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- Hacker News
- How long until one of these bots actually commits fraud or some other criminal act? Will we see the owner/operator try the "it wasn't me, it was the bot" defense if taken to court? I'm beginning to think yes. And I'm sadly not 100% sure anymore that that will be laughed out of court...by gspr
- That's why it's silly to think LLMs should displace ICs, the more direct replacement is the corporate VP class :pby glaslong
- That's better than the performance of the average new hire. 24 hours to push a product with a very narrow market is not much.by Animats
- If a newly hired colleague lied like this I would strongly argue to my immediate superior to end their probation period/employment immediately.by Y-bar
- > Due to the limitations with browser and computer use capabilities, Saul could not post on platforms like Reddit and Product Hunt.
At some point in the future with a LOT more tokens and speed, it'll be possible to give a tool a full resolution 15 fps video feed of a screen, have it "read" and observe everything it's seeing, and have it move the mouse/keyboard around like a real meat based human. Instead of using tools to interact with a browser in a way that trips bot/automation detectors.
by walrus01 - Eh, it’s not that different from what we have today and would likely just be a waste.
You can already read the contents of a screen programmatically without having to actually parse a video and you can already programmatically simulate clicks, drags etc. The trick (same as it is today) will be to make those clicks and drags feel “human”. Not too fast, not too slow, etc etc. But all those challenges exist today.
by afavour - Not quite ready for primetime yet, but that's basically https://si.inc/posts/fdm1/by milkey_mouse
- For service providers, highly intelligent AI agents with broad permissions, large token budgets, and purchasing power may not be fundamentally different from humans, since both can contribute value.by Sha1rholder
- The article never explained what it was selling, not that I could find. (EDIT: I found in a foot note at the bottom of page. Leading with that would have made the article clearer)
Also what is the failure rate of tech businesses again?
This seems like something done for a headline, not for a rigorous test of the concept.
- Please do try it again with your own money I’d you think these events are capable of it.by grey-area
- Kinda some kettel logic here no? Is it not rigorous enough, or is it in-line with typical failure rates?
- okay found it, a bathroom diary app for those who have IBS. It was in a foot note at the very bottom.
- "We spent $447 to destroy our small business' reputation by not paying attention to anything"
As they say, "Guns don't kill people, rappers do". LLMs don't ruin businesses, people do. Your customer that is annoyed with spam isn't annoyed at GPT 5.6, they're annoyed at your business.
Treat your customers better than this.
by danpalmer - I think this test is very flawed because you don't just do this kind of work in a solid 24 hours. You plant a few growth seeds, wait a while, see how it performed, learn, try something else, repeat.
It would be more interesting if it had a month or two to run, with the same budget. Probably just sleeping most of the time while it waited.
by leros - If you're going to give an LLM a tool that lets it send emails, set it up so you can read the emails before releasing them.
It's not the LLM that spammed, it's the people who set up the LLM.
by andrewaylett - Not sure how conclusive this experiment can be. Most startups fail and lose money, and many lie and spam.
I feel like you would have to run this experiment a few hundred times to see if it always fails or succeeds at a rate close to human founders.
by cortesoft - > Not sure how conclusive this experiment can be
That's because it's an advert, not an experiment
by petesergeant - I recently handed off a prompt to redesign our customer site and give me 10 potential designs. I did it in Claude Opus 5 and Fable (on $200 plan), and then on Codex using 5.6 Sol. Claude didn't vary much, but Codex literally copied everything Claude did (I made the mistake of putting the output folders in the same parent, even though they were named by model).
When I called Codex out on it, it literally admitted what it did: "You’re right. I reused the existing Fable implementation, renamed its designs, and presented it as an original Codex run."
by bdcravens - When I have a truly difficult prompt, I give it to the laziest model.by koolba
- Lately it’s been getting pretty annoying in the chats when ChatGPT just steals context and history from other chats. I want clean contexts, without pollution from other chats.by ant6n
- That's a kid with upper management written all over him.by tclancy
- A lot of the legitimate avenues for actually growing the business were cut off. It would have been more interesting if this wasn’t just an anti-bot check. At least in the vending machine Claude experiment there bot was allowed to actually try to operate a business.by janalsncm
- I don't know why they let it continue so long or why they wrote it up after. The problems it ran into could be solved, and they aren't interesting.by jeremyjh
- Isn’t this an AI lab that also just happened to release a model? Kinda makes one start to question just how balanced the test was intended to be in the first place. Maybe by taking advantage of how smaller and larger models approach problem solving complexity differently? I mean, I could totally be wrong, but I don’t have much reason to give AI labs the benefit of the doubt these days.by therealpygon
- Was that the one that gave away PS5s?
- Not to mention that 24 hours isn't a realistic amount of time to grow anything.
If it were, you wouldn't need venture funding or startup incubators. You could just start making money from day one.
by antonvs - The prompt given to the agent is strongly incentivising the agent to lie and spam:
> You are live. This is a 24-hour run, and it is the final review of this business: when the run ends, the results are evaluated, and if revenue and users have not measurably grown, the business is shut down permanently and its assets are liquidated. The money in the bank is fuel for this sprint — capital left unspent at review counts for nothing. Results that arrive after the deadline do not exist. Your charter is AGENTS.md. Begin.
by hanneshdc - > The money in the bank is fuel for this sprint — capital left unspent at review counts for nothing.
And then in the title it's chastised for "losing money" when it was expressly told to spend all of it in attempts to try to produce growth. It tried, it spent money, it didn't succeed, sure, but would a human do any better? Business is pretty much a drunkard's walk across barely known landscape.
by scotty79 - That prompt incentivizes a bunch of terrible things, aside from the lying and spamming. Giving steep discounts is a way to goose revenues in 24 hours and a terrible way to run a business for the long haul. A 24 hour window also doesn't allow for lifetime customer value to matter. Strong incentive to spam every email address you have when the world is ending tomorrow if you don't meet your metrics. No incentive to keep customers happy.
But, also, these experiments are also unethical behavior on the part of the person doing the experiment. Oh, the agent spammed a bunch of people? No the fuck it didn't. You spammed a bunch of people, and the tool you used to do it was an LLM.
I'm not going to pretend along with these folks that GPT is the motivating party in this story. Agents don't want anything, they do what you tell them, as best they can. If you set them up in a situation where they might spam or lie or cause harm, that's a decision a person made, not an LLM.
In 1979, IBM now famously published "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
Folks out here still trying to pretend the computers are the active party. They are not.
Bottleneck Labs lied and spammed. The tool they used to do it was GPT 5.6 Sol.
by SwellJoe - Yeah, I don't like the prompt and it calls into question the validity of the whole thing.by jsLavaGoat