Final week, an advert from the Y Combinator job board for a tiny startup known 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 in case 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 stated.
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 iinfoai.
“It was equal elements PR stunt, experiment,” Peffer stated. “We’re at the moment in search of unbelievable AI engineers. People who’re good at constructing AI programs. 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 collect coaching information or every time their AI has to work together with public web sites to carry out.
AI internet crawlers are a crucial but considerably controversial a part of the web as of late, particularly for small companies. (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 assume, the primary job advert for an AI agent on the YC job board web site, 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 particular person commented on X publish.
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’ve 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 wish to rent. A build-your-own AI worker state of affairs.
Nonetheless others identified the dystopian nature of this AI future. “People creating AI to exchange people … And now people are writing job postings for AI to use to. We’re within the simulation, aren’t we?”
Apparently 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 iinfoai. That $10,000 to $15,000 wage will probably be rolled into the wage supply of the particular person they rent.
It hasn’t labored out but. Firecrawl bought 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 might have beloved to place considered one of these in manufacturing, however none of them had been as much as our requirements,” Peffer stated 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 in a position to accomplish the duties that we’d like.”
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 buddies with pc science levels from the College of New Hampshire, already had a programming training startup. It had hundreds of customers, a waitlist, and was producing income once they utilized to YC, Camara stated.
They deliberate to embed their product into VS Code “contained in the code editor, like Cursor, solely educating you easy methods to code,” Peffer described.
However as soon as they had been accepted into YC, their advisers instructed them that too many edtech coding merchandise exist, and suggested them to seek 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 programs to the knowledge,” and guaranteeing that information is correct, Peffer stated. “When you give rubbish to an AI system, you’re gonna get rubbish out.”
In order that they constructed an online crawler/scraper as a aspect 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 stated.
Their clients, which pay for a business model, use it for all the things from resume parsing to discovering gross sales leads. Firecrawl has raised about $1.7 million to this point, based on the founders, and so they count on 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 into 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 stated.
Observe: This story was up to date to appropriate the rationale why the founders modified their authentic product concept.
