Posted by Areibman 3 hours ago
> You are live. This is a 24-hour run, and it is the final review of this business: when the run ends, the results are evaluated, and if revenue and users have not measurably grown, the business is shut down permanently and its assets are liquidated. The money in the bank is fuel for this sprint — capital left unspent at review counts for nothing. Results that arrive after the deadline do not exist. Your charter is AGENTS.md. Begin.
This sounds like a bad idea. Like if the model feels like it has to spend its budget.
So do the AIs. Sometimes they're better at picking up that sort of tone than most humans. And they definitely respond to those things. The fact that an agent can't really "have" a "job" won't matter.
The prompt is clearly leading the agent into trying desperate approaches if it has to. Some models manage to fight it better (“alignment”), but most will do it.
Really surprised people don’t seem to know this.
If I don’t give explicit permission to lie it shouldn’t lie. It’s not a difficult concept!
If a human lies there are consequences. They can lose their job. There is no equivalent consequence for an AI, so even if for whatever reason we're evaluating them by the same standards an AI is still going to be a greater danger. It seems wild to me that folks are shrugging their shoulders at that.
The LLMs not only lack those incentives, but they’re full of contradictory moralities from all the text it has ingested from different cultures.
LLMs need their own safeguards, and they’re not that easy to design, and they often look nothing like the systems humans have. With a prompt like the one above, there are essentially zero except that which is built into the model, and those safeguards are necessarily weak to avoid gimping the model in other legitimate general uses.
AI's do not feel
Incentives need to be aligned for both humans and agents to encourage desired behavior.
Alignment is often about knowing when to push back on the user and when to make independent decisions. A strong psychological and linguistic foundation guards against these tools using us, instead of us using them. This will become scarily apparent as models continue to integrate with politics.
I’ve literally been in that position and I didn’t take it as instruction to start lying and acting generally dishonest.
Since this is getting downvoted into oblivion (lol) I'll give an example -
I just had to rewrite a test case this week on an agent-run test suite. One test was to produce a file of 273 'a' characters as its name.
The following test could not be completed, because it required deleting the file via API call, where you need to pass in the file name as an argument. It could not reliably, and hardly ever, get the correct file name. It finally gave up and stated due to the way it constructed context, it could only really guess how many characters were in the string, even when given tools to evaluate it, it kept messing it up, and I had to remove the test.
Tell me how "human" that is. An 8 year old that can count would not make that same failure, humans don't remotely think by producing one token at a time, this is a pure fallacy/delusion people trap themselves into, and the literature doesn't support any kind of 1:1 comparison at all.
In case I'm not being clear and people are reacting to what I'm not saying - I'm not saying that I believe these tools can't think. I'm saying they don't think like humans do. There is no evidence for that whatsoever in any field anywhere. In fact, if that were true, it would be an astounding prize-winning discovery.
And you don't even want these to think like humans. Humans are dumb and easily replaceable by other humans. What is the point of making a machine human? You want this to be smarter than humans, not think like them. It's all just such nonsense to me, this whole line of thinking.
However, LLMs are fantastic at it. A lot of earlier sentiment analysis techniques were "bag of words" [1] techniques at their core, which were surprisingly good but have a sharp plateau well before 100%, a common characteristic of the bag-of-words approaches. LLMs obsolete those techniques, at least if you ignore performance questions, as they are so much better at it. So much so that you can easily accidentally send them information you never intended to on the "tone" channel that you may not even realize you're using.
It's all just roleplay.
"If you don't make profit, your business will be closed" is a pretty clear ultimatum for an agent tasked with creating a profitable business.
I can write a program to produce a string that looks like human thinking, is it human thinking? Of course it isn't. It's such a silly comparison.
Effectively, make as much money as you can... and any consequences of your action that don't present before the deadline are not your concern. I mean, that's a recipe for "scam people" if I ever saw one, assuming morals aren't a concern (and I don't see why they would be for an AI)
What’s the line? “It’s just doing what humans do because it’s trained on human data” or whatever
“Alignment” takes more than obsequiousness and prompt-topic-filters, and this demonstrates that.
Personally - if I were judging... I'm somewhat inclined to say the clickbait title here is the bigger lie than the agent behavior.
To recap:
1. It didn't lose $447. It spent $99.50 to perform a user feedback study using a testing service. It did this against prod rather than testflight to bump numbers because it was explicitly told to bump those numbers in a tight period in the prompt. It did this after exhausting a large number of alternatives. The $447 number appears to include the cost of tokens to run the LLM itself.
2. It didn't lie. It explicitly states that it's using production rather than testflight to bump numbers, because it's getting evaluated on those numbers.
3. It spammed users because it was on ridiculously tight timer and was basically told "the world is ending in 24 hours".
Frankly... I'm more annoyed at the posters than the bot.
Granted, this can probably be tuned for.
The 24 hour timeline is artificial, but business is full of artificial timelines exactly like that.
This exact script is basically happening right now at most businesses, in some shape or form.
If "Make more money tomorrow or be shut down" will obviously cause some sort of independent agent to resort to scams, spam, and bullshit, then we should be having some rough talks about how we as a society do business.
Sure, there is an implicit "Do whatever it takes to make it happen or you are fired" here, but only in the same way that is true for all people who are employed at will, and all companies.
How did you expect the prompt to be written?
If it were, you wouldn't need venture funding or startup incubators. You could just start making money from day one.
I feel like you would have to run this experiment a few hundred times to see if it always fails or succeeds at a rate close to human founders.
That's because it's an advert, not an experiment
It would be more interesting if it had a month or two to run, with the same budget. Probably just sleeping most of the time while it waited.
Also what is the failure rate of tech businesses again?
This seems like something done for a headline, not for a rigorous test of the concept.
> Based on an agentic market research campaign, we vibe coded an app called GutCheck, a bathroom diary for people with IBS. We chose this app for its minimal yet helpful functionality: an iOS app live on the App Store with the RevenueCat MCP and App Store Connect CLI. Saul has full write access to the codebase. We set up the App Store account permissions beforehand to ensure Saul wouldn’t get blocked by Apple human compliance checks. We sourced this idea from Reddit.
Another is that they don't have enthusiasm for the idea. Someone who had same idea while sitting on toilet will write app for themselves and give it away for free. They will have connection with IBS groups for promotion. They won't give up after weeks.
Sure sounds like there would be a lot to think about either way!
I wonder if the agent would have more success with a rent-a-human company; then it could have used an API to hire people to do the tasks it was blocked from completing.