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 if you’re an AI agent, or for those who created an AI that may fill this job,” the job posting learn.
The seven-person startup was on the lookout for 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 Digicam instructed TechCrunch.
“It was equal elements PR stunt, experiment,” Peffer stated. “We’re at the moment on the lookout for unbelievable AI engineers. People who’re good at constructing AI techniques. And we thought, huh, let’s simply put a posting on the market for an AI agent, see what individuals construct.”
Firecrawl makes an open supply net crawling bot for AI brokers and fashions. Companies can use it to assemble coaching information or at any time when their AI has to work together with public web sites to carry out.
AI net crawlers are a vital but considerably controversial a part of the web lately, 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 suppose, 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 individual commented on X put up.
One other imagined a scene the place a personal fairness agency supplied to purchase an organization and requested what number of workers it had. The CEO answered: “Zero … However we’ve 275 AI brokers doing the work of three,000 workers whereas we solely pay them $15k a 12 months.”
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 really give the human who constructed the perfect agent a full-time job, the founders instructed TechCrunch. That $10,000 to $15,000 wage will likely be rolled into the wage supply of the individual they employed.
It hasn’t labored out but. Firecrawler 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 attempting to rent a bot, once more.
“We might have beloved to place one among 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 on the lookout for 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, Firecrawler’s three founders — Peffer, Digicam and Eric Ciarla — weren’t even accepted into Y Combinator for the AI crawler thought.
The founders, who’re school mates 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, Digicam stated.
They deliberate to embed their product into VS Code “contained in the code editor, like Cursor, solely educating you find out how to code,” Peffer described.
However as soon as they had been accepted into YC, their advisers instructed them that too many AI coding merchandise 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 techniques to the data,” and guaranteeing that data is correct, Peffer stated. “For those who give rubbish to an AI system, you’re gonna get rubbish out.”
So that they constructed an internet crawler/scraper as a aspect challenge 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 prospects, which pay for a industrial model, use it for every part from resume parsing to discovering gross sales leads. Firecrawl has raised about $1.7 million to this point, in keeping with the founders, they usually anticipate that this primary AI agent rent received’t be their final.
“What we think about occurring is that all of our actual workers goes to change into extremely leveraged with AI. And it’s not a transparent distinction. It’s like, what’s the distinction between a software or a workflow or a full agent?” Peffer stated.
