We're at the point in the cycle where if someone offers you decent money you take it.
It might run on for a while longer but you don't want to be that guy who had a £100m net worth in 1999 but failed to monetise any of it and ended up with nothing
Never understood the hype. Good for the guy but what was the product really? And he goes on and on about changing the world. Gimme a break. You cashed out. End of story.
I am fine with the founder joining OpenAI, he gets to get paid regardless.
I am not confident that the open source version will get the maintenance it deserves though, now the founder has already exited. There is no incentive for OpenAI to keep the open sourced version better than their future closed source alternative.
It's a general anxiety of where the industry is headed. Things like marketing, personal branding, experimenting are increasing in relevance while things like detailed meticulous engineering are falling to the wayside.
At least when it comes to these tales of super fast rise to wealth and prominence. Meticulous engineering still matters when you want to deliver scale, but is it rewarded as much?
My feel is that the attention economy is leaking into software. Maybe the classic bimodal distribution of software careers will become increasingly more like the distribution in social-media things like streaming, youtube, onlyfans etc.
Incredibly depressing comments in this thread. He keeps OpenClaw open. He gets to work on what he finds most exciting and helps reach as many people as possible. Inspiring, what dreams are made of really.
Top comments are about money and misguided racism.
Personally I'm excited to see what he can do with more resources, OpenClaw clearly has a lot of potential but also a lot of improvements needed for his mum to use it.
Unclear what this truly means for the open version.
We can assume first that at OpenAI he's going to build the hosted safe version that, as he puts it, his mum can use. Inevitably at some point he and colleagues at OpenAI will discover something that makes the agent much more effective.
Does that insight make it into the open version? Or stay exclusive to OAI?
(I imagine there are precedents for either route.)
I have not run OpenClaw and similar frameworks because of security concerns, but I enjoy the author's success, good for him.
There are very few companies who I trust with my digital data and thus trust to host something like OpenClaw and run it on my behalf: American Express, Capital One, maybe Proton, and *maybe* Apple. I managed an AI lab team at Capital One and personally I trust them.
I am for local compute, private data, etc., but for my personal AI assistant I want something so bullet proof that I lose not a minute of sleep worrying about by data. I don't want to run the infrastructure myself, but a hybrid solution would also be good.
Quick plus one for Capital One after also working there. They're by far the most tech-forward of all the larger financial institutions, and by virtue of being a FI they take data-security much more seriously than any other "tech" companies.
It’s not like Anthropic or OpenAI were not working on “AI assistants” before OpenClaw, it’s pretty much the endgame as I can see it. This guy just single handedly released something useful (and very insecure) before anyone else. Although that’s impressive, I don’t see more than an acquisition of the hype by OpenAI.
OpenClaw is literally the most poorly conceived and insecure AI software anyone has ever made. Its users have had OpenClaw spend thousands of dollars, and do various unwanted and irreversible things.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadIt might run on for a while longer but you don't want to be that guy who had a £100m net worth in 1999 but failed to monetise any of it and ended up with nothing
https://web.archive.org/web/20260215220749/https://steipete....
You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw.
You can literally ask codex to build a slim version for you overnight.
I love OpenClaw, but I really don't think there is anything that can't be cloned.
You being able to go places is the interesting thing, your car having wheels is just a subservient prerequisite.
I am not confident that the open source version will get the maintenance it deserves though, now the founder has already exited. There is no incentive for OpenAI to keep the open sourced version better than their future closed source alternative.
At least when it comes to these tales of super fast rise to wealth and prominence. Meticulous engineering still matters when you want to deliver scale, but is it rewarded as much?
My feel is that the attention economy is leaking into software. Maybe the classic bimodal distribution of software careers will become increasingly more like the distribution in social-media things like streaming, youtube, onlyfans etc.
Add in databases, browser use, and the answer could be yes
This could be the most disruptive software we have seen
Personally I'm excited to see what he can do with more resources, OpenClaw clearly has a lot of potential but also a lot of improvements needed for his mum to use it.
We can assume first that at OpenAI he's going to build the hosted safe version that, as he puts it, his mum can use. Inevitably at some point he and colleagues at OpenAI will discover something that makes the agent much more effective.
Does that insight make it into the open version? Or stay exclusive to OAI?
(I imagine there are precedents for either route.)
There are very few companies who I trust with my digital data and thus trust to host something like OpenClaw and run it on my behalf: American Express, Capital One, maybe Proton, and *maybe* Apple. I managed an AI lab team at Capital One and personally I trust them.
I am for local compute, private data, etc., but for my personal AI assistant I want something so bullet proof that I lose not a minute of sleep worrying about by data. I don't want to run the infrastructure myself, but a hybrid solution would also be good.
No this is not a paid post lol
This fucking guy will fit right in at OpenAI.