Some users report partial success with supervised AI in their own businesses
1 Sep 14 · 13d ago · 1 article · 2 posts · 29 comments · 3 sources · development 1 of 1
A commenter reports making "very good progress" deploying AI incrementally across operations—marketing, finance, and large swaths of business tasks—while staying in the loop and providing feedback. They note skepticism about a fully general agent but describe partial automation as viable.
“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”
idopmstuffAndon Labs AI research and deployment startupAnthropic (Claude models) LLM provider
The whole story articlespostscomments the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
Reported in the same hours no headline names this development itself — these 1 claim were published in its stretch
-
first by HN Best, 13d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people said 24 voices · best of 84 · verbatim
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
I can certainly understand why YC would fund an idea like this, and it's interesting to read about, but yeah the horizon for it working is surely very long if ever.A more appropriate scope would be "can any element of a business at all be handled autonomously by an agent in the long run?" because I would buy that product, but I can't think of…
-
After seeing a crazy amount of non-programmers, sometimes with 10 years of experience, basically turning off their brains and offloading most their thinking to some LLM and turning their days into "please check this product and tell me what I should do next", I don't see why not.I've seen: designers, performance marketers, data scientists, SEO…
-
I agree and I think that this will bring such abundance of information/slop to deal with / to injest. A lot of security concerns too.It's like the classic hot topic of having personal AI agents booking and ordering pizzas for you that are now all over social media. So pain to deal with when you're a human being on the other end receiving calls…
-
> can't even get Astra to consistently re-use the same font-size across all of my HTML page headings+subheadings.This is just basic software engineering. DRY. Define the style in one place and reuse it.This is also why you need a human in the loop, you need to make these kinds of design decisions and tell it to do stuff like this. Otherwise you're…
-
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…
-
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
-
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…
-
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…
-
Andon has dashboards up for past experiments where you can see how well they're doing:https://andonlabs.com/market - $25,098 all-time revenuehttps://andonlabs.com/cafe - $14,343 all-time revenueThe 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.
-
>>>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…
-
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…
-
Part of the boon of this will just be dealing with less employees.Not so much reducing cost by reducing headcount, but reducing liability; it's the legal labyrinth which is the barrier to entry to scale business. While it is present elsewhere, it's universal in employment.The real question is "how big can a business be before it requires a legal…
-
That’s a user error. Tell it to utilize a UI component library to separate styling from feature implementation and add tests which fail any feature level component outside of the UI component library which directly specify style.As a bonus, you can now easily reskin and maintain dark and light modes.I agree with your main point though. AI isn’t…
-
I think it's possible to get an LLM to run your business but I think it's still prohibitively expensive to spend the time and money getting guardrails, skills, knowledge, context setup.Getting it to work reliably is quite the feat. AI coding is a much lower bar when there's (ideally) still a human expert that can set it straight when it goes…
-
At $DAYJOB we do something very similar shape-wise. I wonder - it sounds like you have a dedicated agent comms plane? In our case we found that the easiest and most straightforward was to just use our default company chat app directly for this. Because most of the context that the agent workers need to do work is there, but also, it’s just much…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Andon Cafe:Revenue: 13 933 krToken Cost: 14 882 krThe 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 tokens to Anthropic, and…
-
"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 :-)
All 1 developments of Andon Labs launches Pion platform for AI-run autonomous… →
MastodonHacker NewsNewswiresLobsters