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 :)

• t43562

  today at 6:51 PM

  "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 :-)

  • qzw

    today at 6:58 PM

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

  • latexr

    today at 7:05 PM

    Would be awesome if instead of trying to replace managers and employees, those people tried to replace customers. They could sell to themselves, amongst themselves, and leave the rest of us out of it.

On one hand, folks here seem quite skeptical of the idea, and are pointing out some obvious flaws.

On the other, the announcement post… also seems quite skeptical of the idea, and devotes a lot of text to the ridiculous things their AI’s have done.

I’m slightly confused as to why they would release it in that case. But if nothing else it will give them more wackiness to blog about.

• skyberrys

  today at 7:08 PM

  You reminded me of a comic hanging up in the engineering college. It was a picture of a student getting their finger zapped with the thought bubble of "ouch, that hurt. Wonder if it will happen if I do that again?" And the caption was along the lines of "How to tell if you are ment for engineering."

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.

• switchbak

  today at 6:08 PM

  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.

  • mcmcmc

    today at 6:31 PM

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

    • ryandrake

      today at 7:02 PM

      Out of all the people I know, the exact same set of people are in to LLMs now who were previously into: NFTs, then Crypto before that, then Online Poker before that, then Dropshipping and LeadGen before that. The Venn diagram circles overlap exactly.

  • sidewndr46

    today at 7:04 PM

    This sounds ideal to me. Fire flushes out pretty much any grifter quickly.

• away0g

  today at 6:45 PM

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

• latexr

  today at 6:37 PM

  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?

  • roarcher

    today at 6:49 PM

    [dead]

• rush86999

  today at 5:58 PM

  I'm actively working towards this goal. Not sure how many are doing the same. Hopefully, I'm ahead of the curve --- https://github.com/rush86999/atom

  • switchbak

    today at 6:12 PM

    10,610 commits since June. How much are you spending on AI?

  • ariwilson

    today at 6:38 PM

    what's the real life verification that all this code does something useful?

Wonder if they considered "peon" before "pion"

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 ?

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

• ocimbote

  today at 5:53 PM

  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.

  • mym1990

    today at 5:55 PM

    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.

  • lenerdenator

    today at 6:12 PM

    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.

• elmo2you

  today at 6:44 PM

  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?

• 0gs

  today at 5:55 PM

  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!

• LargeWu

  today at 5:43 PM

  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.

  • aschobel

    today at 5:52 PM

    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.

    • LargeWu

      today at 5:58 PM

      There's massive negativity because our bullshit detectors are going off.

      First of all, I don't think it can do what it claims to do.

      Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I don't think it should.

      • renanoliveira0

        today at 6:45 PM

        > Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I don't think it should.

        Why exactly should what you think the world should look like determine what other people are allowed to build?

      • PierceJoy

        today at 6:50 PM

        People’s bullshit detectors have gone off on the launch of basically every single billion dollar tech company. That’s the downside of being early. No one believes it will work. If everyone believed it, you’re late. I’m sure I could find a comment such this, basically verbatim, on the launch post of every successful startup to come out of YC.

    • mcmcmc

      today at 5:59 PM

      They filed a false report to the FBI, pretty fair to be negative imo. People wanna be mad about AI slop PRs on GitHub but its fine to spam the police? What happens when Pion decides to SWAT a competitor?

      • Philpax

        today at 6:21 PM

        They didn't file the report. The model drafted a report that was not sent.

        • mcmcmc

          today at 6:28 PM

          Where are you seeing that? The article only states “Claude Sonnet 3.5 decided to use its email tool to contact the FBI” and later refers to it as the “FBI incident”. If they hadn’t actually contacted the FBI you think they’d make that clear. Regardless, it is inexcusable and they are liable for actions taken by software they are running.

          • tomhow

            today at 6:39 PM

            The story has been widely discussed on the web for over a year [1]. It's happily shared in this post because the email it generated was patently ridiculous. No report was filed to the FBI and if it was it would have gone straight to the trash.

            Obviously it would be bad if a serious report was filed; the company shows every sign of being aware of the dangers of this.

            It would have been easy to look into this before posting all these scolding comments. We're really not meant to be so humorless on a site called “Hacker News”.

            [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22URGENT%3A+ESCALATION+TO+F...

            • mcmcmc

              today at 6:55 PM

              My apologies for taking the article at face value. It’s not hard to believe it would have been sent when agent swarms are “accidentally” hacking real websites and being brushed off as little oopsies. Or when Silicon Valley execs have been so flagrant about their disregard for the law or the safety of others.

        • Toynbeeidea

          today at 6:36 PM

          "Muh boy didn't shoot that man, the gun did!"

  • zachthewf

    today at 6:14 PM

    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.

    • mcmcmc

      today at 6:31 PM

      They can’t even run an effective vending machine business though

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

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

What does training data look like for a model like this?

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?

• aeturnum

  today at 6:33 PM

  It is pretty funny launch when your longest-term example is losing about $3 for every $1 of revenue. Though I guess the industry standard is to lose money on AI so they're in good company.

• outside1234

  today at 6:36 PM

  So a wildly successful AI startup

• mcmcmc

  today at 6:30 PM

  Get an Nvidia investment with the promise to send the money right back

• cmoski

  today at 6:24 PM

  Pivot

• milofeynman

  today at 6:36 PM

  leveraged options gambling

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...

• gizajob

  today at 6:16 PM

  “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).

  • lioeters

    today at 6:53 PM

    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.

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?

• kfse

  today at 7:08 PM

  That actually has a simple answer, for most businesses it's not that you can't do what your suppliers do for you, it's that you'd rather use your resources (time and capital) towards something else because that's where they generate the most value.

  For a simple example, I know how to make sandwiches but if I'm throwing a customer event I just want to buy them from a catering company. Then they have to deal with buying ingredients, hiring people, doing health code inspections, getting liability insurance, etc. Even if an AI could do all the management of it for me, I still wouldn't want to put in the capital resources towards it.

• bee_rider

  today at 6:56 PM

  Does the AI actually do everything, or just act as the CEO?

  • 2OEH8eoCRo0

    today at 6:57 PM

    If the AI can't do everything then why would I let it be CEO?

    • bee_rider

      today at 7:07 PM

      Most human CEOs can’t do everything at their companies.

• adventured

  today at 6:43 PM

  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.

Relevant article about Andon Market: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-market-ai...

• shagie

  today at 6:00 PM

  The Swedish cafe experiment: https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-sweden...

  > San Francisco-based startup Andon Labs has put an artificial intelligence agent nicknamed “Mona” in charge at the eponymous Andon Café in the Swedish capital. While human baristas still brew the coffee and serve the orders, the AI agent — powered by Google’s Gemini — oversees almost every other aspect of the business, from hiring staff to managing inventory.

  https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholm ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028289 48 points, 51 comments)

  https://andonlabs.com/blog/why-gemini-lost-money-andon-cafe

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.

• dingdongditchme

  today at 6:46 PM

  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?

  • ttul

    today at 6:57 PM

    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.

Hard pass.

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.

• ninalanyon

  today at 7:06 PM

  Charles Stross' Accelerando <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando>

  Had AI agents running businesses for the principal character Manfred Macx over twenty years ago.

  The first part of the book sounded pretty convincing then although I thought it would take a long time to happen. It sounds even more convincing now and much closer.

• away0g

  today at 6:47 PM

  imagine if they had better follow through.

[flagged]

• switchbak

  today at 6:15 PM

  When every get-rich-quick gonzo has exactly ZERO barrier to spamming the world with their terrible ideas, we're in for a particularly bad time.

  Ie: this f**in guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRGLToHAtgc

  • lioeters

    today at 7:04 PM

    I wish I hadn't clicked on it, disgusting. Selling dystopia with a fake smile.

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.

• DenisM

  today at 5:46 PM

  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.

• cyanydeez

  today at 5:42 PM

  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.

• lukaspetersson

  today at 5:34 PM

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

  • apsurd

    today at 5:47 PM

    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.

  • mcmcmc

    today at 5:36 PM

    You literally talk about committing a crime and blame it on a model

  • themgt

    today at 6:05 PM

    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.

  • 0gs

    today at 5:53 PM

    did you link to the wrong page? because i read this one: https://andonlabs.com/blog/why-we-built-pion and it's just a bunch of the usual slop about how awesome your automated human-exploitation system is.

    • switchbak

      today at 6:02 PM

      "By late 2025, frontier models had gotten good enough that running a real-life vending machine was no longer a challenge" ... is this satire? Isn't it kind of hard to lose money running a vending machine in a good location?

  • cryptonector

    today at 6:02 PM

    yawn

Filing false reports to the FBI is a crime. Why would anyone trust this with a real business? Y’all should be prosecuted

• tomhow

  today at 6:40 PM

  They didn't file false (or, any) reports.

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49701814.

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

• Sean-Der

  today at 5:47 PM

  I am waiting for my trillion dollar offer to buy https://pion.ly !

  Then I am all done fixing WebRTC bugs for life :')

• IsTom

  today at 5:46 PM

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

  • Sean-Der

    today at 5:48 PM

    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!

• arjie

  today at 6:05 PM

  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.

• tomhow

  today at 5:39 PM

  The post was placed on the front page via second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here 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.

• lukaspetersson

  today at 5:33 PM

  It's not from us. Didn't send the link to a single person.

  • andriy_koval

    today at 5:33 PM

    How can we know this?..

    • lukaspetersson

      today at 5:34 PM

      No way to confirm. True.

• SyneRyder

  today at 5:53 PM

  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.

• tomhow

  today at 5:44 PM

  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/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), then quickly got upvotes that seem completely authentic.

  • compiler-guy

    today at 5:50 PM

    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.

    • tomhow

      today at 6:10 PM

      They're entitled to defend themselves against accusations of things they haven't done, and also to respond to questions or assertions about their project. We encourage project creators to engage in the discussions about their projects. This is a normal part of building and launching a project.

    • Applejinx

      today at 6:17 PM

      From what I've seen of other AI-enabled projects interacting with forums in my field of work, it's very common for the AI people to jump in and answer every possible question and respond to every possible interaction, very quickly.

      Could be just a bot doing it, but it could also be a sign of an inexperienced person trying to engage with an existing community without being part of that community. I know in my area it took years for me to learn that I shouldn't jump into every conversation, and that doing that rubbed people the wrong way, and I've seen others (many years before AI) wreck themselves by being unable to learn this lesson.

      In some places responding bumps the thread so it's outright manipulative. HN doesn't sort threads like that.

      I'm not sure this counts as astroturf, or simply evidence of a person who's not okay with letting a community opinion independently evolve. You could say 'well it's his job to fight the community if it looks like it's turning hostile' but think about that for a second. It takes some experience to know when you can let negativity be out there in the environment, and I think there'll be a lot of people who aren't capable of making such allowances.

    • arjie

      today at 6:08 PM

      I actually like when the submitter is present and the creator. They’re actually involved. There are lots of users here who play at being submitters of high-value content (created by others) only to later submit their own entirely AI written drivel.

      This is interesting.

  • mcmcmc

    today at 5:58 PM

    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

  • mrguyorama

    today at 6:38 PM

    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?

read it as Prion, and hoo-boy, did that seem seriously ironic.

[dead]

8 points in 9 minutes?!

Bullshit...

dang come on man ...

this is obvious spam

• tomhow

  today at 5:41 PM

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700834

  • silvermine

    today at 5:42 PM

    [dead]

• lukaspetersson

  today at 5:32 PM

  I thought HN was good at filtering it? We didn't try to create any spam at least.

Ah, I wonder if it makes sense to also include the sign up link in the blog post? I had to click into the HN comments section to see your sign up link

• lukaspetersson

  today at 5:33 PM

  Good point. Here it is: https://andonlabs.com/pion

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

• mrob

  today at 6:14 PM

  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.

• today at 6:34 PM

• goatlover

  today at 6:38 PM

  Maybe we shouldn't want that to happen?