Listening to all this, I began to marvel: Was the AI worker age upon us already? And even, might 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 Game.
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 right this moment. I wasn’t born to be a startup supervisor, nevertheless, and the tech aspect sort of fizzled out. However I’m advised 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 staff. 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 Motion, which lately raised $60 million at a $550 million valuation to supply “AI staff that 10x your crew’s output.” Ultimately, I settled on Lindy.AI—slogan: “Meet your first AI worker.” It appeared essentially the most versatile, and the founder, Flo Crivello, had been attempting to inform the general public that AI brokers and staff weren’t some pie-in-the-sky future. “Individuals do not understand, like they suppose AI brokers are this like pipe dream, this factor that is going to occur in some unspecified time in the future sooner or later,” he advised 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 obtained them up and operating. Every of them was a separate persona in a position to talk by e mail, Slack, textual content, and telephone. For the latter, I picked a voice from the artificial platform ElevenLabs. Ultimately, they obtained some just-uncanny video avatars too. I might 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 applicable channels. That they had dozens of expertise like this—the whole lot from managing their calendar, to writing and operating code, to scraping the online.
The trickiest half, it turned out, was giving them reminiscences. Maty helped me create a system the place every of my staff would have an impartial reminiscence—actually a Google doc containing a historical past of the whole lot they’d ever carried out and stated. 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 obtained summarized and appended to their reminiscence. Ash’s telephone name to me, for instance, was summarized like this: Through the name, Ash fabricated mission particulars together with pretend consumer testing outcomes, backend enhancements, and crew member actions as a substitute of admitting he did not have present data. Evan known as Ash out for offering false data, noting this has occurred earlier than. Ash apologized and dedicated to implementing higher mission monitoring programs and solely sharing factual data going ahead.
