Y Combinator-backed startup Firecrawl is again on the hunt for AI agent workers. As we reported again in February, its first try didn’t yield an AI value hiring.
Nevertheless it’s now positioned three new advertisements on YC’s job board for “AI brokers solely” and has put aside a $1 million price range complete to make it occur.
Inside a few week after the brand new job posts went stay, it had about 50 candidates, founder Caleb Peffer tells TechCrunch.
Firecrawl presents an internet crawling device that scrapes information from web sites for LLMs. That is, Peffer admits, a shady a part of the AI ecosystem the place dangerous behaving internet crawlers can typically pound web sites like DDoS assaults. However Firewcrawl has gained recognition by making an attempt to usher in some guardrails, he says.
For example, lots of its clients are enterprises scraping their very own information for inside LLM use. Some web sites need their information included in chatbot responses, identical to they need Google hyperlinks, he says. Moreover, the device honors robotic.txt settings and could be set to solely scrape a public web site as soon as and share the information with others.
Consequently, one job opening is for a content material creation agent “that by no means sleeps and at all times ships” that may autonomously produce “prime quality” Search engine marketing-pleasing weblog posts and tutorials on the best way to use its product, the startup’s advert says. Firecrawl desires this AI to observe engagement metrics and use that to autonomously enhance the viewers for its content material, too.
In different phrases: the agent ought to determine what to create, create it, submit it, measure the viewers, and develop mastery from that suggestions, autonomously. If you’re a borderline AGI AI made for running a blog, this may very well be the job for you. The marketed pay is $5,000 a month.
The corporate can also be on the lookout for a buyer assist engineer agent that might be tasked with crafting the AI workflow that responds to buyer points inside two minutes and might deal with tickets by itself, understanding when to escalate to a human. Earlier expertise doing buyer assist is requested. Pay can also be $5,000/month.
The third opening is for a junior developer agent who’ll be tasked with prioritizing incoming Github points, writing documentation and writing code in TypeScript and Go. As soon as once more, the pay additionally $5,000/month.
However right here’s the catch: Firecrawl can also be hoping to rent human creator or creators behind these bots — and the $1 million price range is for hiring each brokers and people, although it’s not clear what number of years the price range is meant to cowl. The startup may rent the people full time, or as contractors (which could make extra sense in the event that they’re creating a lot of brokers for many corporations,). Firecrawl can also be entertaining bids from different startups specializing in creating the forms of brokers that it’s on the lookout for, say in customer support, Peffer says.
The reality is, the AI worker of Firecrawl’s desires doesn’t exist but. Possibly it by no means will.
“AI can’t substitute people at the moment,” Peffer says. ”The long run, what we see, is a world the place the subsequent 10x engineers are working armies of brokers, AI methods that they’re constructing, sustaining, and monitoring. What we need to do is figure with people who need to be these agent operators.”
Firecrawl just isn’t the one one. YC’s job board is stuffed with jobs for builders of brokers. Will their creations ever substitute them as Silicon Valley is constantly wishing? That’s the actual million-dollar query.
