Posted by karakoram 4 days ago
This is insane. He's turning the failure of his AI assistants to do what he wants every single time and to do it in a safe manner into a positive thing. Failure as a positive!
That said, I approach AI with deep skepticism. I try to learn it, including its strengths and weaknesses. But I don't blindly trust it.
Coincidentally, my stock brokerage just yesterday sent an email reminding users that anything their agents do using the user's credentials is the responsibility of the user.
Since failure is such a likely outcome in a startup, "failure as a positive" is a mindset that a startup accelerator must propagate to keep founders going. And when you sell a message for long enough, you start to believe it yourself.
> he’s suffered from “cyber psychosis” and sometimes barely sleeps
If your business model is taking money from gullible investors, maybe it's reasonable to appear (or actually be) incompetent so that you don't accidentally waste your time on people who haven't drunk the Kool-Aid.
> He describes using AI agents as getting help with “almost anything that you do in your day-to-day life. (...) Almost anything you want to do, it knows you, and it’s there to help. And it will actually sort of run ahead and say, ‘What about this?’ Or it’ll help you see around corners.”
Wow, impressive. Both the capabilities and how much he's willing to share.
Is it worth $17k per month? For me, absolutely not. But people spend more on luxurious cars and such, so if you've got money to spare...
> Y Combinator is also using an agent that is “rebuilding the way we operate at YC. We now have an internal AI agent, for instance, named Stray Light that kind of has a personality, and then it has a company brain. It actually has the total context of every founder we’ve ever backed, anyone who’s ever emailed us, like all the applications.”
Holy anthropomorphization. But besides that, what's the goal of doing this? Keeping a handy overview of when and why someone said something?
The only way I can imagine to burn that many tokens is just to run every task fully through the most expensive LLM with no real strategy. Like indexing emails should be a combo of scripts and small summarizing prompts I'd think.
You'd be surprised how important such an overview can be in relationship-based businesses. People spend a lot of time trying to track down a vague memory they have of someone telling them something. CRM platforms are big for a reason, after all.
Because they can. It’s as simple as that. To find meaning, to feel in control, to win. To dominate.