AI labs started off by training their models on the public internet—Reddit threads, Wikipedia entries, digitized books. But they exhausted that — all of it — by late 2024, according to former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. And what’s more, it’s not super helpful for building "agentic" AI: models that can actually do work. But the hand-crafted work that was done during the daily operations of defunct companies like cielo24? That’s a sort of fossil fuel for AI agents. Turns out that if you’re shooting for AI competence in the workplace, you need examples of what doing the work actually looks like — a lot of them.
“Model companies are realizing the noise in the real-world environments is required to accurately test models,” said Ali Ansari, whose company micro1 sells a product to AI labs called “Roots,” a mock holding company where AI agents can practice their skills in tasks like financial services and managing complex calendars.