alt Hacker NewsI’m joining OpenAI
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I thought it was a an interesting focal point for agentic ideas, but now it is too much flavored towards OpenAI
If only Europe could have offered him something even remotely competitive.
Innocent people are going to get hurt. Not sure how yet, but, giving a company intimate details about your life never ends well.
All they have to do now is partner with one of the major messaging providers like telegram and they can offer this as a hosted bot solution and probably dominate the market. Yes people are going out there buying mac minis and enjoying setting it up themselves but 90% of the general public don't want to do or maintain that and still want the benefits of all of it.
Maybe one day there will be a book citing the weird influence of crusteans on the tech world of this era... crabs, lobsters, ... I'm holding on for the next crayfish!
Openclaw did what no major model producer would do. Release insanly insecure software that can do whatever it wants on your machine.
If openai had done it themselves, immediate backlash.
Got super inspired by this story and (sorry for the plug) decided to build comrade, a security-focused AI agent: https://github.com/LaurentiuGabriel/comrade. I might be biased, but in my tests it managed to complete coding tasks (creating web apps from scratch) with less tools, which means less tokens, lower costs than openclaw.
What I am missing is distribution. It seems impossible to get traction nowadays on social media, regardless how good your product is.
Any feedback is much appreciated.
Cool. Good for him. I've been building agentic and observational systems and have been working to make them safe and layered in defense. And, well, I probably should have just said "fuck it" and put a disclaimer sticker on the front to let it fly.
Yeah, these systems are going to get absolutely rocked by exploits. The scale of damage is going to be comical, and, well, that's where we are right now.
Go get 'em, tiger. It's a brave new world. But, as with my 10 year old, I need to make sure the credit cards aren't readily available. He'd just buy $1k of robux. Who knows what sort of havoc uncorked agentic systems could bring?
One of my systems accidentally observed some AWS keys last night. Yeah. I rotated them, just in case.
Moving the project to a foundation is smart. Most AI tools die when the founder leaves. This one might actually survive.
OpenAI would have paid $400M or more for the latest AI hotness.
My guess if this guy has taken a job for maybe $1M, effectively handing over the crown jewels to Altman for nothing.
OpenAI must be laughing their heads off.
Beads and blankets.
Hugged to death?
https://web.archive.org/web/20260215220749/https://steipete....
It's pretty depressing yet motivating seeing SWE bifurcate.
This is an app that would've normally had a dozen or so people behind it, all acquihired by OpenAI to find the people who really drove the project.
With AI, it's one person who builds and takes everything.
Congrats! can you tell me how I can also be get hired in such companies. I have 3 years of experience.
I am surprised at the amount of comments that dismiss coding as just means to an end. Yes, every skill at the end of the day is a means to an end, but mastery of those skills is at the end what drives the vision. To know where you are going you need to know where you have been.
For anyone looking at alternatives in this space - I built Gobii (https://gobii.ai) 8 months before OpenClaw existed. MIT licensed, cloud native, gVisor sandboxed.
The sandboxing part matters more than people think. Giving an LLM a browser with full network access and no isolation is a real security problem that most projects in this space hand-wave away.
Multi-provider LLM support (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, open-weight models via vLLM). In production with paying customers.
Happy to answer architecture questions.
at this point idk what openclaw does and am afraid to ask but great for him
That picture at the end of the post really explains and sums up the problem with AI bias...
I personally haven’t used open claw due to security concerns on my device.
How to mitigate this concern?
I usually don't notice these things but in the picture in the bottom it's almost exclusively white men.
It'll be funny when his first task on his first day is un-slopping the trough bucket
> I’m joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone.
Sounds like a threat - "I'm joining OpenSkynetAI to bring AI agents onto your harddisc too!"
It's kind of a shame actually, because the whole promise of OpenClaw is that you own all the data yourself, you have complete control, you can write the memories or the personality of the bot. "Open"AI will never run ChatGPT this way. They want all of your data, your documents, your calendar, they want to keep it for themselves and lock you into their platform. They will want a sanitised corporate friendly version of an AI agent that reflects well on their brand.
Kudos to the guy for building such an awesome project in a very short amount of time. Of course he had to take some shortcuts to deliver, but at the end of the day, OpenClaw remains one of the best open source AI assistant implementations.
OpenAI is speeding up the race to be the most evil company in the world. Impressing.
> The more I talked with the people there, the clearer it became that we both share the same vision.
Bringing unblockable ads to the masses. Roger that.
Congrats — just the beginning for agents!
That's a brilliant move from OpenAI.
In the past, people wanting to sign a juicy contract at a FAANG were told to spend hours everyday on Leetcode.
Now? Just spend tokens until you build something that get enough traction to be seen by one of the big labs!
Not surprising if you've been paying attention on Twitter, but interesting to see nonetheless.
so open claw will be neither open nor claw
Insane. Maybe the takeaway is to just quickly build things that will impress people and have no regard for safety or security.
For OpenAI it’s a smart move, snatch up the creator of a viral and ride on its coat tails for the hype.
This is how you can tell OpenAI is panicking, rather than build something fairly simple themselves, they insta bought it for the headline news/"hype"...
I appreciate the author’s work and he seems like a good guy.
In spite of that, it’s incredibly obvious OpenClaw was pushed by bots across pretty much every social media platform and that’s weird and unsettling.
When I hear people talking about how insecure OpenClaw is, I remember how insecure the internet was in the early days. Sometimes it's about doing the right thing badly and fix the bad things after.
Big Tech can't release software this dangerous and then figure out how to make it secure. For them it would be an absolute disaster and could ruin them.
What OpenClaw did was show us the future, give us a taste of what it would be like and had the balls to do it badly.
Technology is often pushed forwards by ostensively bad ideas (like telnet) that carve a path through the jungle and let other people create roads after.
I don't get the hate towards OpenClaw, if it was a consumer product I would, but for hackers to play around to see what is possible it's an amazing (and ridiculously simple) idea. Much like http was.
If you connected to your bank account via telnet in the 1980s or plain http in the 90s or stored your secrets in 'crypt' well, you deserved what you got ;-) But that's how many great things get started, badly, we see the flaws fix them and we get the safe version.
And that I guess is what he'll get to do now.
* OpenClaw is a straw man for AGI *
I really hope Mario and Armin also gets poached
The real gem inside OpenClaw is pi, the agent, created by Mario Zechner. Pi is by far the best agent framework in the world. Most extensible, with the best primitives. .
Armin Ronacher , creator of flask , can go deep and make something like openclaw enterprise ready.
The value of Peter is in connecting the dots, thinking from users perspective, and bringing business perspective
The trio are friends and have together vibecoded vibetunnel.
Sam Altman, if you are reading this , get Mario and Armin today.
So if Openclaw is chromium then what will be chrome?
Wow, I really thought he would go with meta
> That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research.
You work for OpenAI now. You don't have to worry about safety anymore.
What exactly is the grand vision for this person. He uses soaring language to describe changing the world for his grandma or something. What is his vision and vision that all these smiling people in his pictures have of the world? Is it complete economic collapse? Is it the complete destruction of society due to AI? Is that really so exciting?
"AI" needs to be banned, datacenters destroyed and everyone who worked on this abominations shunned or jailed!
I like the foundation ideas.
Those attempting to discredit the value of OpenClaw by virtue of it being easily replicable or simple are missing the point. This was, like most successful entrepreneurial endeavours, a distribution play.
The creator built a powerful social media following and capitalized on that. Fair play.
im happy for him but it seems like a fairly simple app? why the need to poach?
Happy or you man keep it up i hope i join it one day too
I think the goal for OpenAI employees today should be to do as much good as possible with the ridiculous amount of investor money raised before the bubble goes pop.
The question is whether OpenClaw will actually stay open in the world of 'Open'Ai.
I think peter was mostly using calude and to a lesser extent codex and claude was getting a free marketing. If he can just improve codex to work better with openclaw it will be a big win for openai. If he can make openai agent at par with openclaw with added safety/security it would be a big win too. Its a smart move by openai and i totally get it.