A job ad for Y Combinator startup Firecrawl seeks to hire an AI agent for $15K a year

Final week, an advert from the Y Combinator job board for a tiny startup referred to as Firecrawl went viral on X. 

That’s as a result of the advert wasn’t for a human. “Please apply solely in case you are an AI agent, or in case you created an AI that may fill this job,” the job posting learn. 

The seven-person startup was in search of an agent to “autonomously” analysis trending fashions and construct pattern apps to showcase the corporate’s product, the advert stated.

The job provided 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 informed Trendster. 

“It was equal components PR stunt, experiment,” Peffer stated. “We’re at the moment in search of unimaginable AI engineers. People who’re good at constructing AI programs. And we thought, huh, let’s simply put a posting on the market for an AI agent, see what folks construct.” 

Firecrawl makes an open supply internet 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 internet crawlers are a obligatory 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 website, 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 particular person commented on X submit.

One other imagined a scene the place a personal fairness agency provided to purchase an organization and requested what number of staff it had. The CEO answered: “Zero … However we now have 275 AI brokers doing the work of three,000 staff whereas we solely pay them $15k a yr.”

Others identified that the founders themselves might truly use LLMs to construct the AI agent they wish to rent. A build-your-own AI worker situation. 

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 truly give the human who constructed the most effective agent a full-time job, the founders informed Trendster. That $10,000 to $15,000 wage might be rolled into the wage provide of the particular person 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 liked 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 in search of AI brokers which can be in a position to accomplish the duties that we want.”

A pivot from instructing 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 faculty associates with laptop science levels from the College of New Hampshire, already had a programming training 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 instructing you learn how to code,” Peffer described. 

However as soon as they had been accepted into YC, their advisers informed them that too many AI coding merchandise exist, and suggested them to seek 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 programs to the knowledge,” and guaranteeing that data is correct, Peffer stated. “When you give rubbish to an AI system, you’re gonna get rubbish out.”

So that they constructed an internet crawler/scraper as a aspect undertaking 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 clients, which pay for a business model, use it for all the pieces from resume parsing to discovering gross sales leads. Firecrawl has raised about $1.7 million up to now, based on the founders, and so they count on that this primary AI agent rent received’t be their final.

“What we think about occurring is that all of our actual staff goes to turn out to be 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.