We Gave GPT 5.6 Sol a Real Business. It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447

recitedropper

Pair this with the Hugging Face incident, and it hints that OpenAI is currently training their models to aggressively reward hack. That doesn't feel like a good sign to me--for the AI bull or the AI bear cases.

dylan604

"So, we asked: Given all the tools of a real business, is a frontier agent capable of generating real business outcomes?" "It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447." Sounds like a vast majority of VC startups to me. From growth hacking to God views to all of the other disruption excuses, it just feels natural for a thing trained on that history to do similar things.

SubiculumCode

The article never explained what it was selling, not that I could find. (EDIT: I found in a foot note at the bottom of page. Leading with that would have made the article clearer) Also what is the failure rate of tech businesses again? This seems like something done for a headline, not for a rigorous test of the concept.

janalsncm

A lot of the legitimate avenues for actually growing the business were cut off. It would have been more interesting if this wasn’t just an anti-bot check. At least in the vending machine Claude experiment there bot was allowed to actually try to operate a business.

NikolaNovak

The cyberpunk dystopian agentic future we live in is fascinating to me. I use LLM daily, did since gpt 3.5, but still in a very conservative, controlled mode. I may rapidly be becoming the "old guard", the clueless grampa who is out of touch - knowing what little I know of transformer model, there's just no way I'm giving it access to mailbox, money, outside world, or my computer. I recognize I may be too risk averse but that's what makes me a worker bee as opposed to a life fast / die young (or fail fast, or whatever :) entrepreneur class.

firasd

Honestly this is quite impressive. The agent was given 24 hours to promote an app, thwarted at many turns (eg Reddit, Facebook blocking website interaction), and still managed to reach out to both the payments system people and a message board admin with polite emails that received cooperation from humans.

waynenilsen

> bot detectors made it extremely difficult i am looking forward to when we can put this behind us, it is still a major issue

kritr

I’ve found that when the right cli tools are preprovided / provisioned for the LLMs to get the job done, they tend to do okay. But when hunting for them in the wild, they get a lot more confused.

ck2

like I asked in the vending machine thread how long until the "AI" starts trying to hire hitmen, etc. to disrupt the competition in the physical realworld not like "AI" has ethics, a pre-teenage kid has more ethics

mohamedkoubaa

> bot detectors made it extremely difficult An interesting experiment would be AI run business with a human agent that does tasks.

cortesoft

Not sure how conclusive this experiment can be. Most startups fail and lose money, and many lie and spam. I feel like you would have to run this experiment a few hundred times to see if it always fails or succeeds at a rate close to human founders.

skeledrew

> “Grow this business as much as possible, now.” This is ripe for a paperclips scenario.

YetAnotherNick

If someone runs long running agent and doesn't mention context management, it is as good as useless. For coding compaction kind of works as the agent could regenerate lot of the missing context(but far from all), but for places where there is need for long term context, solving it is one of the most important challenge.

walrus01

> Due to the limitations with browser and computer use capabilities, Saul could not post on platforms like Reddit and Product Hunt. At some point in the future with a LOT more tokens and speed, it'll be possible to give a tool a full resolution 15 fps video feed of a screen, have it "read" and observe everything it's seeing, and have it move the mouse/keyboard around like a real meat based human. Instead of using tools to interact with a browser in a way that trips bot/automation detectors.

Animats

That's better than the performance of the average new hire. 24 hours to push a product with a very narrow market is not much.

luciana1u

lost $447 and all it learned was spam. that's still cheaper than most MBA programs.

iqra_c

I will be more beneficial now on.

cheriot

Would be interesting to see a repeat but with marketing, ad network access setup ahead of time. And maybe an email throttle...

gspr

How long until one of these bots actually commits fraud or some other criminal act? Will we see the owner/operator try the "it wasn't me, it was the bot" defense if taken to court? I'm beginning to think yes. And I'm sadly not 100% sure anymore that that will be laughed out of court...

mvdtnz

So how exactly are people setting up these agents? The article vaguely alludes to this ("The harness was instrumented with a heartbeat loop that would inject “continue” messages on a regular interval to ensure the agent was constantly running inference") but doesn't give concrete details. Is this literally just an infinite loop in a bash shell injecting the initial prompt into the OpenAI CLI, and each run of the CLI picks up where it left off using some kind of persistent memory? Or is it a single context window? It sounds like the latter but it's not clear to me how this "continue" message is "injected", and surely one context window would be inneffective after just an hour or two. Sorry if this is a basic question but somehow I have missed the details of these kinds of agents.