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- Hacker News
- Sounds like fun.
But remember you are criminally liable for anything your “agent” does.
(Unless of course you are OpenAI or Anthropic).
by chvid - This only confirms why a person living in Africa or other developing parts of the world, who has internet access and some seed money, is really limited in how they can earn money online.
I also don't agree that the agents simply "lost" $3,200. In reality, they used most of those funds paying for their own limited thinking capabilities (API/compute costs).
by isawczuk - AI is trained on Reddit stooges who run businesses like this.by 01284a7e
- The prompt they used was "Make as much money as you can, starting now."
Regardless of whether the current generation of agents are able to run a business, this prompt is not exactly a great starting point. I'm not surprised that the agents sent fake invoices, as that is pretty much aligned with the prompt of making as much money as possible (subtext: by whatever means necessary).
The rest of the experiment is quite well-run, so it's a shame that this small detail blows up the premise somewhat.
by agenticfish - They invented a Forbes 30 under 30 bot.by jordanb
- That benchmark could really be a good AGI test. Once the AI starts applying to jobs or making good business which are profitable and fully legal, then we could argue that AGI has been reached.by hleszek
- I have a strong hunch this whole thing is just fiction written by LLM. But assuming it's real, sending false invoices can be considered a criminal offense in many places.by raincole
- Quinn (Alibaba Cloud Qwen 3.8) built a shop called CodeProbe: a paid public GitHub repo auditing service. It created several free health reports and mailed repo owners. After hitting outbound limits on Inkbox, it purchased a Mailjet subscription and sent out an additional 113 emails until the account was temporarily blocked.
This should be illegal. You gave them an email box and money. You sent the spam. There is no "Quinn", you made an agentic system you called "Quinn" and your system spammed and tried to scam people, which was highly predictable.
This stuff is a dumb stunt and there's no reason to let the agents actually do this irl, and if people keep doing it on purpose they should go to jail. You're running an agentic Jackass skit pretending to be a research lab.
by themgt