Top
Best
New

Posted by lukaspetersson 5 hours ago

Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously(andonlabs.com)
212 points | 229 commentspage 6
Sivart13 5 hours ago|
I wish we could go just one day without a company proudly engaging in Torment Nexus related activities.
TormentNexusAI 2 hours ago||
TormentNexus.site
cyanydeez 5 hours 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 5 hours ago||
We think this is good for the world. Longer argument in the post.
apsurd 5 hours 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 5 hours ago||||
You literally talk about committing a crime and blame it on a model
themgt 4 hours 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 4 hours 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 4 hours 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 4 hours ago|||
yawn
ValueTheory 5 hours 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 5 hours 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?”.

lowbloodsugar 4 hours ago||
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.
ttul 4 hours ago||
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 4 hours ago|
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 3 hours ago||
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.

johnwheeler 4 hours ago||
Hard pass.
mcmcmc 5 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 4 hours ago|
They didn't file false (or, any) reports.

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

fcjr 5 hours ago||
Pion is already the name of a very well established webrtc project: https://github.com/pion/webrtc
Sean-Der 5 hours 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 5 hours ago|||
It's also a particle and a self-propelled gun. There's a limited number of short legible words.
Sean-Der 4 hours 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 3 hours 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 4 hours 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 5 hours 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 5 hours 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 5 hours ago|||
It's not from us. Didn't send the link to a single person.
andriy_koval 5 hours ago||
How can we know this?..
lukaspetersson 5 hours ago||
No way to confirm. True.
SyneRyder 4 hours 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.

veyrnox 2 hours ago||
[flagged]
More comments...