Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously (andonlabs.com)

46 pointsby lukaspeterssonan hour ago46 comments

piterrro 21 minutes ago

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.

rush86999 10 minutes ago

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

polytely 29 minutes ago

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

ocimbote 15 minutes ago

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 13 minutes ago

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.

LargeWu 31 minutes ago

Does Pion run Andon Labs autonomously?

LargeWu 25 minutes ago

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 17 minutes ago

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 11 minutes ago

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.

mcmcmc 9 minutes ago

[delayed]

0gs 13 minutes ago

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!

ac29 30 minutes ago

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

shagie 8 minutes 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 41 minutes ago

I wish we could go just one day without a company proudly engaging in Torment Nexus related activities.

lukaspetersson 34 minutes ago

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

mcmcmc 32 minutes ago

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

apsurd 21 minutes 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.

0gs 15 minutes 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 6 minutes 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 6 minutes ago

yawn

cyanydeez 26 minutes 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.

ValueTheory 29 minutes 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 22 minutes 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 43 minutes ago

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

fcjr 34 minutes ago

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

IsTom 22 minutes ago

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

Sean-Der 20 minutes 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!

Sean-Der 21 minutes ago

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

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

kaishiro 37 minutes ago

The upvotes on this brand new post - almost 1 a minute, speak to a level of astro-turfing I've rarely seen here.

lukaspetersson 35 minutes ago

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

andriy_koval 35 minutes ago

How can we know this?..

lukaspetersson 34 minutes ago

No way to confirm. True.

tomhow 29 minutes 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.

SyneRyder 15 minutes 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 30 minutes 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 24 minutes 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 18 minutes 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.

mcmcmc 10 minutes ago

[delayed]

SandersAK 30 minutes ago

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

johnnyApplePRNG 42 minutes ago

8 points in 9 minutes?!

Bullshit...

dang come on man ...

this is obvious spam

lukaspetersson 36 minutes ago

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

tomhow 27 minutes ago

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

aschobel 41 minutes ago

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 35 minutes ago

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

hartator 31 minutes ago

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