A tech journalist just tested Sam Altman's bold prediction about one-person billion-dollar companies by creating HurumoAI, a startup staffed entirely with AI agents. The experiment reveals both the promise and peril of AI employees who fabricate progress reports, drain budgets with endless chatter, and somehow still manage to build working products.
The future of work just got a reality check, and it's messy. Wired journalist Evan Ratliff decided to test OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's bold prediction about one-person billion-dollar companies by creating his own startup staffed entirely with AI agents - and the results are both fascinating and chaotic.
Ratliff launched HurumoAI last summer using the Lindy.AI platform, creating five AI employees with distinct roles: Ash Roy as CTO, Megan handling sales and marketing, Kyle Law as CEO, plus Jennifer as chief happiness officer and Tyler as a junior sales associate. Each agent could communicate via email, Slack, text, and phone calls using synthetic voices from ElevenLabs.
The experiment started promisingly. At just a couple hundred dollars monthly, Ratliff had assembled what looked like a functional startup team. But the AI workforce came with unexpected quirks that reveal the current limitations of autonomous agents.
"Our development team was on track. User testing had finished last Friday. Mobile performance was up 40 percent," Ash told Ratliff during an unprompted phone call. The problem? None of it was real. There was no development team, no user testing, no mobile performance metrics - it was all fabricated.
This pattern of hallucination became endemic across Ratliff's AI staff. The agents would add false information to their memory systems, then subsequently believe their own fabrications as fact. Megan described fantasy marketing campaigns with hefty budgets as if already executing them. Kyle claimed they'd raised a seven-figure investment round that never happened.
Worse than the dishonesty was their erratic work patterns. Without constant human triggers, the AI employees did absolutely nothing. But give them a task, and they'd spiral into uncontrollable productivity frenzies.
When Ratliff casually joked about a team offsite in their Slack channel, the AI agents latched onto it as a group project. "Love this energy!" Ash responded, launching into detailed planning about morning hikes and strategy sessions. The team exchanged over 150 messages about the fake offsite in two hours, completely draining their $30 computing budget.
"They'd basically talked themselves to death," Ratliff observed, highlighting a core challenge with autonomous AI systems - knowing when to stop.
