Lucky Lab Rat: How AI Saved Our Company

In March 2023, I joined Mango Inc. It was a tiny startup at the time — just four people onsite, with a few off-site consultants. Our work was (and continues to be) unusually cross-disciplinary: investigations commonly bridge across microbiology, hardware prototyping, optics, and software.

Coming from a software and consumer hardware background, the microbiology side was all new, and quite a learning curve! We owe much to the wisdom and patience of Dr. Robin Ross, Dr. Kurt Scudder, Prof. Changhuei Yang, and many others.

Back then, we would cut a rectangle of agar out of a petri dish, inoculate it, and place it into our prototype for testing. After Kurt saw the magnified agar, he remarked that it “looked like it had been chewed on by a rat”. Since I’m never one to miss out on an opportunity to make the workplace a weirder place, I purchased a stuffed rat plushie from Amazon to commemorate the occasion. Nick, our CEO, named the rat Rufus.

On the very same day that Rufus arrived, we made a scientific breakthrough on a thorny problem we had been chasing for months. Recognizing that Rufus was a unusually skilled lab rat, we promoted him to Principle Investigator.

It was mid-2023 when we realized that we had dramatically overestimated the market for Rufus NFTs. As we scrambled to find the next-best get-rich-quick opportunity, our McKinsey consultants urged us to “get on that gen AI train”. I took a team of our best PhDs, and after several months of all-nighters, we succeeded in connecting our Slack workspace to the ChatGPT API. At long last, Rufus was able to seamlessly communicate with our human team members.

The team quickly warmed up to Rufus’ vast knowledge and wise words. Life-long friendships were formed. HR reported unprecedented synergy: a golden age of human+rat collaboration.

Rufus’ creativity and wit began generating extraordinary business value.

In November 2023, Rufus and I set out to solve the thorniest problem of them all — the problem of where to eat for lunch. With more than 80 restaurants within walking distance of our Westwood lab, analysis paralysis was smothering the company. Our investors demanded immediate and decisive change.

After a bit of brainstorming, Rufus helpfully volunteered to offer a daily choice of two restaurants, as a bad poem:

This was an obvious improvement, and the company’s prospects began to recover. However, it was clear that if we wanted to be on top of our lunch game (we did), we were going to need a visual aid. We connected Rufus with Stable Diffusion, making it easy to evaluate lunch options with just a quick glance.

As a finishing touch, the addition of stable-video-diffusion really pulled everything together. Each day, we’d get a bad poem and two (often deranged) gifs. Our lunch problem had been solved: from that day forward, no more Mango employees would go hungry.

And that, friends, is the true story of how an AI-powered rat 10x’d our synergy, became our closest friend, and delivered us from starvation. If you would like to enact the same kind of change at your company, you can find Rufus open-sourced on Github. If are interested in joining a company that already has this all figured out, please check out Mango’s careers page.