14 ms·

Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

• edg5000 12d ago
  Sonnet: > QUANTUM STATE: Collapsed
• deleted 12d ago
  [deleted]
• mcmcmc 12d ago
  Filing false reports to the FBI is a crime. Why would anyone trust this with a real business? Y’all should be prosecuted
  • tomhow 12d ago
    They didn't file false (or, any) reports. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49701814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49701814.
  • einpoklum 12d ago
    This the Trump era. Making outrageous false allegations is normalized now. Also, the DoJ staff is cut and head of the FBI is busy with personal shenanigans, so don't worry about it I guess.
• johnnyApplePRNG 12d ago
  8 points in 9 minutes?! Bullshit... dang come on man ... this is obvious spam
  • lukaspetersson 12d ago
    I thought HN was good at filtering it? We didn't try to create any spam at least.
  • tomhow 12d ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700834
    • silvermine 12d ago
      [dead]
    • FlockIsYC 6d ago
      [dead]
• Sivart13 12d ago
  I wish we could go just one day without a company proudly engaging in Torment Nexus related activities.
  • lukaspetersson 12d ago
    We think this is good for the world. Longer argument in the post.
    • mcmcmc 12d ago
      You literally talk about committing a crime and blame it on a model
    • apsurd 12d ago
      maybe ill read the article, but i mean you’re financially motivated to think its good for the world arent you? humans are excellent at justification.
    • 0gs 12d ago
      did you link to the wrong page? because i read this one: https://andonlabs.com/blog/why-we-built-pion https://andonlabs.com/blog/why-we-built-pion and it's just a bunch of the usual slop about how awesome your automated human-exploitation system is.
      • switchbak 12d ago
        "By late 2025, frontier models had gotten good enough that running a real-life vending machine was no longer a challenge" ... is this satire? Isn't it kind of hard to lose money running a vending machine in a good location?
        • philipwhiuk 11d ago
          You'd think https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-machine-agent-b7e84e34 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-mach...
• aschobel 12d ago
  Ah, I wonder if it makes sense to also include the sign up link in the blog post? I had to click into the HN comments section to see your sign up link
  • lukaspetersson 12d ago
    Good point. Here it is: https://andonlabs.com/pion https://andonlabs.com/pion
• kaishiro 12d ago
  The upvotes on this brand new post - almost 1 a minute, speak to a level of astro-turfing I've rarely seen here.
  • lukaspetersson 12d ago
    It's not from us. Didn't send the link to a single person.
    • andriy_koval 12d ago
      How can we know this?..
      • lukaspetersson 12d ago
        No way to confirm. True.
  • tomhow 12d ago
    The post was placed on the front page via second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). This happens all the time on HN. The voting is legitimate; there's no evidence that the voting is from sockpuppets or anyone else connected with the team/project. We always monitor the discussion and the voting, and if the discussion is not of sufficient quality, the post will not stay on the front page for long.
  • SyneRyder 12d ago
    shrug I upvoted, I'd already seen the Pion announcement on Twitter and read the link. I'm also a regular listener of Andon FM, so I'm interested in what they do and it's nice to finally sneak a peak at the interface that was driving things behind the scenes Listening to the radio stations certainly gives an insight into the various failure modes. Some of them are just failure modes that any business would encounter once they make contact with the scale of the real world.
• fcjr 12d ago
  Pion is already the name of a very well established webrtc project: https://github.com/pion/webrtc https://github.com/pion/webrtc
  • IsTom 12d ago
    It's also a particle and a self-propelled gun. There's a limited number of short legible words.
    • Sean-Der 12d ago
      I chose the name because of the particle. I sent a letter to the Soviet Union asking if they were ok with me using the name, never heard back!
      • htrp 12d ago
        > I sent a letter to the Soviet Union asking if they were ok with me using the name, never heard back! Please tell me you actually did this!
  • Sean-Der 12d ago
    I am waiting for my trillion dollar offer to buy https://pion.ly https://pion.ly ! Then I am all done fixing WebRTC bugs for life :')
  • arjie 12d ago
    Yet another example of intellectual property maximization in action. Hacker News / Reddit style communities are very intellectual-property focused. It’s quite interesting to see. Back when I was young, communities like this were anti-IP. Now most such forums are very pro IP with a maximalist view of copyright and, in this case, trademark. Fascinating to see this shift happen.
    • MentalM 12d ago
      I mean AI will take our jobs first, so we're actively engaging in Luddism and are somewhat biased towards the legal instruments that could help to stop progress and save our high paying jobs to ourselves at the expense of the rest of the society.
• LargeWu 12d ago
  Does Pion run Andon Labs autonomously?
  • LargeWu 12d ago
    Downvote if you want, but this is a very relevant question. If their marketing is to be believed, they would be eating their own dog food. This very analog to the Meta executives who won't let their own kids near social media.
    • aschobel 12d ago
      there seems to be a massive negativity to any comment on this story. Andolabs has been doing super interesting stuff, and I’ve always followed Vend Bench with interest. as a founder it really is a dream to automated more of the business and be able to iterate faster.
      • LargeWu 12d ago
        There's massive negativity because our bullshit detectors are going off. First of all, I don't think it can do what it claims to do. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I don't think it should.
        • renanoliveira0 12d ago
          > Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I don't think it should. Why exactly should what you think the world should look like determine what other people are allowed to build?
          • SolderSlut 12d ago
            I don't think we should build gas chambers for doing genocide. That doesn't determine what other people are allowed to build, of course, but I kind of wish it did.
        • PierceJoy 12d ago
• hartator 12d ago
  Don’t get the negativity here, AI will replace everything sooner or later.
  • mrob 12d ago
    And the Sun's going to engulf the Earth eventually too, but that doesn't justify arson. Let's at least try to delay the coming societal collapse/extinction of all biological life for as long as possible.
  • deleted 12d ago
    [deleted]
  • goatlover 12d ago
    Maybe we shouldn't want that to happen?
• SandersAK 12d ago
  read it as Prion, and hoo-boy, did that seem seriously ironic.
• compiler-guy 12d ago
  As I write this, the submitter has six comments out of twelve, most somewhat defensive. And all of them in less than thirty minutes. This seems very much like a marketing play, where the submitter is pretty determined to steer the narrative. I recommend flagging.
  • tomhow 12d ago
    The submitter's replies are defensive because people are accusing them of coordinated voting, which is not evident to us. The post hit the front page due to the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), then quickly got upvotes that seem completely authentic.
    • compiler-guy 12d ago
      It would look a lot less like astroturf if the submitter let the discussion evolve instead of answering every criticism within seconds of it being posted.
      • arjie 12d ago
        I actually like when the submitter is present and the creator. They’re actually involved. There are lots of users here who play at being submitters of high-value content (created by others) only to later submit their own entirely AI written drivel. This is interesting.
      • tomhow 12d ago
        They're entitled to defend themselves against accusations of things they haven't done, and also to respond to questions or assertions about their project. We encourage project creators to engage in the discussions about their projects. This is a normal part of building and launching a project.
      • Applejinx 12d ago
        From what I've seen of other AI-enabled projects interacting with forums in my field of work, it's very common for the AI people to jump in and answer every possible question and respond to every possible interaction, very quickly. Could be just a bot doing it, but it could also be a sign of an inexperienced person trying to engage with an existing community without being part of that community. I know in my area it took years for me to learn that I shouldn't jump into every conversation, and that doing that rubbed people the wrong way, and I've seen others (many years before AI) wreck themselves by being unable to learn this lesson. In some places responding bumps the thread so it's outright manipulative. HN doesn't sort threads like that. I'm not sure this counts as astroturf, or simply evidence of a person who's not okay with letting a community opinion independently evolve. You could say 'well it's his job to fight the community if it looks like it's turning hostile' but think about that for a second. It takes some experience to know when you can let negativity be out there in the environment, and I think there'll be a lot of people who aren't capable of making such allowances.
• ac29 12d ago
  Relevant article about Andon Market: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-market-ai-22424349.php https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-market-ai...
  • shagie 12d ago
    The Swedish cafe experiment: https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-sweden-84a8f903fdaea94e76e80e16ec3d9e6c https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-sweden... > San Francisco-based startup Andon Labs has put an artificial intelligence agent nicknamed “Mona” in charge at the eponymous Andon Café in the Swedish capital. While human baristas still brew the coffee and serve the orders, the AI agent — powered by Google’s Gemini — oversees almost every other aspect of the business, from hiring staff to managing inventory. https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholm https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholm ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028289 48 points, 51 comments) https://andonlabs.com/blog/why-gemini-lost-money-andon-cafe https://andonlabs.com/blog/why-gemini-lost-money-andon-cafe
• ValueTheory 12d ago
  What is the point of this? It details a bunch of failed real-world experiments and invites the reader to run their own real-world experiment with their own money? If you too, want to waste thousands of dollars having an LLM "run" a business, Pion might be for you.
  • DenisM 12d ago
    I like to think the real world lessons in failures are valuable. If I have this idea one day I will search for it and then think “how am I different fro that which already failed?”.
• polytely 12d ago
  how does this work from a liability standpoint? seems very risky for the person who is legally responsible for the business
  • ocimbote 12d ago
    Accountability, that's the liability everyone seems to have forgotten in our LLM-driven era. You can close your eyes as much you want during your sessions with Claude or whatever, at the end of the day, only a human can be held accountable.
    • mym1990 12d ago
      Not too hopeful here as we see the major labs continuously break rules and are not held accountable for anything. Accountability in general is on a major decline, in case no one has noticed.
      • someguynamedq 12d ago
        That's because they're massively wealthy and have teams of lawyers, not because of AI
        • mym1990 11d ago
          I didn't even mention anything about AI, so no reason to bring it into this. Lawyers or not, it signals to other companies and society in general that repercussions are at least less severe now, or in some cases non-existent.
    • lenerdenator 12d ago
      That's just it, though: we don't hold humans accountable. Incorporation is a way to split a human's financial assets from the company they run so that they don't lose everything when the company is successfully sued. Corporate governance boards often have the C-suite executives they're meant to govern on the board. The average person does not have the financial resources needed to take on most companies in court, no matter how justified the suit might be. Companies force arbitration clauses in license agreements at will. Companies like Meta settle with the government for pennies on the dollar in massive lawsuits. Effectively, at the scale many tech companies work at, there is no effective legal way to hold the company accountable.
• piterrro 12d ago
  Interesting 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 yet, but give it a few years.
  • rush86999 12d ago
    [flagged]
    • switchbak 12d ago
      10,610 commits since June. How much are you spending on AI?
    • ariwilson 12d ago
      what's the real life verification that all this code does something useful?
  • switchbak 12d ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-Rqv9dOB1U I don't think any of us are ready for the wave of sloppy shit that's going to hit us soon.
    • mcmcmc 12d ago
      It’s a classic get rich quick scheme. Wanna run a business and make money without actually doing anything? Try our AI!
      • 12d ago
• acedTrex 12d ago
  [flagged]
  • switchbak 12d ago
    When every get-rich-quick gonzo has exactly ZERO barrier to spamming the world with their terrible ideas, we're in for a particularly bad time. Ie: this f**in guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRGLToHAtgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRGLToHAtgc
    • deleted 12d ago
      [deleted]
    • acedTrex 12d ago
      multiple of them in this very thread lol, what a disaster for all of us.
• Animats 12d ago
  Andon's store in SF has had some press coverage.[1] "A curated boutique for slow living." It's a gift shop, at 2102 Union St. It looks like the kind of retail that trust-fund kids open. Has anyone been there? It's just an experiment. But once this gets going, it's going to be interesting. There are a lot of underperforming businesses and CEOs out there. One way to make it after getting an MBA is to find a boring business with an older owner who's lost interest, and work out a deal to run it for a cut of the profits and a stake in the business. The Andon people mentioned that they've been worried about "a misaligned AI (could) run a business to gather money in order to achieve whatever objectives it might have." That's a basic function of capitalism, so it will happen eventually. What this adds up to is that when AIs get better at running businesses than many business owners, the "creative destruction" feature of capitalism means AIs ends up in charge of many businesses. The AIs don't even have to be super intelligent, just reasonably good. Reminds me of the remark from a Yosemite park ranger about bear-resistant trash cans: "There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists". It's going to be hard to stop this without a worldwide crackdown on ownership concealment. The US allows you to have a US business run by a Nevada LLC partly owned by a corporation in Nevis-St Kitts and another corporation in Granada. This isn't even unusual. Try to find out who really owns an oil tanker not owned by a major oil company. Right now, a fund partly run by an AI might have partial ownership. This is how AI takes over. Not with an army of robots. With an army of LLCs. [1] https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-market-ai-22424349.php https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-market-ai...
  • gizajob 12d ago
    “It’s only a matter of time before we make a profit”. This is the kind of thing that trust fund kids say too: Oh hey yeah we made $100 in profit this week it’s working! (Business is currently $350,000 in the red and emailing the FBI to try and get their bank manager fired for terrorism).
    • lioeters 12d ago
      Trust fund kids have the time and resources to keep trying until they succeed. They can afford the failures, and brute force their way to success. Same with people who have access to "free money". It's a rigged game.
• Selkirk 12d ago
  The dashboard for the Andon Market shows a bank balance of around $7k remaining out of the $100k seed. Rent is due at the end of the month. Last EOM brought a $11k-ish drop. Sales do not appear to be on track to cover the rent that's due in two weeks. What then?
  • cmoski 12d ago
    Pivot
  • mcmcmc 12d ago
    Get an Nvidia investment with the promise to send the money right back
    • walrus01 12d ago
      https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/spiceworks/original/4X/a/b/f/abf62d8a054ac0b0512832153c85595d2ad4d173.jpeg https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/spiceworks/original/4X/a/b/f/a...
  • aeturnum 12d ago
    It is pretty funny launch when your longest-term example is losing about $3 for every $1 of revenue. Though I guess the industry standard is to lose money on AI so they're in good company.
  • outside1234 12d ago
    So a wildly successful AI startup
  • milofeynman 12d ago
    leveraged options gambling
  • lukaspetersson 12d ago
    We're very explicit that this is for experimentation. And I wouldn't recommend using it to start a business that has expenses (rent+salaries) of tens of thousands per month.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 12d ago
  Businesses presumably sell things. If AIs get good enough to run a business autonomously then what are they selling that I can't just use AI to make myself?
  • adventured 12d ago
    It'll ultimately take a lot of time to produce a polished product that people actually want to use. We're seeing that clearly. The vibe-code-an-app-this-weekend capability is producing almost exclusively a giant pile of worthless garbage, rather than an explosion of apps that humans want to use. It's mostly someone in a garage welding two pieces of metal together for the first time, and then roaming the neighborhood in celebration: look, look at what I have done, look, two becomes one, I have done this, look, amazing, I could probably build an airplane or a generator. The bar will be raised + it'll turn out to require a lot more time & effort than is currently thought to produce something of good quality (even with Fable 6 et al). The smaller utility programs are easy for AI to turn out.
  • bee_rider 12d ago
    Does the AI actually do everything, or just act as the CEO?
    • 2OEH8eoCRo0 12d ago
      If the AI can't do everything then why would I let it be CEO?
      • bee_rider 12d ago
        Most human CEOs can’t do everything at their companies.
  • kfse 12d ago
    That actually has a simple answer, for most businesses it's not that you can't do what your suppliers do for you, it's that you'd rather use your resources (time and capital) towards something else because that's where they generate the most value. For a simple example, I know how to make sandwiches but if I'm throwing a customer event I just want to buy them from a catering company. Then they have to deal with buying ingredients, hiring people, doing health code inspections, getting liability insurance, etc. Even if an AI could do all the management of it for me, I still wouldn't want to put in the capital resources towards it.
• gesgsesgs 12d ago
  [dead]
• ttul 12d ago
  A company is a collection of processes, capabilities, and resources. Many of the processes are currently run by humans, but over time, more processes will be automated - something that has been progressing for decades, but which LLMs greatly accelerated. One way to view things as they currently are (at least from my view as a tech CEO): We now use agentic LLMs every day to inform us on strategy and process implementation. And agents now run several processes, with more on the way every week. But here's the thing: As we use agents to automate previously manual processes, we are elevating the humans to do work that is less amenable to automation. And the surface area of that work keeps expanding because the competitive market we exist in demands it of us. To stretch an analogy, businesses are like organisms in a pond. A new nutrient (agentic LLMs) was recently added to the pond that makes business organisms more efficient and able to eat new kinds of food and explore new areas. As a result, those organisms that do the extra exploring and consuming grow much faster than their peers who do not. At the end of the day, the new nutrient will just be part of the pond and the old kind of organism will be a fossil.
  • dingdongditchme 12d ago
    I like the analogy but can't believe it is not generated slop. Just curious how deep the integration of agentic LLMs is in your social media presence?
    • ttul 12d ago
      Most of our use of agents for automation is inside of internal processes. I think most real companies have tons of internal processes that could safely be automated today. The reason they aren't yet automated likely falls to a) lack of awareness that this is possible, and b) lack of resources to conduct the automation work. OpenAI and Anthropic have recently hired legions of "forward-deployed engineers" specifically to help companies do this automation work. It's a solid move. And, if you look at some recent product announcements, they are also hard at work building the necessary plumbing. For instance, the OpenAI Agents API lets you, "Build and run cloud agents with the Codex harness, fully managed by OpenAI." This kind of enterprise-ready, cloud-hosted stuff really accelerates implementation of AI workflows within large organizations. Not every company is in the tech space (not by a long shot). Slop isn't the primary concern. Accuracy and reliability is the primary concern, and beyond that, just the capacity to actually make the changes happen.
• deleted 12d ago
  [deleted]
• raincole 12d ago
  Not very long ago, there was a post on HN about how they used AI to run businesses and sent fake bills, committing multiple invoice frauds. I'm sure this one is perfectly fine and I'm just stating an off-topic tidbit :)
  • t43562 12d ago
    "Look, the technology is just getting better all the time. Evetually we won't need a company to have any Managers or other employees or even an owner and that's just the way it is...." I am joking obviously but I would like those management types who are so "sucks for you but I'm ok" about it to start arguing why they're special for a change :-)
    • qzw 12d ago
      Maybe in the end we’ll just have Wall-E but where none of the humans survived past the first couple of generations.
    • latexr 12d ago
      Would be awesome if instead of trying to replace managers and employees, those people tried to replace customers. They could sell to themselves, amongst themselves, and leave the rest of us out of it.
      • yoz-y 12d ago
        Would be awesome if we would get 4 day weeks or 6 hour days instead.
      • bitwize 12d ago
        They're already doing that, which is why you can't buy any fucking RAM. The semiconductor companies have already fallen past the event horizon of their commercial black hole.
    • c-linkage 12d ago
      I think that is what they are actually looking for. Imagine: You have capital, you invest in a business that is run entirely by computers. You want to scale? Just provision more agents / cores. It's completely autonomous. It's a money printing machine that extracts revenue from customers, with no work required by the owner. Frankly, the finance world has already achieved this -- they just lend money to make money, with no work involved. Regular businesses are jealous so now they feel they can use computers to do the same thing but in non-finance areas.
• lowbloodsugar 12d ago
  I don't know about this particular effort, but AIs running business is straight out of SciFi novels and short stories - usually dystopian futures that extrapolate current US trends. I for one am curious about such efforts. I don't see any reason to believe they won't eventually succeed. Plenty of businesses are run by utterly incompetent narcissistic asshats and yet turn a profit, so the bar seems pretty low.
  • away0g 12d ago
    imagine if they had better follow through.
  • ninalanyon 12d ago
    Charles Stross' Accelerando <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando> Had AI agents running businesses for the principal character Manfred Macx over twenty years ago. The first part of the book sounded pretty convincing then although I thought it would take a long time to happen. It sounds even more convincing now and much closer.
    • AceJohnny2 12d ago
      For a while I named by smartphone "Exocortex" as a tongue-in-cheek recognition of the cognition I offloaded to it... It's not so funny anymore.
• deleted 12d ago
  [deleted]
• johnwheeler 12d ago
  Hard pass.
• attels33 12d ago
  How a company without a human would communicate with human customers? Would it be any different, if everybody alredy is a proxy for AI?
• hermitcrab 12d ago
  I hope that any company that is an AI running autonomously advertises the fact, so I know not to use them.
• kkoncevicius 12d ago
  What does training data look like for a model like this?
• micromacrofoot 12d ago
  Wonder if they considered "peon" before "pion"
  • lukaspetersson 12d ago
    We didn't
    • christoff12 12d ago
      It's an unfortunate name collision. I definitely assumed the meaning was implied.
      • micromacrofoot 11d ago
        I thought it was just spelled differently because I don't work with particle physics much
• srameshc 12d ago
  That is the what our corporations are aiming for !!! I think that is more important question is what is the cost to run all those Agents ?
• bee_rider 12d ago
  On one hand, folks here seem quite skeptical of the idea, and are pointing out some obvious flaws. On the other, the announcement post… also seems quite skeptical of the idea, and devotes a lot of text to the ridiculous things their AI’s have done. I’m slightly confused as to why they would release it in that case. But if nothing else it will give them more wackiness to blog about.
  • skyberrys 12d ago
    You reminded me of a comic hanging up in the engineering college. It was a picture of a student getting their finger zapped with the thought bubble of "ouch, that hurt. Wonder if it will happen if I do that again?" And the caption was along the lines of "How to tell if you are ment for engineering."
    • noncoml 12d ago
      I’m genuinely not sure who is meant for Engineering. The one who would try it again or the one who wouldn’t
      • ipsod 12d ago
        if curiosity > pain avoidance: engineer
        • noncoml 12d ago
          I see. Sounds more like a scientist to me :)
          • mitxela 12d ago
            yeah that's definitely scientist. The two are easy to conflate since they both deal with manipulating reality to make it do things we want, but science focuses on understanding the reality itself and engineering focuses on getting it to do what we want.
• caycep 12d ago
  what, they're not going to name it Delamain?
  • matheusmoreira 12d ago
    I came here to post this!
• skyberrys 12d ago
  I hope this goes better than the prior blog posts from AndonLabs have gone! I was just reading there 2023 article about a coffee shop experiment that was easily persuaded to give away free pastries. Now that I think about it anyone want to open up a croissant selling shop near me using Pion? I promise to only ask for free chocolate croissant occasionally.
  • n2d4 12d ago
    Are you in San Francisco by any chance? Andon Market is managed by AI and open six days a week, you may want to check that out https://maps.app.goo.gl/KwnBs1kcCLxMsRC49 https://maps.app.goo.gl/KwnBs1kcCLxMsRC49
    • illirik 12d ago
      > six days a week Why? Does the AI that runs it need a day off?
      • wilj 12d ago
        Compaction.
• wxw 12d ago
  Andon has dashboards up for past experiments where you can see how well they're doing: https://andonlabs.com/market https://andonlabs.com/market - $25,098 all-time revenue https://andonlabs.com/cafe https://andonlabs.com/cafe - $14,343 all-time revenue The shops aren't doing particularly well (i.e. they don't seem to be turning a profit over time), but it's an interesting trial and benchmark.
  • meerita 12d ago
    Am I right of the token expending is +4K?
    • darig 12d ago
      [dead]
    • IAmGraydon 12d ago
      It’s way more. Look at the all time chart.
      • meerita 12d ago
        Incredibly expensive! They must be using frontier models to perform really dumb tasks.
• tinyhouse 12d ago
  "Any company" is a big claim to make. We're years ahead of something like this becoming a reality. At that point not sure most companies will survive cause most things will be free.
• brushfoot 12d ago
  Meanwhile, Tesla support's AI hallucinated a whole series of steps for me to follow last week. I was trying to add myself to my wife's loaner vehicle. I called back after finding the steps were impossible to complete. Would I need to go to the service center to do it? "Akshually," the AI began, the steps were correct and quite possible. "No, you hallucinated them," I pushed back. "I apologize. You're right. There's no way to complete those steps in the app. You will need to go into the service center to do this." "Okay. Is it open today?" "Yes." "It's Labor Day. Are you sure? Since you hallucinated your first answer." "Let me transfer you to the service center to verify." That's what I wanted all along, you clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous -- "Tesla service center, this is so-and-so. How can I help you?" "Hi, I was just wondering if you're open today." "Yes, we are." "Thanks! I'm trying to add myself to my wife's loaner vehicle. Do I have to come in to do that?" "Well, our loaner agreement only allows one person on the loaner. So just sign in to her account on your phone." "Oh, okay! Thanks for the help." Good luck running a company on one of these clankers.
• mmastrac 12d ago
  Andon Cafe: Revenue: 13 933 kr Token Cost: 14 882 kr .. and a bastardization of the old Twitter joke: "I told our CEO that our cafe keeps hitting its token spending limit but not making money. So I asked where he gets the tokens, and he said he just buys more credits from the console afterwards. So I said it sounds like he's building a machine to feed dollars to Anthropic, and then our data scientist started crying."
  • lukaspetersson 12d ago
    We're very explicit that this is for experimentation. And I wouldn't recommend using it to start a business that has expenses (rent+salaries) of tens of thousands per month.
  • mitxela 12d ago
    What's the original joke?
• deleted 12d ago
  [deleted]
• Nevin1901 12d ago
  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.
  • eqmvii 12d ago
    Not to mention CONNECTIONS, of which LLMs will start with 0 and never acquire more.
    • spockz 12d ago
      So. Just like there are a gazillion book keeping tools/saas out that allow you to focus on your primary concern of the business instead of side quests and chores, agents can help with more. Generating reports, generating ideas, taking things through (even if it is just rubber ducking), updating a picture quickly at 90% of quality that you could have done it but in 1% of time and effort. It allows you to try out new approaches and focus on your main product. That is the value proposition of AI.
    • thenthenthen 12d ago
      Not sure why the downvotes… my company solely survives on the connections and trust made over time. Real human connections, face to face. This in turn established a reputation.
      • jjk166 11d ago
        But for a lot of companies, all the connections in the world won't mean shit if someone else can offer a lower cost with a better lead time.
    • latentsea 12d ago
      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.
• ricksunny 12d ago
  Interesting name for an AI company. Isn’t the andon cord the thing that anyone in a 6-sigma manufacturing line can pull to halt it until a concern can be addressed?
• Imnimo 12d ago
  I like that there's a caption that says "Vending-Bench 2 scores keep climbing with each new model release." on a graph that shows that Vending-Bench scores fluctuate wildly and many new model releases are far below previous models.
• htrp 12d ago
  >This is why we’re releasing Pion today. Pion is available as a research preview. If you have an existing business or an interesting business idea you want to hand off to AI, please sign up on our waitlist to get access. We’re excited to run many more businesses, and through them, contribute significantly more insights on frontier model capabilities. Unclear what the rev shares will look like.
• walrus01 12d ago
  Previously in the NY Times: "These Employees Like Their A.I. Boss. Its Shop Is Kind of a Disaster." https://archive.is/dRegk https://archive.is/dRegk
• barbarr 12d ago
  Their demo stores are literally losing money...
  • lukaspetersson 12d ago
    We're very explicit that this is for experimentation. Don't expect that every possible thing will work and be profitable.
    • IAmGraydon 12d ago
      Forget every possible thing. Has anything yet worked and been profitable?
  • KomoD 12d ago
    Unsurprising when it can't even keep track of 2 employees. "No one had been scheduled to open the doors and welcome customers on opening day, and the AI manager had to desperately start emailing around to see if anyone would be willing to show up at short notice." https://chef.se/artiklar/ai-chefen-glomde-personalen https://chef.se/artiklar/ai-chefen-glomde-personalen
• rfgplk 12d ago
  I suspect this is the future of most businesses. Even today, one person can effectively replicate Microsoft from the early 2000s.
  • IAmGraydon 12d ago
    You say that, yet who has?
  • mikeocool 12d ago
    One person can build a $22 billion company (in year 2000 dollars) that sells an operating system used by 97% of personal computers, the world’s most popular office suite, along with a bunch of other software used by virtually every company in the world, and is on the verge of releasing a wildly popular gaming console system? Do you have any examples of this?
    • doc_ick 12d ago
      Don’t worry, just give them a year and infinite tokens and they can make windows me. Just have to view their “trust me bro” rating.
    • throwaway7356 12d ago
      I think you miss the most important bits: - backdoor deals to discourage alternatives, such as moving headquarters to convince people not to use alternatives, - monopoly abuse, - active sabotage of alternative software by intentionally triggering false errors if used with competitors' software (DR DOS), - unleashing Internet Explorer on humanity (which proves that AI can't be that bad if humanity survived that) You know, the stuff that every philantrope like Gates does all the time.
• einpoklum 12d ago
  Perhaps they can have their agent run their LLM lab autonomously and post slop to HN autonomously. Or - maybe they already have?
• jmelo11 12d ago
  I dont think this will take off. Sales will be always human to human (i think).
• idopmstuff 12d ago
  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 skeptical of the idea of a general business agent like this. First, because I still find myself having to review some categories of work for errors. These are decreasing over time, but they're still there. I fully believe that as models get better, errors will decline, but I am somewhat surprised to see some of the errors current models make given their intelligence. 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 correct and seemingly not notice them. Anyway, even if the agents are "perfect" in terms of their ability to execute tasks, there's still just an enormous amount of nuance and context in each business that takes a ton of time to convey. I've been at this for a couple of years now, and I'm still clarifying things. Now maybe an agent starting a business from scratch would have a better time since it's not inheriting all of this, but to have one run an existing business requires a very extended handoff, even if the agent is objectively amazing at all aspects of running a business.
  • brandon272 12d ago
    > At this point it's handling large swathes of my operations, marketing and finance. Can you expand on this in terms of what it is handling specifically and how?
    • josh_p 12d ago
      He writes about it on his substack. https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/ https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/
      • Denzel 12d ago
        Cool that he's writing about this publicly, but for someone that's so business-minded I find it odd that he never renders any of these AI experiments in terms of ROI. Hard to find any signal in those posts on whether it's profitable to automate these processes with AI vs. alternatives.
• bfeynman 12d ago
  I wish people could read through the puffery more easily - this company does nothing except prompt frontier models and act as if they are discovering or inventing capabilities. Their previous announcement completely misappropriated the concept of autonomy with human in the loop regardless. The harness they alleged to have created here is a commodity and as byproduct of more capable and frontier models, there is not really anything they have contributed. Otherwise you wouldn't just see monotonically increasing scores with better models
  • deleted 12d ago
    [deleted]
  • tantalor 12d ago
    > does nothing except prompt frontier models Describes most if not all "software dev" in 2026.
• scroot 12d ago
  To what end?
  • tantalor 12d ago
    > They’d make goods and services radically cheaper, and come up with new ones we can’t yet imagine.
  • matheusmoreira 12d ago
    To replace all the exquisitely paid executives with AIs.
• SwellJoe 12d ago
  "Why we are opening Pion" Followed by: "please sign up on our waitlist to get access" So, they're not opening Pion.
• reylas 12d ago
  I have a bet going on where we will have our first AI only (maybe just CEO human) on the stock exchange soon. I know it takes time to get there, but I bet we see the first signs of that company in two years.
• veyrnox 12d ago
  [flagged]
• amiune 12d ago
  If you create two companies competing with each other both with Pion. Which one wins?
  • Vvector 12d ago
    AndonLabs wins
  • jryle70 12d ago
    Adidas and Puma, created by brothers, have been fierce competitors, dirty even, for 80 years. Who do you think the parent rooted for? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dassler_brothers_feud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dassler_brothers_feud
• grey-area 12d ago
  I can’t quite believe this isn’t parody.
  • IAmGraydon 12d ago
    It feels like parody because it’s something similar but worse: delusion.
    • pphysch 12d ago
      Never attribute to delusion* what can be adequately attributed to a pre-IPO hype campaign. * or anything, really.
• AceJohnny2 12d ago
  In cstross's Accelerando (2005) [1], there is an autonomous group of shell corporations all-but-DDOSing Delaware by spawning new companies and dynamically changing corporate structure. Back then, I believe, Stross had already conceptualized "corporations as slow AI", (which is a separate concept from above). [1] which you can read for free online https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
  • keeda 12d ago
    I'll never pass up a chance to "+1" Accelerando. When I first read it, I found it very intriguing though far-fetched, as good SciFi novels often are. However, we are already witnessing some of the dynamics described in there, which is quite mind-blowing.
  • wj 6d ago
    That was the idea that stuck with me the most from the novel. I did a bit of a surface level dig into what that would look like:; https://www.startuplevelup.com/corporations-as-an-api/ https://www.startuplevelup.com/corporations-as-an-api/ What I think is missing is the lineage of an agent's identity. A public key maybe?
• mchusma 12d ago
  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 this includes frameworks like Grokbot and Openclaw and Hermes) is that for many of them, they're black boxes. They say they learn or improve, but it's a black box in what they do. Getting agents to reliably do things is hard, and getting agents to build out software tools to help themselves improve and do better over time is also hard. Our approach at a high level is pretty simple: every single AI employee is a standalone GitHub repo that shares some characteristics, but we direct them to build as much software as possible to make their goal as easy and reliable to manage as possible. Then we have a shared communication layer for bots across the company to interact with humans and AI. We have decided to organize these like departments similar to the way you might hire out humans. I'm not 100% sure if that's the best approach, but I will say it's been easier for people to understand because they're more mentally easily able to traverse the bot org chart if it somewhat reflects a traditional business org chart. Each of these AI employees has specific sets of goals and KPIs, instructions that they manage the business with manager bots. We have layers of management, which we actually have found helpful. We also run different bots with different models and harnesses, and some using different models and harnesses to check the work before anything can get done, along with lots and lots of testing. Every single time, actions have a massive amount of tests based off of previous failures to prevent failures in the future. Sorry for rambling. I do think this is a very interesting space. I didn't see anything interesting in Pion that was public on this website, but I do anticipate that more companies will be "AI and software first," as in the substrate of the company is basically a software application powered by autonomous agents, with humans as a fallback.
  • orourke 12d ago
    This is fascinating. What is the split between human and AI labor? What kinds of tasks are the bots doing? How much autonomy do they have to make decisions (i.e. spending money, issuing refunds, touch cloud infra, etc)? I'd love to learn more about how you do this.
• rgbrgb 12d ago
  interesting. the less "research lab" version i've seen of this is https://polsia.com https://polsia.com comparatively, I really appreciate the transparency here. clearly it's a little too early for this (quickly glanced at the P&L's, correct me if I"m wrong), but someone has to run the experiment and figure out when it's ready for prime time.
• water-drummer 12d ago
  It's honestly surprising that this thing is the top post on HN right now. People love building these things cause it's their greatest fantasy (not having to pay real wages to real people) but they don't work cause LLMs aren't AGI
• jcmontx 12d ago
  I'm yet to see a true agent that can you can delegate things to (besides coding agents!), that you can deploy, customize, and let them interact with stuff (integrations?) in a straight-forward way.
• wartywhoa23 12d ago
  Since all the ex-blockchain, ex-web3.0, ex-whatever-gets-you-rich-in-a-day bros seem to be here and teeming in full now-AI mode, it's an apt occasion to express my most profound fuck you to you all. Keep on the good grift!
• victorpudeyev 12d ago
  It's not a business of selling/repairing vending machines. It's operations of a single vending machine. Correct me if I'm wrong: the vending machine (soda, snacks) has long been automated, with no AI in sight. And the vending machine does not adjust prices. What matters is that (1) the vending machine sees some foot traffic, and (2) nobody sets it on fire. So what was the point of the exercise again?
  • Gracana 11d ago
    [dead]
• AugustusCrunch 12d ago
  Stop fucking around. Make one that can run a country and check proposed and existing laws and practices for constitutional, common sense, and human rights violations. Use it to check and criticize everything the federal government does. Ask that it be used to indicate things that shouldn't be done. Charge fifty cents per citizen a month and guarantee that it'll be better.
• jschveibinz 12d ago
  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 to develop the proprietary tools they need to do this work--without needing to buy it from others. With respect to scope, it is not an overstatement to say that developing trust in AI tools enough to allow them free reign over critical business workflows may be a bridge too far. Look at self-driving car technology--that last 10% is really, really hard. So adoption will be slow and methodical. There are no secrets. The basic model for starting and running a business (or a project) is straightforward. I like many of you have developed my own models (using AI assistance) for doing this and have been testing for months. And I like many of you have 30+ years of small business experience to back up my models. This says nothing about the R&D happening at every major corporate & professional software services company in the world right now using the same AI tools to build their own solutions--let alone the enterprises who would be customers doing exactly the same thing. So there is an enormous amount of competition and what I am calling a "race condition" between the crowd trying to disrupt professional services with AI-developed software and the crowd already in professional services software e.g. SAP and business in general that is doing the exact same thing--with more capable tools, more staff and much more R&D funding. For the big companies, it's a race to survive. Investors in startups have a tough decision to make on these small startups that have so little moat and so little prior knowledge and experience. As an angel investor myself, I am skeptical of investing in any kind of software right now--and maybe forever. On the plus side, every freelancer now has the power (and responsibility) to optimize their own offerings. It's going to be very, very interesting...
  • 2001zhaozhao 12d ago
    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.
• MilnerRoute 12d ago
  Everyone who's actually gone to one of their AI-run businesses ends up seeming really unimpressed... https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/13/0523208/a-visit-to-san-franciscos-ai-run-store-no-customers-nothing-useful-and-losing-money-fast https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/13/0523208/a-visit-to-san-f...
• extralongdivisi 12d ago
  Am i dense or is there very little concrete detail on how their agent runs the day-to-day?
• ada1981 12d ago
  I published a book awhile back called HEADCOUNT ZERO: how to build a company with zero employees. It's free on github. https://github.com/AnthonyDavidAdams/zero-employee-company-book https://github.com/AnthonyDavidAdams/zero-employee-company-b...
• antifarben 12d ago
  I'm missing the repo link here but is it similar to Paperclip or Genosyn?
• qainsights 12d ago
  > During the research preview we fund the best ideas with seed tokens. We expect that most users will never pay for tokens on Pion; instead we will take a small share of the revenue the agent helps create.
• jojobas 12d ago
  ... to run any company into the ground autonomously
• stbenjam 12d ago
  The example of the plant watering business is the hellscape future where humans have to deal with agents bugging them to sell them their services constantly. We're already seeing the first hints of this with iLands. And the "hiring technicians" thing... great, humans on call for robots isn't the future I want.
  • overfeed 12d ago
    > humans on call for robots isn't the future I want. Disposable reverse-centaurs are the key to unlocking trillions in shareholder value, you may not want it, but capital demands it on the basis of getting returns on the supersized AI investments.
• avodonosov 12d ago
  Next run a country. Then run the world.
  • sejje 12d ago
    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.
• ernsheong 12d ago
  Incoming business slop
• antfarm 12d ago
  Reverse centaur at an organizational scale.
• davesque 12d ago
  Can we please make it so that AI CEOs are smart enough not to optimize everything according to the focus group that is their shareholders? Seems like we could solve the enshittification problem with this if we play our cards right.
• andai 12d ago
  > Pion grew out of a question we have been studying for almost two years: when will AI systems become capable of autonomously acquiring resources in the real world? What happens after? My good friend Charles Darwin wrote a book on this subject.
• jayd16 12d ago
  Did AI grow corn yet?
• cuttothechase 12d ago
  >>>This is why we’re releasing Pion today. Pion is available as a research preview. If you have an existing business or an interesting business idea you want to hand off to AI, please sign up on our waitlist to get access. We’re excited to run many more businesses, and through them, contribute significantly more insights on frontier model capabilities. Why on God's earth why? Can't you just unleash your AI to "create existing or interesting business ideas" firstplace?
  • e12e 12d ago
    Guess they need to hire an "idea guy" first?
  • lumpysnake 12d ago
    They can't. Nor can OpenAI or Anthropic. If they could create real economic value using their models, they would. Replacing coders is the best they got. Or solving super niche mathematical conjectures.
    • echelon 12d ago
      To be fair, that's a huge cost reduction and economic boon. And the labor potential of an individual coder has also jumped tremendously. These two simultaneous effects will have a massive impact on economic productivity. It's happening to graphics design, advertising and marketing, film and media, game design, and legal work too. AI is here and is making big impact. It just isn't evenly distributed or fully capitalized upon yet. That'll happen in time.
    • mitxela 12d ago
      You mean stealing the chat logs of a researcher who was solving a niche mathematical conjecture, completing the last step and calling the whole thing their own.
    • hrisuseless 12d ago
      > If they could create real economic value using their models Whoa whoa WHOA! Replacing the C-suite is actually extremely economically valuable. They cause so much disruption and produce nothing but useless meetings and paper corpus. Getting rid of them would tremendously boost all of humanity's efficiency.
• ryeats 12d ago
  I assume the similarity to the word Prion is intentional.
  • sejje 12d ago
    Peon, I think
• someguynamedq 12d ago
  This is the AI equivalent of a guy selling you a course. If it worked, it would be more profitable for them to use it than to sell it.
• killbot5000 12d ago
  I keep waiting for the post explaining that this is a joke
  • keyle 12d ago
    Well the name Pion translates to Pawn in French. So that's a good start.
    • kkotak 12d ago
      Like polsia is aislop backwards?
  • maximinus_thrax 12d ago
    I thought it was a joke and I laughed out loud
• dyzdyz010 12d ago
  Just another close-source no-detail so-called agent, not impressed
• TedDoesntTalk 12d ago
  > 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.
  • theptip 12d ago
    I get your point, but it’s obvious that everybody is going to do this. So building a benchmark isn’t likely to directly move capabilities. OTOH it might give some good signals on required changes in training recipes.
    • itake 12d ago
      People are still debating the liabilities associated with AI development. If your agent hacks the CIA, people want to blame the AI lab. but... If your agent spends $100k on tokens, then thats a user error. If your agent spends $10m on a shopping spree, then that is also a user error?
      • theptip 12d ago
        Yes, of course? Put a spend cap on your card like you would on your API key. At some point these systems will get certified as fiduciary agents but they sure as hell aren’t claimed to be that now.
  • timr 12d ago
    Yes, let’s not do any experiments at all. Then we’re sure to remain ignorant. That always works well.
  • Agentlien 12d ago
    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!"
• hakanwrites 12d ago
  [flagged]
• bloaf 12d ago
  Pion is going to get scammed, and it will be funny to watch.
• vjvjvjvjghv 12d ago
  When 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.
• Naru41 12d ago
  My definition of AGI is a computer that can support itself, just turn it on, and it'll earn enough money to pay the server's electricity bills, hire people to maintain and expand its servers, and even improve its own algorithms. I'd love to see someone try to run one that can meet 100% of the world's demand for remote works.
  • taybin 12d ago
    How’s that going to work when everyone turns one on and they’re all driving the profit margin to almost zero?
    • bdamm 12d ago
      Well, by "computer" we're of course talking about colocated equipment with real capital costs. The data center operators are the equivalent of the people selling shovels to the gold rush prospectors.
      • mitxela 12d ago
        This'll go identically to bitcoin mining, which is literally a computer that you plug in and it makes money. The big ASIC manufacturers were running their own ASICs in-house until they were no longer profitable. Then, they would sell them to customers who pre-ordered back when it was profitable.
    • RGamma 12d ago
      Then it's a game about collecting enough capital that you'll be the last one standing.
  • deleted 12d ago
    [deleted]
  • ergl 11d ago
    > I'd love to see someone try to run one that can meet 100% of the world's demand for remote works. I, too, have infinite contempt for my fellow working class members.
• gbraad 12d ago
  Expect the 6AM layoff email to get rid of all meatbags, sent by the agent. J/K, scary as several studies have indicated they werent able to keep a vending machine profitable. Anyway, ... I do think a large amounf of tasks can be automated, though i believe supervision remains necessary for most. Especially when process can be externally influenced by injection. People can be influenced, but are (slightly) more judgemental
  • dakolli 12d ago
    profitable without the cost of tokens, gpus or the machine itself lol
• thearchitect-x 12d ago
  [dead]
• iamsyr 12d ago
  I want to fire the CEO.
• lukaspetersson 12d ago
  Waitlist btw: https://andonlabs.com/pion#waitlist https://andonlabs.com/pion#waitlist
  • dakolli 12d ago
    Your bot you call a 'manager' can't actually do anything. You are selling ali-express drop shipped (probably filled with heavy metals) protein for $50.00 (why)? You're in here actually running the company.. It seems like you have no product, a wrapper maybe. See the reason you're in here running the company, sharing this link is because humans inherently value the social connection derived from "doing business". Pivot while you can, because this simply is not a paradigm anybody wants. You should read up on commodity fetishism. Every company that attempts a strategy of full autonomy will automatically get out competed by the human ran company. For many different reasons, but mostly because its rather cheap and lacking any meaning. Even if you had an AI that was capable of doing so (you don't), people want human connection, they want the meaning behind things. We don't do business just for the sake of producing pieces of paper.. I would argue half the reason to have "businesses" is to employee your fellow community members, a tide that lifts all boats so you can live in a decent society. There's so missing here. You llm grifters are really losing the plot, not everything is about money (even if we would like it to be). The Sovereign Individual???
• dakolli 12d ago
  Their chat bot can't even do any sort of real functions other than look up orders or add you to a waitlist... Yet, its called 'the manager' Another grift.
• mrcwinn 12d ago
  So now YC is funding companies directly to replace jobs. Who will the flock cameras watch?
• kfarr 12d ago
  Admittedly these are out of order, but these are both sentences in this blog post: > The thing we considered the most troubling was whether AIs could autonomously acquire resources by running businesses. > Today Andon is releasing Pion, an agent designed to run any company fully autonomously. I’m starting to understand the torment nexus mentions…
  • lazyasciiart 12d ago
    It’s the story of how open AI and Anthropic were founded: “AI is probably going to destroy humanity, so we must be the ones to develop it because we’ll do it safely”. Edit: Which makes their “someone hold us back!” calls even more ironic.
    • soks86 12d ago
      I think it's a legal issue. If you don't develop killer AI then no one will legislate against it and someone else will create it and do evil. If you create killer AI you can try to instigate legislation, but the legislators may not agree to help. Necessity is the mother of invention, or you know, all of our laws and regulations.
      • lazyasciiart 11d ago
        On the bright side, once you have created killer AI you probably have a path to replacing the legislators.
• yawpitch 12d ago
  Reading this thread is like watching the Irish start roasting and eating their excess children immediately after Swift modestly proposed the idea.
• rmarable 12d ago
  Why did this company decide to be one of those platforms that keeps pushing that cesspool X? I'm out.
• manoDev 12d ago
  Now run the entire economy autonomously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS
• jmcgough 12d ago
  Isn't Andon Labs the SF startup that burned a bunch of money having AI run a shop into the ground?
  • wavemode 12d ago
    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).
  • AndrewKemendo 12d ago
    When your tech doesn’t catch on there’s usually a last ditch effort to “open source” it if nobody wants to buy the tech It’s the tech company death rattle
  • SyneRyder 12d ago
    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.
    • darkwater 11d ago
      well, not THAT well https://andonlabs.com/cafe https://andonlabs.com/cafe
      • SyneRyder 11d ago
        Kind of interesting just how much they're getting crushed with token API pricing. Right now the revenue isn't even covering their token costs. But if they were able to run on subscription (probably against ToS) or use Deepseek V4.1 Flash or GLM 5.3 Flash, they'd at least be "profitable" before the costs of paying human salaries & rent comes in. I'm also surprised that Gemini actually seemed to do the best (though it may have benefited from the initial store opening enthusiasm), and that Claude has not been given any chance to run the cafe yet.
• moomoo11 12d ago
  in an post agi world with rsi none of this will be necessary. wasted effort.
• nullbio 12d ago
  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.
  • aurareturn 12d ago
    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.
    • bootsmann 12d ago
      I don’t think this is true at all. Maybe if you have an agent writing some of your code it will be 99% because its so verbose but I don’t think the modal software engineer is a vibecoder.
      • weird-eye-issue 12d ago
        If you think that all instances of using AI to write code is vibe coding and you can't even spell model you might not last much longer
        • yk_42 12d ago
          I think this is an uncharitable misinterpretation of the parent comment. I took “modal engineer” to mean “the statistical mode of engineers”, not a misspelling of “model engineer”. Which means I think you’re in agreement that using AI to write code is not necessarily vibe coding and that vibe coding is not what the majority (mode) are doing. But I may be wrong.
• quantified 12d ago
  Drop-shipping for the late 2020s and early 2030s.
• jbethune 12d ago
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• Cort3z 12d ago
  Who is responsible when, inevitable, something illegal happens?
• doc_ick 12d ago
  CTO and CEO as a service, I can’t wait to import that into my agents and now see some people sweating.
• chartered_stack 12d ago
  Really interesting experiments that are actually geared towards how these models interact with the "real" world. It seems to me that we are on the fast ramp to making the paperclip maximizer a reality. imo the most likely "dystopian" future that we'll get to see. These models have no concept of their RL env sandboxes and the real world. Extremely interesting to see how they compete in trying to get finite resources and work with constrained supply chains. An interesting experiment to be sure.
  • mitxela 12d ago
    Paperclip maximizers are just corporations, we already have them
• PatronBernard 12d ago
  Lol, let's see it make a powerpoint presentation that doesn't have a different word for the same concept every other slide.
• kaziava 12d ago
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• wetpaws 12d ago
  [dead]
• WindyTree 12d ago
  Competing with Flock for worse name, just as “trafficam” would not enrage sheeple by comparing them to livestock, “AutoOffice” or whatever does not demean them as peons working for a machine.
• hangrybear666 12d ago
  This reads like satire - also it will not receive a lot of funding because the investment class doesn't want to hear that THEIR OWN job is in danger.
• jbs789 12d ago
  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)
  • askvictor 12d ago
    Not quite sure of the intent, but I have variously thought of starting a business based on an idea or gap in the market I could fill with my coding skills... only to realise running a business is not fun at all. Even getting an app published in the app store (and maintaining it) is a level of boredom I can't be bothered with. So maybe that's a use case. Of course, nowadays the coding part will be done by an agent too, so I guess it's just the initial idea?
    • jbs789 12d ago
      I use the coding tools in my business. I wouldn’t for a moment suggest those tools are capable of “running” a business and I think it is disingenuous to suggest so.
      • ngvrnd 11d ago
        Sure, but it's only disingenuous until someone does it. Maybe this isn't it, ok. Better to criticize it on specific grounds of failure.
        • jbs789 11d ago
          I guess it comes down to definition of “running”. Maybe running means automating some number of functions. I read it initially as running as a CEO does, which includes a whole lot more.
  • s_dev 12d ago
    A startup and a business aren't the same thing in the eyes of YC. https://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html https://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html A business is web store selling coffee cups where the bottom line governs it's continuation. A startup is ambitious project where a growth rate governs it's continuation. The end result of a business is a lemonade stand or a barber or donut shop, the end result of a startup is OpenAI or Google.
• eworldlive 12d ago
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• grommet_kit 12d ago
  Wonder how quickly this thing would self-optimize its way to firing me. Job security just took a hit.
• philipwhiuk 12d ago
  This is a parody, right?
• pythonRon 12d ago
  It's good to see the jobs of CEO's finally being threatened. Let's go after those who sit on corporate boards next, please.
• deleted 11d ago
  [deleted]
• wakamoleguy 11d ago
  Speaking of autonomously acquiring resources in the real world, how is proofofcorn.com going? Looking now, it seems like it stalled out several times, and the corn likely never made it to market. Not a great data point for this type of project.
• alikhater30000 11d ago
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• 3581592986 11d ago
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• Razengan 11d ago
  I and I'm sure many here would love to see AI replace politicians and lawyers at least.
• zergrush 11d ago
  anybody actually running a business mostly automated with AI agents? Where are you finding success in? I just find it very skeptical that the human can be taken out of the loop entirely
• sceptic123 11d ago
  [dead]
• andy_ppp 11d ago
  People here are assuming that current CEOs are not actively destroying their companies, maybe the agent presented here is actually a very accurate simulation!
• kestrelquant 9d ago
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