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. (A director at the research institute even posted on X, “Yay just what I wanted for my bday: a comms crisis.”)
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. “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.
Besiroglu did, however, clarify to TechCrunch 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. As X user Anthony Aguirre replied, “Huge respect for the founders’ work at Epoch, but sad to see this. The automation of most human labor is indeed a giant prize for companies, which is why many of the biggest companies on Earth are already pursuing it. I think it will be a huge loss for most humans.”
But the controversial part isn’t just this startup’s mission. Besiroglu’s …