Every so often, a Silicon Valley startup emerges with a mission so bizarrely worded that it’s hard to tell if it’s a legitimate venture or just an elaborate joke.
That’s exactly the case with Mechanize, a startup launched by AI researcher Tamay Besiroglu. Following the announcement of Mechanize, Besiroglu—and his non-profit AI research organization, Epoch—have faced heavy criticism, particularly on X, with some calling out the startup’s audacious goals and the potential damage to Epoch’s well-established reputation. One director at Epoch even jokingly posted, “Yay, just what I wanted for my birthday: a communications crisis.”
Mechanize was introduced on Thursday via a post on X by Besiroglu. The stated mission? To “fully automate all work” and “fully automate the economy.”
So, is Mechanize working to replace every human worker with AI? In short, yes. The startup aims to provide the tools, data, and digital environments necessary to automate any job, making it possible to replace human workers with AI agents.
Besiroglu even calculated the startup’s total market potential by summing up global wages. “The market opportunity here is absurdly large: U.S. workers are paid around $18 trillion annually. For the entire world, that number is more than three times higher, at $60 trillion per year,” he said.
However, Besiroglu clarified in a TechCrunch interview that the startup’s immediate focus is on automating white-collar jobs, rather than manual labor requiring robotics.
The reaction to Mechanize’s launch has been harsh. X user Anthony Aguirre responded, “I have huge respect for the founders’ work at Epoch, but I’m sad to see this. The automation of human labor is a massive prize for corporations, which is why some of the world’s biggest companies are already working on it. I think it will be a massive loss for humanity.”
But the backlash isn’t just about the startup’s ambitions. Epoch, Besiroglu’s AI institute, is known for analyzing the economic effects of AI and setting benchmarks for AI performance. It had been seen as an unbiased organization that offered objective evaluations of the capabilities of AI models, including those from the likes of SATA frontier model creators.
This isn’t the first time Epoch has been embroiled in controversy. In December, it was revealed that OpenAI had helped fund the creation of one of Epoch’s AI benchmarks, which was then used to promote the launch of OpenAI’s o3 model. The lack of transparency about this relationship sparked backlash on social media.
When Besiroglu introduced Mechanize, X user Oliver Habryka commented, “This seems like confirmation that Epoch research directly influenced frontier AI work, though I had hoped it wouldn’t come from you.”
Mechanize is backed by a number of high-profile investors, including Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Patrick Collison, Dwarkesh Patel, Jeff Dean, Sholto Douglas, and Marcus Abramovitch. While Friedman, Gross, and Dean didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, Abramovitch, a managing partner at the crypto hedge fund AltX and self-described “effective altruist,” confirmed his investment. He explained, “The team is exceptional across many dimensions and has thought more deeply about AI than anyone I know.”
