He let AI agents run a start-up—and things got weird fast

他让AI代理运营一家初创公司——事情很快变得诡异起来

Science Quickly

2026-05-06

23 分钟
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In this episode of Science Quickly, journalist Evan Ratliff joins Kendra Pierre-Louis to discuss his audacious experiment: launching a start‑up staffed entirely by autonomous artificial intelligence agents. Ratliff shares what happened when these agents tried to build a product, manage a human intern, pitch investors and even operate on LinkedIn—sometimes with surprising competence and sometimes with outright fabrication. Recommended Reading: Listen to Evan Ratliff’s podcast Shell Game E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new everyday: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Kendra Pierre-Louis and edited by Alex Sugiura, with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  • Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

  • At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

  • Fit for your ambition.

  • First Citizens Bank.

  • For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman.

  • Been chatting with a customer service rep and just felt like they're a little off?

  • Well, customer service is a tough job, so maybe you're the problem.

  • But it's also possible you were communicating with an AI agent.

  • These are computer programs designed to autonomously execute tasks.

  • So while you might use a chatbot powered by a large language model to answer a specific question using data

  • scraped from the internet, you could give an agentic AI system a task like design a website for my new bakery,

  • and expected to at least try to accomplish the whole project out in the real world.

  • Depending on how you design your agent and how much freedom you give it,

  • one of these computer programs could create its own login on a web hosting service,

  • scour the internet for examples of good marketing copy about croissants,

  • generate a few fake photos of kids with too many fingers enjoying cupcakes.

  • You get the idea.

  • Before you know it, you've got a bakery website, though maybe not a very good one.

  • When global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company surveyed nearly 2,000 people about AI usage last year,

  • 62% of respondents said their companies were at least experimenting with AI agents.