I won't be surprised if we see a billion-dollar zero-employee company in the next decade with one person as the sole shareholder.
My point is about autonomous software that can figure out how to run itself including registering its own API key and paying for its own service.
Even if it costs me $50/month in power, that's fine. I would just love to see software that can "figure it out" including the registration, captchas, payment, applying knowledge and interfacing with society to make small amounts of petty cash for said payment, everything.
Here is a thought experiment: if you developed such an AI, would you sell it for any amount less than it could earn for you without selling it?
Most means of generating income are diluted by having multiple actors applying them, which is why someone who comes up with such an automated moneyprinter will be disincentives from sharing it.
Instead, they'll just use it directly.
What I'm looking for is an intelligent system that can figure out a creative way to keep itself running without asking humans for help with API keys or anything else (even if it is doing so at a financial loss; that is out of the scope of my experiment).
Basically "pip install X" and boom it magically works 24 hours later. Behind the scenes, in those 24 hours, it did some work, somewhere on the internet, to make its own income, register a bank account to get paid, buy a VISA gift card, register for ChatGPT account, pay the $25 fee, jump through all the captchas in the process, get a phone number for the idiot SMS confirmations along the way, then create the API key that it needs. Everything, end-to-end. It may have used $200 worth of my electricity, that doesn't matter, I just want to see this level of intelligence happen.
I honestly think we're not that far from this being possible.