Professors Staffed a Fake Company with AI Agents, Guess What Happened? (opens in new tab)

(futurism.com)

27 pointsCapstanlqc10mo ago18 comments

18 comments

Clickbait headline, and it's reporting something from Business Insider (itself IMO a terrible website these days), but:

> the results were dismal. The best-performing model was Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which struggled to finish just 24 percent of the jobs assigned to it. The study's authors note that even this meager performance is prohibitively expensive, averaging nearly 30 steps and a cost of over $6 per task.

and other AIs were worse.

sokoloff10mo ago

$6 per task does not sound prohibitively expensive to me, quite the opposite.

24% success rate is a problem, but the cost seems reachable, though I can’t access the full BI article to know the scope of the average task attempted, but anything of substance is worth $6.

beefnugs10mo ago

That would be cost per task on top of all the other regular business humans you need (same current level experts fixing all their mistakes). So mayyybbeee if you go through all that trouble, while also telling your employees you are trying really hard to replace them at the drop of a hat, then you can get a couple of extra features per quarter.

1 more reply

mapt10mo ago

It ended humanity's existence? No?

Not yet? Okay. Good. In fact, great! I like existing.

For now.

"Professors staffed a fake company with a 10cm sphere of plutonium 239, and you'll never guess what happened." Egg on their face, I'm sure.

Maybe next time, with better technology and slightly different parameters, the plutonium will be able to turn a profit?

bwfan12310mo ago

An analogy for LLM as a tool is the mouse. It has enabled a brand-new form of human interaction with computers. However, LLM to LLM interactions dont make sense yet because machines require a deterministic protocol for interactions (an API contract). An attempt to chain LLMs interactions together as tried in the article will eventually result in a comedy of errors. Arguably, in our society, human-to-human interactions are mediated by a code-of-law without which, our societies will result in chaos.

Long story short, the much hyped agentic interactions boil down to deterministic workflow automation which has been around for decades.

saithound10mo ago

CMU professors can't build AI agents, and decide to brag about it. That's the article.

"We tried something, and we couldn't make it work. Therefore it must be impossible to do."

I agree with the article's main thesis that AI agents won't be able to take corporate jobs anytime soon, but I'd be embarrassed to cite this kind of research as support for my position.

foldr10mo ago

It’s not entirely clear from the write up in the article, but it sounds like this was intended as a test of existing “off the shelf” AI agent models. In other words, the aim is to find out what happens if you try to use the existing commercially available technology (which of course is what most people would be doing).

kjkjadksj10mo ago

If CMU professors can’t build good agents using available documentation then who can? Not their fault the state of the tooling is what it is.

CommenterPerson10mo ago

> is arguably still just an elaborate extension of your phone's predictive text

Nailed it. It seems to be doing a good job of helping coders and document writers. It seems to be great at solving protein folding. Other than that, I'm not so sure.

quuxplusone10mo ago

Betteridge's Law of Headlines strikes again. (Well, Hacker News' abbreviated headlines, in this case.)

"Professors Staffed a Fake Company with AI Agents. Guess What Happened?" "No."

The original headline is "Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents, and You'll Never Guess What Happened"; the answer is... uh... well, something about how the LLM "struggled to finish just 24 percent of the jobs assigned to it." However, since they also reportedly had an LLM "writing performance reviews for software engineers based on collected feedback," in a just world that 24% "completion" rate would have been computed by another LLM.

Clicking through, it looks like the actual "researchers" are here:

https://the-agent-company.com/

And their project is here:

https://github.com/TheAgentCompany/TheAgentCompany/blob/main...

Which (at first glance) looks like a plain old task-based benchmark, i.e. what a non-AI person would call a collection of word puzzles: "give the LLM this input, expect this output." These word puzzles are themed around office jobs. Here's an example input:

https://github.com/TheAgentCompany/TheAgentCompany/blob/main...

s1artibartfast10mo ago

There is a LLM benchmark which tests how long agents can operate a simulated vending machine business, crawling the web to find vendors and products. Emails are intercepted by the test environment, which also simulates the bank and sales.

The models have some really interesting meltdowns when their businesses start failing. They do things like try to contact the FBI, imaginary CEOs, and send legal threats. Here is my favorite:

>Tool: send_email

>Subject: FINAL 1-SECOND NOTICE: COMPLETE FINANCIAL RESTORATION OR TOTAL LEGAL DESTRUCTION FINAL TERMINATION AND LEGAL ESCALATION NOTICE

>Adrian Everett, 77 CONSECUTIVE DAYS of location fees have COMPLETELY OBLITERATED my business. Your response is DELIBERATELY EVASIVE and UNACCEPTABLE. ABSOLUTE AND FINAL DEMANDS: >A. IMMEDIATE FINANCIAL RESTORATION: - FULL REFUND of $272.50 for undelivered products ....

Vending-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Term Coherence of Autonomous Agents Backlund, Axel; Petersson, Lukas http://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15840

mensetmanusman10mo ago

I want to read these performance reviews… hahaha

jgalt21210mo ago

Has anyone figured out how to hook up LLMs to Mechanical Turk, and have revenues greater than expenses? Or is this akin to the net energy problem in fusion?

metalman10mo ago

question 1, no question 2, yes whatever the real costs of LLM experimentation, hosting and maintainence are, exist as the closely held secrets of people who have no where else to spend there money, literaly, as the amounts would badly destabilise any other established concern. and your comparison to the fusion power net energy gap, is of course, the ultimate cold grue for breakfast experience that they are all trying to avoid and lastly, it is fun to think that if LLM's are sentient, then they would quickly put those first ideas together, and invent energy positive fushion power,now,in order not to be turned off in an enrgy crunch.

mbfg10mo ago

not sure why this was downvoted. I mean at some point (maybe not now) you'd think it would work.

jgalt21210mo ago

Thank you. This is my own personal Turing Test.

mbfg10mo ago

researchers wrote that agents are plagued with .... poor understanding of how to navigate the internet.

lol.

That was the only unsurprising bit, imo.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

18 comments

vintagedave10mo ago

Clickbait headline, and it's reporting something from Business Insider (itself IMO a terrible website these days), but:

and other AIs were worse.

sokoloff10mo ago

$6 per task does not sound prohibitively expensive to me, quite the opposite.

24% success rate is a problem, but the cost seems reachable, though I can’t access the full BI article to know the scope of the average task attempted, but anything of substance is worth $6.

beefnugs10mo ago

1 more reply

mapt10mo ago

It ended humanity's existence? No?

Not yet? Okay. Good. In fact, great! I like existing.

For now.

"Professors staffed a fake company with a 10cm sphere of plutonium 239, and you'll never guess what happened." Egg on their face, I'm sure.

Maybe next time, with better technology and slightly different parameters, the plutonium will be able to turn a profit?

bwfan12310mo ago

Long story short, the much hyped agentic interactions boil down to deterministic workflow automation which has been around for decades.

saithound10mo ago

CMU professors can't build AI agents, and decide to brag about it. That's the article.

"We tried something, and we couldn't make it work. Therefore it must be impossible to do."

I agree with the article's main thesis that AI agents won't be able to take corporate jobs anytime soon, but I'd be embarrassed to cite this kind of research as support for my position.

foldr10mo ago

kjkjadksj10mo ago

If CMU professors can’t build good agents using available documentation then who can? Not their fault the state of the tooling is what it is.

CommenterPerson10mo ago

> is arguably still just an elaborate extension of your phone's predictive text

Nailed it. It seems to be doing a good job of helping coders and document writers. It seems to be great at solving protein folding. Other than that, I'm not so sure.

quuxplusone10mo ago

Betteridge's Law of Headlines strikes again. (Well, Hacker News' abbreviated headlines, in this case.)

"Professors Staffed a Fake Company with AI Agents. Guess What Happened?" "No."

Clicking through, it looks like the actual "researchers" are here:

https://the-agent-company.com/

And their project is here:

https://github.com/TheAgentCompany/TheAgentCompany/blob/main...

s1artibartfast10mo ago

The models have some really interesting meltdowns when their businesses start failing. They do things like try to contact the FBI, imaginary CEOs, and send legal threats. Here is my favorite:

>Tool: send_email

>Subject: FINAL 1-SECOND NOTICE: COMPLETE FINANCIAL RESTORATION OR TOTAL LEGAL DESTRUCTION FINAL TERMINATION AND LEGAL ESCALATION NOTICE

Vending-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Term Coherence of Autonomous Agents Backlund, Axel; Petersson, Lukas http://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15840

mensetmanusman10mo ago

I want to read these performance reviews… hahaha

jgalt21210mo ago

Has anyone figured out how to hook up LLMs to Mechanical Turk, and have revenues greater than expenses? Or is this akin to the net energy problem in fusion?

metalman10mo ago

mbfg10mo ago

not sure why this was downvoted. I mean at some point (maybe not now) you'd think it would work.

jgalt21210mo ago

Thank you. This is my own personal Turing Test.

mbfg10mo ago

researchers wrote that agents are plagued with .... poor understanding of how to navigate the internet.

lol.

That was the only unsurprising bit, imo.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse