He let AI agents run a start-up—and things got weird fast
· 24 min
Episode He let AI agents run a start-up—and things got weird fast
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
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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.
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Links in the notes 4
- https://www.shellgame.co/
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- https://megaphone.fm/adchoices
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