Is Mechanize the Future of Work or Just a Satirical Startup?
Every now and then, a Silicon Valley startup launches with such an “absurdly” described mission that it’s difficult to discern if the startup is for real or just satire.
Such is the case with Mechanize, a startup whose founder – and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch – is being skewered on X after he announced it.
Complaints encompass both the startup’s mission, and the implication that it sullies the reputation of his well-respected research institute. Mechanize was launched on Thursday via a post on X by its founder, famed AI researcher Tamay Besiroglu. The startup’s goal, Besiroglu wrote, is “the full automation of all work” and “the full automation of the economy.”
Does that mean Mechanize is working to replace every human worker with an AI agent bot? Essentially, yes. The startup wants to provide the data, evaluations, and digital environments to make worker automation of any job possible. Besiroglu even calculated Mechanize’s total addressable market by aggregating all the wages humans are currently paid.
Besiroglu did, however, clarify to JS that “our immediate focus is indeed on white-collar work” rather than manual labor jobs that would require robotics.
The response to the startup was often brutal. But the controversial part isn’t just this startup’s mission. Besiroglu’s AI research institute, Epoch, analyzes the economic impact of AI and produces benchmarks for AI performance.
When Besiroglu announced Mechanize, X user Oliver Habryka replied, “Alas, this seems like approximate confirmation that Epoch research was directly feeding into frontier capability work, though I had hope that it wouldn’t literally come from you.”
Still, Besiroglu argues to the naysayers that having agents do all the work will actually enrich humans, not impoverish them, through “explosive economic growth.” He points to a paper he published on the topic. This might be true for whoever owns the agents.
On the other hand, this optimistic outlook overlooks a basic fact: if humans don’t have jobs, they won’t have the income to purchase all the things the AI agents are producing. Still, Besiroglu says that human wages in such an AI-automated world should actually increase because such workers are “more valuable in complementary roles that AI cannot perform.”
Even though Besiroglu vision and mission are clearly extreme, the technical issue he’s looking to solve is legit. If each human worker has a personal crew of agents which helps them produce more work, economic abundance could follow. And Besiroglu is unquestionably right on at least one thing: a year into the age of AI agents, they don’t work very well.
However, he’s hardly alone in working on fixes. In the meantime, Besiroglu wants you to know: Mechanize is hiring.
