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This sounds like it was written by someone who has never actually built a company.

No, it's not possible to do most of the things you listed purely online without physical, in-person communication. Silicon Valley still hires engineers and drags them into their physical office in San Francisco, instead of hiring them remotely, because you can't even build a software company fully remotely, forget about a physical world factory or chemical plant. Even the so-called fully remote companies were built on a lot of in-person collaboration between a small founding team in the beginning.

The AI wouldn't be hiring engineers; it doesn't need people for that. At any rate, I have worked for fully remote distributed companies, and never met the CEO. And I think most of us would be willing to work for such a company at least, not knowing whether the CEO is human or not.

For construction work the AI would probably be hiring other companies.

You may have never met the CEO, but I am sure that the CEO or founder was not living in a cave the entire time. They may not have talked to you, but they certainly had their inner circle built in-person at some point.

I don't think that inner circle would be essential to an AI the same way it is to a human. Even if so, an AI's inner circle is going to be other AIs and they communicate digitally anyway.

Also, if you had to pick a year for when we see the first AI-controlled company with at least $100M in assets under its control, what date would you pick?

I'm reminded of the 2010s when people said an AI would never be able to break from its box and be connected to the internet, and then in the 2020s the first thing the AI companies did was offer AIs as online services. I expect in the 2030s fund managers will be eager to hand control of their billions to AI, so how the AI gets control of funds and a corporation is hardly an obstacle.

What does it mean to be AI controlled? Somebody had to give it a bank account, a prompt, a harness and tell it to build a company. If that's what you mean by AI-controlled, then my startup is AI-controlled.

I operated as a one-man bootstrapped startup for many years. And now it's just one man plus AI, which has made me much more productive. It's pretty much fully AI-controlled, depending on how you define it. But I still consider myself the owner of my own startup. AI is not the owner.

And yes, as a person who runs a fully online one-person startup, I know that it is impossible to do everything online.

> But I still consider myself the owner of my own startup. AI is not the owner.

You have a small company but when there's more money and business at stake, owners often delegate decision making to hired people. Decisions that engage sometimes billions of dollars in resources.

You can easily imagine that owners of a successful business at some point might forgo putting a human in charge of their investment and let AI manage it instead. And while technically AI wouldn't own anything, it would be in power to decide what the billions of dollars get spent on, with no human supervision as long as the bottom line looks decent.

Sure, I already do that at my company. Before I go to sleep, I put Opus 5 in bypass permissions mode and give it SSH access to my server and tell it to restart it or take necessary actions to keep the server online while I sleep. I could easily put it in control of more things. But at that point, AI is just managing a well-oiled machine and harness with tools that I have spent years building. It still didn't build a company. Any idiot can manage an established company (how many idiots have we had in the White House?), but very few can build one. And our original discussion was about AI building a company.

The original discussion was about what can be done digitally by a super intelligent AI.

Yup the gloomy posts in this thread are utter cringe

Hahahaha

Why haven’t accountants been replaced yet? Customer service agents?

Why was I talking to a human yday on the phone to get something sorted?

Why did I have to go interface with a human in person today to get a refund?

So many questions!!!

I don't know, but I've never met my accountant in person. Only spoken on the phone and over email.

> So the question then becomes, how much damage can be done by an AI-directed corporation, funded by AI-directed investment firms, providing well-paying jobs to loyal locals by building an arbitrary number of AI-designed chemical and pharmaceutical plants in under-regulated juristictions?

No, the question is "how much MORE damage" ... and the answer, if you think about it, is pretty much "meh". We are doing close to maximum possible amount already. Corporations and bureaucracies were misaligned AIs of the last century and a lot of us, though not all, survived this.

So at worse they would be like another North Korea?

Kind of, if North Korea were populated by a super intelligent uni-mind with lots of money, no trade restrictions preventing it from running projects in the United States or anywhere else, capable of winning widespread support by people around the world whose income depends on its projects succeeding, and completely unconcerned with keeping the planet inhabitable for Kim Jong-Un or any other human, even a single one of them.