Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

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• Hacker News
• I keep waiting for the post explaining that this is a joke
  by killbot5000
• I thought it was a joke and I laughed out loud
  by maximinus_thrax
• Well the name Pion translates to Pawn in French. So that's a good start.
  by keyle
• 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...

  by jschveibinz
• 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.

  by 2001zhaozhao
• I can’t quite believe this isn’t parody.
  by grey-area
• It feels like parody because it’s something similar but worse: delusion.
  by IAmGraydon
• how does this work from a liability standpoint? seems very risky for the person who is legally responsible for the business
  by polytely
• Bro! My LLM will set up an LLC for that!
  by BeetleB
• If you use this as a (legal/registered) business, it will be that legal business entity that is responsible. If that business want's to blame the software, it can do so and go after the makers of the software, but that remains a matter between that business and its "supplier". It won't absolve the business for whatever damage it does downstream.

  Running this as an individual, without the legal shielding a business typically gives you against being prosecuted on personal title, seriously risky. There will no doubt be "bros" that will do it anyway and flaunt all they've achieved with that. But they might be just one glitch away from going to jail (if not for running a business without a registration, which in many jurisdictions is illegal by itself).

  by elmo2you
• LLM magic-8-ball says: Don't worry about! Shall I spin up an agent which handles business liability for you?
  by einpoklum
• 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.
  by ocimbote
• You'll have AI attorneys? Hello??
  by maximinus_thrax
• Isn't Andon Labs the SF startup that burned a bunch of money having AI run a shop into the ground?
  by jmcgough
• 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

  by AndrewKemendo
• 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.
  by SyneRyder
• 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).
  by wavemode
• 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.

  by skyberrys
• 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

  by n2d4
• 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/acceler...

  by AceJohnny2
• 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.
  by keeda
• 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.

  by Nevin1901
• Lmao, pop music.
  by fennecbutt
• Not to mention CONNECTIONS, of which LLMs will start with 0 and never acquire more.
  by eqmvii
• Or a way to automate scamming old people.
  by zouhair

•   skills/advertising_and_sales.md
    skills/novel_distribution.md
    skills/unique_and_interesting.md
  

  Naive to think you can't reduce these to instructions.
  by tantalor
• >> Most of the bottleneck in business isn't building the things or sourcing, it's mostly advertising/sales.

  That may also change with llms - they can help the buyers compare every product available, and find the best.

  by petra
• 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.

  by mchusma
• What worries me most are questions like this: these autonomous AI employees or automations - it doesn't change the essence - consume a lot of LLM tokens. Please tell me, how do you pay for this? Do you use, for example, the Anthropic or OpenAI API directly, or do you connect, for example, a Codex subscription?
  by ianberdin
• > we direct them to build as much software as possible

  That's not a cure-all. Sometimes not writing software is the better choice.

  by classified