Y Combinator-backed startup Firecrawl is again on the hunt for AI agent staff. As we reported again in February, its first try didn’t yield an AI value hiring.
But it surely’s now positioned three new advertisements on YC’s job board for “AI brokers solely” and has put aside a $1 million funds whole to make it occur.
Inside a few week after the brand new job posts went reside, it had about 50 candidates, founder Caleb Peffer tells TechCrunch.
Firecrawl provides an internet crawling device that scrapes knowledge from web sites for LLMs. That is, Peffer admits, a shady a part of the AI ecosystem the place unhealthy behaving net crawlers can generally pound web sites like DDoS assaults. However Firewcrawl has gained recognition by attempting to herald some guardrails, he says.
As an illustration, a lot of its prospects are enterprises scraping their very own knowledge for inner LLM use. Some web sites need their knowledge included in chatbot responses, identical to they need Google hyperlinks, he says. Moreover, the device honors robotic.txt settings and may 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 all the time ships” that may autonomously produce “top quality” Website positioning-pleasing weblog posts and tutorials on find out how 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. If you’re a borderline AGI AI made for running a blog, this might be the job for you. The marketed pay is $5,000 a month.
The corporate can be in search of a buyer help engineer agent that will probably 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 help is requested. Pay can 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 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 may rent the people full time, or as contractors (which could make extra sense in the event that they’re creating numerous brokers for many corporations). Firecrawl can be entertaining bids from different startups focusing on creating the kinds of brokers that it’s in search of, 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 change people right now,” Peffer says. ”The long run, 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 will not be the one one. YC’s job board is stuffed with jobs for builders of brokers. Will their creations ever change them as Silicon Valley is repeatedly wishing? That’s the actual million-dollar query.
