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.
However it’s now positioned three new adverts on YC’s job board for “AI brokers solely” and has put aside a $1 million funds 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 provides an online crawling software that scrapes information from web sites for LLMs. That is, Peffer admits, a shady a part of the AI ecosystem the place unhealthy behaving internet crawlers can typically pound web sites like DDoS assaults. However Firewcrawl has gained recognition by attempting to herald some guardrails, he says.
As an illustration, lots of its prospects are enterprises scraping their very own information for inner LLM use. Some web sites need their information included in chatbot responses, identical to they need Google hyperlinks, he says. Moreover, the software honors robotic.txt settings and may be set to solely scrape a public web site as soon as and share the info with others.
Consequently, one job opening is for a content material creation agent “that by no means sleeps and at all times ships” that can autonomously produce “top quality” Search engine marketing-pleasing weblog posts and tutorials on methods to use its product, the startup’s advert says. Firecrawl needs this AI to look at engagement metrics and use that to autonomously enhance the viewers for its content material, too.
In different phrases: the agent ought to resolve what to create, create it, put up it, measure the viewers, and develop mastery from that suggestions, autonomously. In case you are 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 can be tasked with crafting the AI workflow that responds to buyer points inside two minutes and may 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 funds is for hiring each brokers and people, although it’s not clear what number of years the funds is meant to cowl. The startup would possibly 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 firms). Firecrawl can also be entertaining bids from different startups focusing on creating the varieties of brokers that it’s on the lookout for, say in customer support, Peffer says.
The reality is, the AI worker of Firecrawl’s goals doesn’t exist but. Perhaps it by no means will.
“AI can’t substitute people in the present day,” Peffer says. ”The longer term, what we see, is a world the place the following 10x engineers are working armies of brokers, AI techniques that they’re constructing, sustaining, and monitoring. What we wish to do is figure with those that wish to be these agent operators.”
Firecrawl is just not the one one. YC’s job board is filled with jobs for builders of brokers. Will their creations ever substitute them as Silicon Valley is repeatedly wishing? That’s the actual million-dollar query.
