alt Hacker NewsI’m joining OpenAI
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Well that was a crazy month. Kudos to this guy for recognising his goals which is not to start another company. It is very easy to get intoxicated by the idea of something being so successful that you can capture the value, especially after having struggled for so long with a previous company. I think it's every founder's dream to like just hit lightning. But this stuff is incredibly stressful and it's important to be able to look into the future and ask yourself. Is this what I want? Is this what I need in my life? And the answer here is no. This person can deliver value elsewhere quite easily and get the reward without as much stress. We should all take a lesson from this whirlwind journey. Do not attempt to be like Peter. You can admire the work he's done. Do not attempt to replicate it. Appreciate it for what it is. For yourself as an observer or a user it's a lesson. But also to note that this is an anomaly. You will never replicate it. A lot of people feel a little bit of envy or jealousy. I used to feel that when I was working on something and I saw other people succeed and I wished that that had happened to me. But if it was meant for you it would find you. And the fact that it hasn't found you means that it was not meant for you. We all have our role to play. There is something important for us to do and that's not necessarily something that is world famous or amasses thousands of GitHub stars. If after reading this it's still bothering you. Take a walk and reflect on the good things in your life.
Good move. OpenClaw is alpha quality, very dangerous, super useful and super fun - which amplifies the danger. It’s a disaster waiting to happen and a massive risk for a solo dev to take on. So best to trade it for a killer job offer and transfer all that risk.
To get a sense of what this guy was going through listen to the first 30 mins of Lex’s recent interview with him. The cybersquatting and token/crypto bullshit he had to deal with is impressive.
This is the same "heating" effect as social media algorithms apply to random podcasters (e.g. Joe Rogan) - those isolated cases of success which happen to be completely synthetic provide an 'american dream' for the system, whose success depends on the Fantasy being alive and believed in by those who are its customers/product
If you step back and look at this whole thing from a marketing and cash flow perspective, I think it makes a lot more sense.
It is in OAI's best interests to create a perception that flinging agentic swarm crap at the wall may result in lucrative job offers. Or to otherwise imply this is the golden path. They need their customers to consume ever more tokens per unit time. This highly contentious parallel agent swarm stuff is the perfect recipe.
With OpenClaw we are seeing how the app layer becomes as important as the model layer.
You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw.
This is all about PR now.
openclaw is inevitable type of software (as cli agents, as context-management software, as new methodologies of structuring sofware for easier AI ingestion, etc). Guy gamed, built it, guy got it.
At this point I would not expect well-rounded software as a byproduct of huge investments and PR stunts. There will be something else after LLMs, I bet people are already working on it. But current state of affairs of LLMs and all the fuss aroud them is way more peceptive, PR and emotion driven than containing intristic value.
Congrats to Peter!
Can any OpenClaw power users explain what value the software has provided to them over using Claude code with MCP?
I really don’t understand the value of an agent running 24/7, like is it out there working and earning a wage? Whats the real value here outside of buzzwords like an ai personal assistant that can do everything?
Did this guy just exit the first one man billion-dollar startup for... less than a billion?
I really hope Mario who wrote the engine that powers OpenClaw[0] gets spoils as well.
OpenClaw is mostly a shell around this (ha!), and I've always been annoyed OpenClaw never credited those repos openly.
The pi agent repos are a joy to read, are 1/100th the size of OpenClaw, and have 95% of the functionality.
There are a few take aways I think the detractors and celebrators here are missing.
1. OpenAI is saying with this statement "You could be multimillion while having AI do all the work for you." This buy out for something vibe coded and built around another open source project is meant to keep the hype going. The project is entirely open source and OpenAI could have easily done this themselves if they weren't so worried about being directly liable for all the harms OpenClaw can do.
2. Any pretense for AI Safety concerns that had been coming from OpenAI really fall flat with this move. We've seen multiple hacks, scams, and misaligned AI action from this project that has only been used in the wild for a few months.
3. We've yet to see any moats in the AI space and this scares the big players. Models are neck and neck with one another and open source models are not too far behind. Claude Code is great, but so is OpenCode. Now Peter used AI to program an free app for AI agents.
LLMs and AI are going to be as disruptive as Web 1 and this is OpenAI's attempt to take more control. They're as excited as they are scared, seeing a one man team build a hugely popular tool that in some ways is more capable than what they've released. If he can build things like this what's stopping everyone else? Better to control the most popular one than try to squash it. This is a powerful new technology and immense amounts of wealth are trying to control it, but it is so disruptive they might not be able to. It's so important to have good open source options so we can create a new Web 1.0 and not let it be made into Web 2.0
The amount of negative posts about this on twitter is crazy, I've not seen any positive posts. Jealousy or something else?
Peter is not a vibe coder. He build/code and sold a company way before LLMs. a lot of comments here seem to so fix on him being a "vibe coder"
So that’s OpenClaw dead then.
It took all of Peter’s time to move it forward, even with maintainers (who he complained got immediately hired by AI companies).
Now he’s gonna be working on other stuff at OpenAI, so OpenClaw will be dead real quick.
Also I was following him for his AI coding experience even before the whole OpenClaw thing, he’ll likely stop posting about his experiences working with AI as well
While following OpenClaw, I noticed an unexpected resentment in myself. After some introspection, I realized it’s tied to seeing a project achieve huge success while ignoring security norms many of us struggled to learn the hard way. On one level, it’s selfish discomfort at the feeling of being left behind (“I still can’t bring myself to vibe code. I have to at least skim every diff. Meanwhile this guy is joining OpenAI”). On another level, it feels genuinely sad that the culture of enforcing security norms - work that has no direct personal reward and that end users will never consciously appreciate, but that only builders can uphold - seems to be on it’s way out
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.
It's strange how quickly this project got so big... It did not seem like anything particularly novel to me.
This is NOT OpenAI buying OpenClaw, it's OpenAI hiring someone who can build it, similar to them betting on Jony Ive.
This is a smart play. Models aren't going to be a moat, performance is too easy to replicate and all the big players (and even OSS) are following quickly behind. The only moat that will be stable is having something with network effects and adoption overhead, something that can grab eyes and has sticking power. This was probably the idea behind Sora (although it hasn't worked).
Filling the team with people who come up with novel and interesting ways to grab attention that could possibly create vendor lock-in is probably the goal.
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.
Weird how OpenAI would spend so much money to buy a developer when developers will just be obsolete in a couple years.
Somehow seeing 1025 comments after 21h of HN makes me realise the smallness of the world.
This has been travelling on a bunch of platforms, but the niche-ish ones have fairly low engagement numbers.. in the grand scheme of things.
Hello, fellow humans
So with Max Stoiber and Peter Steinberger 2 well known Austrian Devs ended up at OpenAI.
Truly incredible.
OpenAI is putting money where their mouth is: a one-man team can create a vibe-coded project, and score big.
Open-source, and hyped incredibly well.
Interesting times ahead as everyone else chases this new get-rich-quick scheme. Will be plentiful for the shovel makers.
Kinda… funny? that one in this position could not just blurt out “they offered the most”?
It's hard not to be jealous.
What he did is incredible, he grabbed attention of the tech community like no other...however good or bad he was at it and making it secure.
He was curious and experimental and got lucky!
Potentially amazing opportunity for OpenAI to more meaningfully compete with Claude Code at the developer and hobbyist level. Based on vibes it sure seemed like Claude Code / Opus 4.6 was running away with developer mindshare.
Peter single handedly got many of us taking Codex more seriously, at least that's my impression from the conversations I had. Openclaw has gotten more attention over the past 2 weeks than anything else I can think of.
Depending on how this goes, this could be to OpenAI what Instagram was to Facebook. FB bought Instagram for $1 billion and now estimated to be worth 100's of billies.
Total speculation based on just about zero information. :)
The generous interpretation is that Open AI is still safety aligned and they hired this guy because it's safer to have him inside and explain to him how reckless he's being, than having him far from "sphere of control".
The more likely scenario is that he was hired for the amazing ability to move fast and break things.
Austrian media are reporting that Peter Steinberger had a $100m exit with PSPDFKit in 2021.
I'm extremely curious what OpenAI's offer was. The utility of more money is diminished when you're already pretty wealthy.
> The claw is the law.
This isn't a Slay The Spire reference is it?
It‘s just crazy to me that this guy lives around the corner. That should inspire some hope for me I guess, that even people from Vienna can be successful on such a level.
Is an agent running on a desktop, with access to excel, word, email and slack going to replace Saas?
Add in databases, browser use, and the answer could be yes
This could be the most disruptive software we have seen
Can someone explain what value openclaw provides over like claude code? It seems like it's literally just a repackaged claude code (i.e. a for loop around claude) with a model selector (and I guess a few builtin 'tools' for web browsing?)
I feel like a lot of people miss out what this hire and his decision to join are really about. I (think) I can relate, because I once had a viral hit (with interviews, press, etc) that made me "silicon valley famous" for a while, and ended up with me joining a mega-company despite lots of speculation I'd build it into a startup.
The two sides:
* From his POV: He said he's not interested in doing "another company" after spending 13 years trying to build a startup. I imagine there's another aspect too, which is that OpenClaw is not in itself an inherently revenue-generating product, nor is it IP-defensible. This was my situation. My viral hit could (and soon was) replicated by many others. I had the advantage of being "the guy who invented that cool thing", but otherwise I would be starting from scratch. It was a mind-fuck having a huge hit on my hands from one day to the next, but with no obvious direction on how to capitalize on it.
* Then from the company's POV: despite hiring thousands and thousands of employees, only a tiny handful of them ever capture any "magic." You've got an army of product managers who have never actually built or conceived of a product people love, and engineers who usually propose ideas that are ok but probably not true gold. So now here we have a guy who did actually conjure up something magical that really resonated with people. Can he do it again? Unknown, but he's already proved himself in the ideas space more than most people, so it's worth a shot for the company.
Not sure if anyone has heard his interview on the Hard Fork podcast... was not unlike listening to a PR automaton. Now going to work for OpenAI. Yup.
Personal agents disrupt OpenAI’s revenue plan. They had been planning to put ads in ChatGPT to make revenue. If users rapidly move to personal agents which are more resistant to ads, running on a blend of multiple models/compute providers - then they won’t be able to deliver their revenue promises.
> "What I want is to change the world".
I don't know if you'll achieve that at OpenAI or if it'll even be a good change for the world, but I genuinely wish you the best. Regardless of the news around OpenAI I still think it's great that a personal project got you a position at a company like that.
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.)
Just like the original OpenAI story, this seems like a case of reputation hacking through asymmetry in risk tolerance.
There is not much novel about OpenClaw. Anybody could have thought of this or done it. The reason people have not released an agent that would run by itself, edit its own code and be exposed to the internet is not that it's hard or novel - it's because it is an utterly reckless thing to do. No responsible corporate entity could afford to do it. So we needed someone with little enough to lose, enough skill and willing to be reckless enough to do it and release it openly to let everyone else absorb the risk.
I think he's smart to jump on the job opportunity here because it may well turn out that this goes south in a big way very fast.
If you actually spent some time researching his background you would know he was already very successful before his vibe-coding saga.
I really hoped he would support Europe’s startup ecosystem. Hopefully, he will at least bring stronger privacy standards to OpenAI, such as a policy that prohibits reading or analyzing user prompts or AI responses.
It indeed is the logical next step. It's been super interesting following him online and he's inspired a bunch of people to just go build stuff. Because why not.
Title could have mentioned this relates to Openclaw/moltbot/clawdbot too. Now the post became more relevant to read when I realized what this was about.
The guy already sold his previous company for a shitload of money. Got bored and did a side project that stirred the Internet on the past month. That is way more than most people here are going to accomplish in a lifetime. Yet, he has some deal with OpenAI to work on whatever he things exciting. I don't see why so much negative comments here other than jelously
It likely won't matter much in the end, but I do think this could be a significant mistake for OpenAI.
OpenAI has two real competitors: Anthropic in the enterprise space and Google in the consumer space. Google fell far behind early on and ceded a lot of important market share to ChatGPT. They're catching up, but the runaway success of ChatGPT provides OpenAI with a huge runway among consumers.
In the enterprise space, OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft has been a gold mine. Every company on the planet has a deep relationship with Microsoft, so being able to say "hey just add this to your Microsoft plan" has been huge for OpenAI.
The thing about enterprise is the stakes are high. Every time OpenAI signals that they're not taking AI safety seriously, Anthropic pops another bottle of champagne. This is one of those moments.
Again, I doubt it matters much either way, but if OpenAI does end up blowing up, decisions like this will be in the large pile of reasons why.
I'm happy for the guy, but am I jealous as well? Well yes, and that's perfectly human.
We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities. This is reported by many folks
We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person.
We don't know how much of the github stars are bought. We don't know how many twitter followings/tweets are bought.
Then after a bunch of podcasts and interviews, this person gets hired by a big tech company. Would you hire someone who never read any if the code that they've developed? Well, this is what happened here.
In this timeline, I'm not sure I find anything inspiring here. It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success". Maybe I should network better to get "successful". I shouldn't be focusing on writing good code or good enough agents. I shouldn't write secure software, instead I should write softwares that can go viral instead. Are companies hiring for vitality or merit these days? What is even happening here?
So am I jealous, yes because this timeline makes no sense as a software engineer. But am I happy for the guy, yeah I also want to make lots of money someday.