Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

2 hours ago (andonlabs.com)

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 :)

  • "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 :-)

    • Maybe in the end we’ll just have Wall-E but where none of the humans survived past the first couple of generations.

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 ?

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.

  • 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

    I don't think any of us are ready for the wave of sloppy shit that's going to hit us soon.

    • It’s a classic get rich quick scheme. Wanna run a business and make money without actually doing anything? Try our AI!

  • What would that look like, I assume youre talking about building infra ontop of the infra debt for datacenters

  • And we made fun of 90’s cartoon villains… They would blush and retire if they saw what’s being excitedly peddled today as “the future”.

    Pray tell, what will these fantastical vibe coded business sell, and why will anyone pay for it?

how does this work from a liability standpoint? seems very risky for the person who is legally responsible for the business

  • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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).

Does Pion run Andon Labs autonomously?

  • haha no they admit they built it because they cannot build a revenue generating business in the article. maybe THAT is what is good for the world!

  • 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.

    • 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.

      9 replies →

    • It's a relevant question but not a "gotcha". Businesses are not equivalent in complexity and no one at Andon would claim that running an effective vending machine business is similar to running Apple or Jane Street. There is some level of complexity and other characteristics that AI can maybe handle today. That doesn't mean CEOs should be worried about their jobs more generally.

      1 reply →

I hope that any company that is an AI running autonomously advertises the fact, so I know not to use them.

How a company without a human would communicate with human customers? Would it be any different, if everybody alredy is a proxy for AI?

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?

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?

  • 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.

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...

  • “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).

    • 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.

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.

  • 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?

    • 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.

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.

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.

  • 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?”.

I wish we could go just one day without a company proudly engaging in Torment Nexus related activities.

  • it's interesting how the torment nexus is starting large, and boiling the most people with the "most comfortable" lives. I wonder how long the white collar workers will keep bending over to keep their lives safet, particularly when they're building the Torment Nexus to specifically torment them.

    You'd think Meta's "we're going to spy on you for the good of the country" policy would have set them a bit on fire.

  • We think this is good for the world. Longer argument in the post.

    • 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.

    • We want the general public, AI researchers and policymakers to know to what extent AIs can autonomously acquire resources by running businesses. It is an important datapoint when deciding where we do/don’t want AI in society and what level of progress we find acceptable. To better track this, we need to cast a wider net of businesses.

      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.

      So the longer argument is that it's good for the world to see how much revenue Pion can manage, and also your pricing plan is take [unspecified] % of revenue.

Pion is already the name of a very well established webrtc project: https://github.com/pion/webrtc

  • It's also a particle and a self-propelled gun. There's a limited number of short legible words.

    • 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!

  • 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.

The upvotes on this brand new post - almost 1 a minute, speak to a level of astro-turfing I've rarely seen here.

  • The post was placed on the front page via second chance pool (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.

  • 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.

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.

  • 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/item?id=26998308), then quickly got upvotes that seem completely authentic.

    • 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.

      3 replies →

    • Interesting how they’re not making any defensive replies to comments pointing out that they committed a federal crime by filing a false report to the FBI. Perhaps they know it is indefensible

    • Okay, why was this rescued from the 2nd chance pool? Was it from some sort of interesting discussion? Something novel enough to warrant it? A significant amount of petitions from legitimate users?

Don’t get the negativity here, AI will replace everything sooner or later.

  • 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.