What if your coworkers were AI? What if AI agents, not humans, monitored security camera feeds? What if you had an AI tech recruiter to find motivated candidates, or an entirely autonomous recruiting firm? What if UPS, but AI, or finance, but DeepMind?

Does that sound like absolute hell on Earth? Well, too bad, because the giant Silicon Valley investment firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is giving companies up to $1 million each to develop every single one of these ideas as part of its Speedrun program. 

A new startup backed by one of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is building a service that allows clients to “orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts through both bulk content creation and deployment.” Essentially, the startup, called Doublespeed, is pitching an astroturfing AI-powered bot service, which is in clear violation of policies for all major social media platforms. 

“Our deployment layer mimics natural user interaction on physical devices to get our content to appear human to the algorithims [sic],” the company’s site says. Doublespeed did not respond to a request for comment, so we don’t know exactly how its service works, but the company appears to be pitching a service designed to circumvent many of the methods social media platforms use to detect inauthentic behavior. It uses AI to generate social media accounts and posts, with a human doing 5 percent of “touch up” work at the end of the process.