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.
This is the case with Mechanize, a firm whose creator is being ridiculed on X for announcing it, as well as the non-profit AI research group he established, Epoch.
Both the startup’s goal and the suggestion that it damages the standing of his reputable research center are the subject of complaints. (A research institute director even wrote on X, “Yay just what I wanted for my bday: a communications crisis.”)
Mechanize’s founder, renowned AI researcher Tamay Besiroglu, introduced the company on Thursday through a post on X. “The full automation of all work” and “the full automation of the economy” are the startup’s objectives, according to Besiroglu.
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. “The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year,” he wrote.
However, Besiroglu clarified to TechCrunch that “white-collar work is indeed our immediate focus” as opposed to manual labor positions that would necessitate robotics.
The startup was frequently met with harsh criticism. Anthony Aguirre, an X user, said, “It is terrible to see this, but I have a lot of respect for the founders’ work at Epoch. Many of the largest corporations in the world are already working to automate the majority of human labor since it is a huge reward for businesses. For most people, it will be a tremendous loss, in my opinion.
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. It was believed to be an impartial way to check performance claims of the SATA frontier model makers and others.
Epoch has previously gotten involved in controversy. The ChatGPT-maker released its new o3 model in December after Epoch disclosed that OpenAI had backed the development of one of its AI benchmarks. People on social media thought Epoch ought to have disclosed the relationship more honestly.
“Alas, this seems like approximate confirmation that Epoch research was directly feeding into frontier capability work, though I had hope that it would not literally come from you,” said Oliver Habryka, an X user, in response to Besiroglu’s announcement of Mechanize.
