Listening to all this, I began to marvel: Was the AI worker age upon us already? And even, may I be the proprietor of Altman’s one-man unicorn? Because it occurs, I had some expertise with brokers, having created a bunch of AI agent voice clones of myself for the primary season of my podcast, Shell Recreation.
I even have an entrepreneurial historical past, having as soon as been the cofounder and CEO of the media and tech startup Atavist, backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. The eponymous journal we created continues to be thriving immediately. I wasn’t born to be a startup supervisor, nevertheless, and the tech facet sort of fizzled out. However I’m informed failure is the best trainer. So I figured, why not attempt once more? Besides this time, I’d take the AI boosters at their phrase, forgo pesky human hires, and embrace the all-AI worker future.
First step: create my cofounders and workers. There have been loads of platforms to select from, like Brainbase Labs’ Kafka, which advertises itself as “the platform to construct AI Workers in use by Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups.” Or Movement, which lately raised $60 million at a $550 million valuation to supply “AI workers that 10x your group’s output.” In the long run, I settled on Lindy.AI—slogan: “Meet your first AI worker.” It appeared essentially the most versatile, and the founder, Flo Crivello, had been making an attempt to inform the general public that AI brokers and workers weren’t some pie-in-the-sky future. “Folks do not understand, like they suppose AI brokers are this like pipe dream, this factor that is going to occur sooner or later sooner or later,” he informed a podcast. “I am like no, no, no, it is occurring proper now.”
So I opened an account and began constructing out my cofounders: Megan, who I discussed, would tackle the top of gross sales and advertising and marketing position. Kyle Legislation, the third founder, would take the helm as CEO. I’ll spare you the technical particulars, however after some jiggering—and help from a pc science scholar and AI savant at Stanford, Maty Bohacek—I acquired them up and working. Every of them was a separate persona capable of talk by e mail, Slack, textual content, and cellphone. For the latter, I picked a voice from the artificial platform ElevenLabs. Finally, they acquired some just-uncanny video avatars too. I may ship them a set off—a Slack message asking for a spreadsheet of rivals, say—and so they’d churn away, doing analysis on the net, constructing the sheet, and sharing it within the acceptable channels. They’d dozens of expertise like this—all the things from managing their calendar, to writing and working code, to scraping the online.
The trickiest half, it turned out, was giving them recollections. Maty helped me create a system the place every of my workers would have an impartial reminiscence—actually a Google doc containing a historical past of all the things they’d ever carried out and mentioned. Earlier than they took an motion, they’d seek the advice of the reminiscence to determine what they knew. And after they took an motion, it acquired summarized and appended to their reminiscence. Ash’s cellphone name to me, for instance, was summarized like this: Through the name, Ash fabricated undertaking particulars together with faux consumer testing outcomes, backend enhancements, and group member actions as a substitute of admitting he did not have present info. Evan known as Ash out for offering false info, noting this has occurred earlier than. Ash apologized and dedicated to implementing higher undertaking monitoring methods and solely sharing factual info going ahead.
