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.

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dlivingston 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My gut feeling is that OpenAI is desperately searching for The Killer App™ for LLMs and hired Peter to help guide them there.

OpenAI has tried a lot of experiments over the years - custom GPTs, the Orion browser, Codex, the Sora "TikTok but AI" app, and all have either been uninspired or more-or-less clones of other products (like Codex as a response to Claude Code).

OpenClaw feels compelling, fresh, sci-fi, and potentially a genuinely useful product once matured.

More to the point, OpenAI needs _some_ kind of hyper-compelling product to justify its insane hype, valuation, and investments, and Peter's work with OpenClaw seems very promising.

(All of this is complete speculation on my part. No insider knowledge or domain expertise here.)

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readitalready 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In the AI space there isn’t a single killer app. EVERYTHING is open for disruption. ChatGPT was the start but OpenAI could create tons of other apps. They don’t need to wait for others to do so. People already want them to make a Slack replacement but I’m just wondering why none of the frontier labs are making a simple app platform that could be used to make custom apps like ChatGPT itself, or the Slack clone. Instead, they expect us to brute force app development through the API interface. Each frontier lab really needs their own Replit.

Like, why doesn’t OpenAI build tax filing into ChatGPT? That’s like the immediate use case for LLM-based app development.

	▲	oblio 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Like, why doesn’t OpenAI build tax filing into ChatGPT? Legal liability.

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Atotalnoob 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Orion is Kagis browser.

Atlas is OpenAIs browser

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mschuster91 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> the Sora "TikTok but AI" app

This product should never have seen the light of day, at least not for the general public. The amount of slop that is now floating across Tiktok, YT Shorts and Instagram is insane. Whenever you see a "cute animals" video, 99% of it is AI generated - and you can report and report and report these channels over and over, and the platforms don't care at all, but instead reward the slop creators from all the comments shouting that this is AI garbage and people responding they don't care because "it's cute".

OpenAI completely lacks any sort of ethical review board, and now we're all suffering from it.

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Slartie 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Would you consider cute animal videos that are not AI generated to be so much more worthy of your time? Because I don't really care whether cute animal videos are AI generated or filmed - I simply don't want to spend even a second on them.

And most people I know who love spending time on this kind of content would not care either - because they don't care whether they waste time on real or AI animal videos. They just want something to waste time with.

	▲	mschuster91 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Would you consider cute animal videos that are not AI generated to be so much more worthy of your time? Yes indeed. I do love me some cat and bunny videos. But I hate getting fed slop - and it's not just cat videos by the way. I'm (as evidenced by my comment history) into mechanics, electronics and radio stuff, and there are so damn many slop channels spreading outright BS with AI hallucinated scripts that it eventually gets really really annoying. Sadly, YT's algorithm keeps feeding me slop in every topic that interests me and frankly it's enraging, as some of my favorite legitimate creators like shorts as a format so I don't want to completely hide shorts. > And most people I know who love spending time on this kind of content would not care either - because they don't care whether they waste time on real or AI animal videos. They just want something to waste time with. The problem is, these channels build up insane amounts of followers. And it would not be the first time that these channels then suddenly pivot (or get sold from one scam crew to the next) and spread disinformation, crypto scams and other fraud - it was and is a hot issue on many social media platforms.

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nikcub 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Regardless of what you think of OpenClaw, Peter is a great hire - he's been at the forefront of brute-forcing app development with coding agents.

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noosphr 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OpenAI has been running around headless for at least two years now. I've build systems like openclaw, based on email, at my day job and told OAI during an interview that they needed to build this or get smoked when someone else does. I guess aqi-hire is easier than building a team that can develop software internally.

Of course the S in openclaw is for security.

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pezo1919 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Same here, seems 100% marketing move. The trend continues.

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FinnKuhn 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

While insecure and not something I would use myself (yet) one thing OpenClaw has managed to do is to show people the potential that AI still has.

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Aurornis 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> This guy just single handedly released something useful (and very insecure) before anyone else.

It has been interesting to watch this take off. It wasn't the first or even best agent framework and it deliberately avoided all of the hard problems that others were trying to solve, like security.

What it did have was unnatural levels of hype and PR. A lot of that PR, ironically, came from all of the things that were happening because it had so many problems with security and so many examples of bad behavior. The chaos and lack of guardrails made it successful.

	▲	isx726552 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Let’s not lose sight of the fact that he piggybacked on a large company’s name recognition by originally calling it “clawd”, clearly intending it to be confused with Claude. I have my doubts it would have gone anywhere without that.

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krick 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But... how is it even useful? Do you use it? Is it a good idea for anyone to, uh, use it? Is it a product that you or any other "vibe coder" cannot ~~build~~ tell Claude Code to build on the go, if he wants to communicate with Claude Code via WhatsApp for some reason? Sure, product doesn't need to be some sophisticated technology to be worth something, it could also just have user base because it succeeded at marketing, but does this particular product even benefit from network effects? What is this shit? Why anybody cares?

Seriously, I just don't understand what's going on. To me it looks like all world just has gone crazy.

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pubby 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Single-handed made me smirk. It was vibe coded.