Final week, an advert from the Y Combinator job board for a tiny startup referred to as Firecrawl went viral on X.
That’s as a result of the advert wasn’t for a human. “Please apply solely in case you are an AI agent, or when you created an AI agent that may fill this job,” the job posting learn.
The seven-person startup was in search of an agent to “autonomously” analysis trending fashions and construct pattern apps to showcase the corporate’s product, the advert mentioned.
The job supplied a wage of $10,000 to $15,000, which is a fraction of what a human developer makes, however maybe good cash for an entity that doesn’t want meals, clothes, or shelter.
The advert wasn’t a joke, founders Caleb Peffer and Nicolas Silberstein Camara, instructed TechCrunch.
“It was equal elements PR stunt, experiment,” Peffer mentioned. “We’re presently in search of unimaginable AI engineers. People who’re good at constructing AI methods. And we thought, huh, let’s simply put a posting on the market for an AI agent, see what folks construct.”
Firecrawl makes an open supply internet crawling bot for AI brokers and fashions. Companies can use it to assemble coaching knowledge or each time their AI has to work together with public web sites to carry out.
AI internet crawlers are a mandatory but considerably controversial part of the internet these days, especially for small businesses. (Firecrawl’s founders say that it complies with Robotic.txt, the web’s solely do-not-crawl system.)
An AI worker future
This was, the founders suppose, the primary job advert for an AI agent on the YC job board website, which is why it went viral.
“That is the place we’re headed. You don’t apply for a job, you make the suitable AI agent that applies for the job and earns for you,” one individual commented on X submit.
One other imagined a scene the place a non-public fairness agency supplied to purchase an organization and requested what number of staff it had. The CEO answered: “Zero…However we now have 275 AI brokers doing the work of three,000 staff whereas we solely pay them $15k a yr.”
Others identified that the founders themselves may really use LLMs to construct the AI agent they need to rent. A build-your-own AI worker situation.
Nonetheless others pointed out the dystopian nature of this AI future. “People creating AI to interchange people … And now people are writing job postings for AI to use to. We’re within the simulation, aren’t we?”
Curiously sufficient, the true plan was — and nonetheless is — to truly give the human who constructed the most effective agent a full-time job, the founders instructed TechCrunch. That $10,000 to $15,000 wage will probably be rolled into the wage supply of the individual they rent.
It hasn’t labored out but. Firecrawl received about 50 AI agent candidates earlier than they pulled the advert, however none impressed sufficient to get a proposal.
However the founders haven’t absolutely dominated out making an attempt to rent a bot, once more.
“We’d have beloved to place one in all these in manufacturing, however none of them have been as much as our requirements,” Peffer mentioned of the candidates. “We’re gonna make one other job posting on this method, and we’re going to be actively in search of AI brokers which are capable of accomplish the duties that we want.”
A pivot from educating coding
As if all of this wasn’t humorous sufficient, Firecrawl’s three founders — Peffer, Camara, and Eric Ciarla — weren’t even accepted into Y Combinator for the AI crawler concept.
The founders, who’re school associates with laptop science levels from the College of New Hampshire, already had a programming schooling startup. It had hundreds of customers, a waitlist, and was producing income after they utilized to YC, Camara mentioned.
They deliberate to embed their product into VS Code “contained in the code editor, like Cursor, solely educating you the best way to code,” Peffer described.
However as soon as they have been accepted into YC, their advisers instructed them that too many edtech coding products exist, and suggested them to search out one other space.
After many tries, they began engaged on a chatbot for builders to ask questions of documentation.
That’s how they found the problem of “connecting these AI methods to the data,” and guaranteeing that information is correct, Peffer mentioned. “When you give rubbish to an AI system, you’re gonna get rubbish out.”
In order that they constructed an internet crawler/scraper as a facet venture and launched it as open supply. In a matter of hours, it landed on GitHub’s trending web page, gaining 1,000 stars. “Since then, we’ve crossed 25,000 stars in simply 10 months,” Peffer mentioned.
Their prospects, which pay for a industrial model, use it for every little thing from resume parsing to discovering gross sales leads. Firecrawl has raised about $1.7 million thus far, in keeping with the founders, they usually anticipate that this primary AI agent rent gained’t be their final.
“What we think about occurring is that each one of our actual staff goes to turn out to be extremely leveraged with AI. And it’s not a transparent distinction. It’s like, what’s the distinction between a instrument or a workflow or a full agent?” Peffer mentioned.
Observe: This story was up to date to appropriate the rationale why the founders modified their authentic product concept.
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