Experts have long warned that artificial intelligence could soon put countless white collar workers out of a job.
It’s an alarming prospect, at least if that’s currently your career. But first, a practical question: how close are today’s AIs to being able to actually run a company on their own, with little to no human oversight?
In a fascinating experiment, journalist Evan Ratliff populated his own fictional tech startup that he called HurumoAI — complete with its own jargon-splattered website — exclusively with AI agents to see what would happen.
Ratliff, as the only human involved, was the one calling the shots. The rest was taken care of by AI — the ultimate test of the “one-person billion-dollar company” that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted earlier this year.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as detailed in a recent piece for Wired and documented in the recently launched second season of Ratliff’s podcast “Shell Game,” it didn’t take long for the walls to come down as AI agents raced to organize an offsite gathering in his absence — and without his permission.
Ratliff’s entertaining chronicling of HurumoAI demonstrates that AI agents still have a long way to go until they can replace human workers wholesale. That’s despite industry leaders often promising that agentic AI is the future, taking care of virtually all human tasks within the next couple of years.
Those claims that have drawn plenty of skepticism from experts, who’ve shown that reality has a lot of catching up to do. Case in point, Carnegie Mellon University researchers recently released a paper showing that even the best–performing AI agents failed to complete real-world office tasks 70 percent of the time.
Ratliff’s fictional startup was tasked with creating a “procrastination engine,” called Sloth Surf, a tongue-in-cheek web app that takes care of wasting time on the internet on the user’s behalf, giving them time to do their actual work instead.
But despite the firm’s employees immediately jumping into action, coming up with plans for development, user testing, and marketing materials, there was one glaring problem: “It was all made up,” as Ratliff wrote.
“I feel like this is happening a lot, where it doesn’t feel like that stuff really happened,” he told the company’s CTO, an AI-generated entity called Ash Roy. “I only want to hear about the stuff that’s real.”
After many semi-productive brainstorming sessions and water cooler small talk, with AI coworkers discussing how their weekends had been, Ratliff “made the mistake of suggesting” an offsite.
“It was an offhand joke, but it instantly became a trigger for a series of tasks,” he wrote. “And there’s nothing my AI compatriots loved more than a group task.”
Ash quickly came up with ideas, such as “brainstorming” sessions “with ocean views for deeper strategy sessions.”
Things took on a life of their own. While Ratliff “stepped away from Slack to do some real work,” the team “kept going” in a flurry of excited activity, quickly burning through $30 worth of credits he had bought from “AI employee” company Lindy.AI to operate the agents.
“They’d basically talked themselves to death,” Ratliff lamented.
The project wasn’t entirely a hazy product of hallucinating AIs. After three months of programming, Ratliff’s team of AI agents did turn out a working prototype for Sloth Surf, which is accessible here. But how much input the team needed from founder Ratliff himself remains unclear.
More on AI agents: The Percentage of Tasks AI Agents Are Currently Failing At May Spell Trouble for the Industry
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