over 400 people and watched what they do, it won't be long till that isn't worth much.
- wslh 1y agoYour message doesn't make it clear what those 175 employees can realistically accomplish on their own. For instance, you might have an SEO expert on the team, but that alone won't guarantee top search engine rankings. There are countless SEO professionals and tools (human or AI-powered), and even having the best one doesn't eliminate the underlying challenge: business competition. LLMs, like any other tool, don’t solve that fundamental problem.
- neom 1y agoNo employees accomplish anything on their own in the real world, all employees are part of a team. That's why I designed a business strategy and analysis layer (over half the system, in fact), with web tools and connections to all of the insights systems (like mix panel). I built the exact same thing I build at digitalocean but instead of humans I defined them with code, digitalocean runs just fine, so does my LLM system. The whole system I build is self learning, insight gathering and refinement. Competition is for losers, the best teams win via the best insights.
- vasco 1y agoWhy 175? Why not 5 billion employees? Why not 20000 companies in parallel? Why not simulate 5 earth's worth of history and setup a full universe of worlds full of startups? This sounds like those guys in social media that one up each other with their bed times and end up saying they wake up every day at 2am to meditate and work out
- neom 1y agoBecause that was the scope of the project. When we got to 400 employees at DigitalOcean I noticed I thought it was really half that, original I just sat out to make the marketing and strategy team, but got bit carried away, the fp&a team was the only group I really struggled with, my cfo skills are very meh.
- vasco 1y ago1 single agent with a good model is going to beat that approach every single time. The same way Whatsapp needed only 55 people (and probably the last hires were not needed for the outcome) to sell for $19B. And other companies have existed for hundreds of years and had thousands of people work for them and never even made $100M.
- yusina 1y ago> understand the work LLMs don't understand. It's mind-boggling to me that large parts of the tech industry think that. Don't ascribe to them what they don't have. They are fantastic at faking understanding. Don't get me wrong, for many tasks, that's good enough. But there is a fundamental limit to what all this can do. Don't get fooled into believing there isn't.
- neom 1y agoWhat is the limit my system will reach?
- rzz3 1y agoThats an interesting word to pick on. Understanding still means something here in a relative sense.
- zenburnmyface 1y agomeh. I feel this is just a linguistic shortcut, similar to how _trained_ biologists can talk about a species or organism evolving some trait. Of course the organism isn't _really_ evolving with any goal in mind, but that's clear to the speaker and audience. Whether or not LLMs understand (very unlikely), it's clear what we mean by an LLM "understanding": has the context + prior training to make reasonable predictions. But no one wants to write that each time.
- yusina 1y agoThat's an interesting take and in fact one I could get behind. But I'm afraid that most folks using the term mean it more literally than you describe.
- philistine 1y agoExactly. The whole point of all the LLM companies is to get grandma to use it. If you say understand about a technology with the desired appeal of Facebook, then you’re talking to everyone and words matter extra hard.
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- immibis 1y agoDoes this experiment do anything useful or does it just soak up investor money? Not that there's anything wrong with the latter.
- neom 1y agoThe only investor is me. I build it on my own over a weekend, on my own. I just wanted to confirm it can be done therefore will exist, that is all. Personally, I decided not to peruse it because I am old and lazy and don't want to compete against a16z and sequoia funded adderall filled teenagers.
- immibis 1y agoI meant the one that investors are paying for.
- neom 1y agoIt professes to be able to do the business side of business (not literal product or technology development) - they did not have any agents to code or design, mine didn't either but has agents that can call tools, I don't think mine can build a product, but I believe mine can build, operate, and grow a business around one, I presume theirs will be able to also.
- acchow 1y ago> The whole system has the ability to do around 275 base processes It’s incredibly easy to get LLMs to do a lot of stuff that seems convincing. They are literally trained for plausibility.
- robbomacrae 1y agoIs anyone else annoyed that VC's are out there sharing decks of startups in stealth with potential competitors? How often does this happen?
- eterm 1y agoI would be annoyed along with you if I thought the post was true.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoIt's not a lie, it is just vibe posting
- iammrpayments 1y agoSounds really interesting but I have no idea what’s the purpose of having 175 “employees” here? Maybe it is a smart way to sell the idea you’re going to replace 175 people if you buy the product? Could just buy chatgpt instead I guess, but a chatbot doesn’t sound as cool as 175 employees.
- neom 1y agoI would love to know how to do it another way if you have any ideas, I'm sadly not experienced or intelligent enough to think of another way to do it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jprokay13 1y agoI’ve been floating around a similar set of ideas and it’s been very fun (if not all that useful yet) to build Did you try taking it one step further where a “recruiter” has to hire the engineers after a screening process? I wonder if this could get you even better AI engineers
- catlifeonmars 1y agoThis really sounds like a “faster horse” scenario and totally misses the point of the GPs comment: why shackle yourself to modeling the way humans work?
- neom 1y agoHumans modeled time, and morning and night are real.
- catlifeonmars 1y agoHave you thought about what emergent properties might arise if you weren’t prescriptive about the organizational structure or task specialization?
- neom 1y agoMy thought is, it would be a dysfunctional system, like this: https://futurism.com/professors-company-ai-agents https://futurism.com/professors-company-ai-agents I was just building a tool people can use to do the business side of product and technology. I wanted it to do basic tasks i KNOW a business needs at all scales, not pretend to do whatever "AI" thinks an employee does.
- catlifeonmars 1y agoAh I see. Basically a skeuomorphism for bizops?
- neom 1y agofuckin' cool description, never would have put skeuomorphism there myself, but it's apt, nice.
- mucha 1y agoCool. What goods/services does your business provide to customers?
- neom 1y agoGoods and services are a byproduct of business, business is primarily concerned with systems and processes that facilitate value exchange, so my tool, can work with a user, to build a business, not a product or a service. If you bake cupcakes, my tool can get you 100 people at your door, it cannot open the door or provide the cakes.