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Posted by lukaspetersson 2 hours ago

Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously(andonlabs.com)
81 points | 85 commentspage 2
ac29 1 hour ago|
Relevant article about Andon Market: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-market-ai...
shagie 1 hour ago|
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

Sivart13 2 hours ago||
I wish we could go just one day without a company proudly engaging in Torment Nexus related activities.
cyanydeez 1 hour ago||
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 1 hour ago||
We think this is good for the world. Longer argument in the post.
apsurd 1 hour ago|||
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 1 hour ago||||
You literally talk about committing a crime and blame it on a model
themgt 1 hour ago||||
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 1 hour ago||||
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 1 hour ago||
"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 1 hour ago|||
yawn
acedTrex 1 hour ago||
[flagged]
switchbak 1 hour ago|
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

ValueTheory 1 hour ago||
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 1 hour ago|
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?”.

mcmcmc 2 hours ago||
Filing false reports to the FBI is a crime. Why would anyone trust this with a real business? Y’all should be prosecuted
tomhow 48 minutes ago|
They didn't file false (or, any) reports.

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

fcjr 1 hour ago||
Pion is already the name of a very well established webrtc project: https://github.com/pion/webrtc
Sean-Der 1 hour ago||
I am waiting for my trillion dollar offer to buy https://pion.ly !

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

IsTom 1 hour ago|||
It's also a particle and a self-propelled gun. There's a limited number of short legible words.
Sean-Der 1 hour ago||
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!

htrp 4 minutes ago||
> I sent a letter to the Soviet Union asking if they were ok with me using the name, never heard back!

Please tell me you actually did this!

arjie 1 hour ago||
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.

kaishiro 1 hour ago||
The upvotes on this brand new post - almost 1 a minute, speak to a level of astro-turfing I've rarely seen here.
tomhow 1 hour ago||
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 1 hour ago|||
It's not from us. Didn't send the link to a single person.
andriy_koval 1 hour ago||
How can we know this?..
lukaspetersson 1 hour ago||
No way to confirm. True.
SyneRyder 1 hour ago||
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.

compiler-guy 1 hour ago||
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 1 hour ago|
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 1 hour ago|||
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 1 hour ago|||
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 1 hour ago||||
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 1 hour ago|||
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 1 hour ago||||
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 50 minutes ago|||
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?
SandersAK 1 hour ago|
read it as Prion, and hoo-boy, did that seem seriously ironic.
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