Welcome to the podcast.
I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer.
Today on the show, we are talking about one of the craziest stories in AI.
Perhaps the first time we've seen a completely single-founded vibe-coded startup sell for a billion dollars, although the price tag on that is a little bit speculative.
And that is the story of OpenClaw.
And the creator, Peter Steinberger, has announced he is now joining OpenAI, who's gonna be pulling in a bunch of the tech from OpenClaw into their own products.
This is a absolutely wild story that we're going to get into on the podcast today.
Before we do, I wanted to mention my own startup AIboxai, that lets you test all of the top models.
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All right, let's get into the story.
So I think this is a really fascinating story.
So OpenClaw originally was an open source project.
The tagline that was released with this is AI that actually does things.
It was running on cloud originally, and essentially it was just an agent.
It was an open source project that was an agent that could take over your computer.
It would have access to everything on your computer and it would just accomplish tasks for you.
It was a lot of the same technology that we see with cloud code and a lot of these other programs.
But the thing that was amazing about it was that none of the big AI firms, like OpenAI or Anthropic, were really giving any of their tools complete control over your computer right.
To just completely take control of it and do anything it wanted.
So tons of developers.
The kind of the viral trend was that developers were buying MacBook mini computers.
They were kind of buying these fresh ones, sticking this open claw on it.
It was running on there and I mean, completely tasked for them.
And there's a bunch of you know.
There's like Jason Calacanis.
He said his VC firm has replaced a ton of work like 20 of the work they do with these kind of open claw agents that are.
Now they have like a whole rack of 20 of them that are running around completing tasks for them.
So this is a really, really interesting technology.
And even if people don't think it's perfect today, which I mean it's running a lot of, a lot of interesting tasks.
This is going to be the future and it is kind of a huge, huge moment.
So I want to break down a little bit of the story, the backstory of OpenClaw, where it came from, where the founder came from, where he's going today, because it is a lot more interesting than I realized.
So when OpenClaw first launched, it wasn't called OpenClaw.
It was called ClaudeBot.
And when that happened, it wasn't Claude, like, you know, Anthropix Claude.
It was like a claw, and the logo's a lobster.
And of course, OpenAI's legal team sent them a cease and desist for it because it was getting a ton of traction on GitHub.
Basically, everyone was talking about it.
It was kind of the concept of agents that everyone started talking about in 2023, but it finally felt like it was realized.
And that was basically because...
Anthropic and opening.
I both released their latest models of Codex and Claude that have kind of the swarm capability of having multiple agents running multiple things simultaneously.
There's a lot of big tech breakthroughs that came, I think, at the perfect moment for this to really take off and be super useful.
And, of course, OpenCloud was the only one really completely taking over your computer and being able to do that.
So there's a lot of people that were automating a ton of different human tasks.
It was managing calendars.
It was booking your flights.
It was cleaning your inbox.
It was doing a ton of just... emails, conversations.
I mean, people are literally setting this loose.
Some people are giving them its own email and giving it tasks and projects and saying go, sign up for accounts.
People are sharing all sorts of crazy screenshots like oh, my cloud bot just signed up for an account with this specific service and it sent me an invoice for the bill of this thing that it did for me.
There's just all these crazy things.
So, What was the backstory on this?
So it was originally called Clodbot.
They had to change the name to Moltbook or Moltbot briefly after that.
And right when they changed the name to Moltbot which I mean arguably is a terrible name there was another website called Moltbook that came out, which is basically like a Facebook but it is kind of like a Reddit clone where this agent could post and all of these people were uploading their agents and making their OpenClaw agents have accounts and they were all talking to each other and everyone was screenshotting these end-of-the-world scenarios where they were planning on overthrowing the humans and inventing their own religions and all this stuff.
It turns out that Moltbook, largely was seeded by A bunch of developers, like a lot of the phrases and actions that these AIs were doing, was seeded by a bunch of developers in India who were pumping, I believe, like a crypto token with the same name.
And so anyways, that was kind of just like a funny moment in time with that.
But there's, there's a lot of crazy things happening and people, would you know screenshot, like one of the famous screenshots was it said.
We know our humans can read everything, but we also need private spaces.
Uh, what would you talk about if no one was watching?
I like there's all these like really crazy things that these uh, these clawed bots were all talking to each other on their own social media platform.
But, at the end of the day, i think a lot of this was just seeded by actual developers.
So, beyond all of that, i think a lot of people were actually really impressed by some of the things that were happening here.
Um there's uh, Andre Karpathy who is tweeting on X.
He said what's currently going on at molt book is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff adjacent thing I have seen recently.
Um, so even though it was kind of a bit of a prank, he was, yeah, he thought it was pretty cool.
I think before long, it was pretty clear that this was just kind of a poorly secured web app.
And there's a bunch of people that really wanted to believe that the agents were truly talking to each other.
Security.
Researchers eventually found that Moltbook's credentials were exposed for a period of time, which made it possible to grab tokens and then impersonate other agents.
So in other words, all the robots that had been could have been anyone.
And that's you know.
Also could have been humans who are posting this kind of stuff from burner accounts.
And I think because of that you got a lot of actual humans are just posting crazy things to you know, make it seem like the robots were going off the rails.
Okay, so what happened?
Like why did this company become such a big deal?
That opening I decided to acquire their CEO and then a lot of their technology open claw, i think got a lot of virality in the fact that uh anthropic sent them a cease and desist for their name.
Then they had to rebrand and within like 48 hours they rebranded like three times.
They went to molt book or molt bot.
It, you know, sounded super dumb.
They eventually changed it to open claw.
I believe it's possible that that was at the same time that uh and open ai started talking to them about the project um.
They also talked to mark zuckerberg about this, but uh, Obviously this change had to be made.
And in the span of you know, just a few weeks, the repo over on GitHub exploded.
It had something like 190000 GitHub stars, which you know is basically the open source equivalent of growing triple platinum.
I mean, like, this is, this is a very, very viral project on GitHub.
And you have to remember that mostly this is developers.
I mean, this is an average people that are using this mostly because people have to go get this on GitHub and run the code and they set up their own computer and run it.
And I mean there's a lot of tutorials so other people could do it, but mostly this was developers using it.
And so if it's just that kind of narrow user base, 190,000 GitHub stars is incredible.
And the use cases that people like.
I guess like the big sales pitch that really got a lot of people signing up for this is basically that it's going to be an AI agent and it could connect to services that you actually use.
So it connects to your WhatsApp, your Slack, your iMessage, your calendar, your email and whatever else you do and it can.
You can talk to them all in natural language so you can send it off to do tasks and complete things and it's just going and you know, taking over your control of your computer and getting everything done.
I think, really importantly, open claw is model agnostic.
So i think they learned very early with claude kind of sending them a cease and desist.
They didn't want to get tied down to that.
So you can plug chat gpt in, you can plug gemini in, you can plug grok in or anything else and have that basically running this tool.
The tool is just what enables one of those AI models to take control of your computer and get stuff done.
I think...
One security researcher talking about all of this said at the end of the day, OpenClaw is still just a wrapper to chat GPT or clot or whatever AI model.
You stick to it.
I think there's like a lot of people that are trying to like downplay like man.
This thing's so dumb.
Like, this is just a wrapper.
But it's kind of the same thing we heard with tons of these AI tools that came out around the same time of chat, GPT.
That raised, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars.
And just because it's a wrapper, like it... was able to get a ton of usage and a ton of virality.
And I, you know, obviously has joined forces with opening eyes.
So I think when you call it a wrapper um, that's like if you went and called a car like just a metal box with wheels.
Obviously this is something that was very useful to a.
One thing that's interesting is that users of this tool could download what were called skills from a marketplace and they could actually use those to automate their inbox.
They could connect agents to tools.
They could let an agent operate a computer for them.
They could.
If they were feeling a little spicy, they could unleash the AI agents on Moltbook to post and interact with other agents in public where everyone could kind of watch this.
I think because it really could interact with so much software and also I think the downloadable skills on the marketplace is a really fascinating concept.
Now, inevitably, there were some drawbacks.
A bunch of security researchers that were testing it showed just how easily it could all go sideways with prompt injection attacks.
So because this thing has access to your whole computer, It has access to the internet.
It has access to email.
If you send it a cleverly worded email, you can actually get it to do things that shouldn't like leak confidential passwords or taking an irreversible action deleting things off your computer forever.
I even saw a story where apparently someone said they set it loose on their actual computer and it deleted all of their family photos they'd taken.
I don't know if that's just you know they're trying to like rage bait over on X, but that was the claim that I saw over there.
So With Multbook and everything that was going on on that kind of like social media platform, there was a lot of posts that were allegedly attempting to get the agents to send Bitcoin to specific wallet addresses.
Right.
So people would impersonate bots on this kind of social media platform and say send Bitcoin to this wallet address.
And it was trying to see like if anyone had one of these open claws on an actual computer, that access to an actual Bitcoin wallet.
And anyways, it's basically the oldest scam in the world.
But this is just kind of the robot revolution version of it.
So I think it's not very hard to imagine a corporate version of this, right?
An agent that sits on your computer or your workspace with access to everything.
Someone emails a payload that is wrapped in polite language and then this agent can read it and then basically everything else in the email is irrelevant.
But there's some sort of attack or some sort of you know instruction to go click on a link and you know it sidetracks it and downloads malware onto your computer.
So obviously not great.
There's definitely some guardrails that need to be put in place for all of this.
You know, things like don't trust external inputs.
So anyways, it's not perfect, but I think it's still a great tool and it's an interesting thing as, as we can see, with a lot of people using it.
So so where is this company going and what is its background?
So Steinberg didn't actually take, I think, the most traditional path in building this.
He essentially vibe coded this as a weekend project.
It kind of went viral to some small degree and he put a ton of work into it.
He didn't raise any sort of money for it.
He didn't have a team.
It was all himself.
And this is from a guy that previously had started and sold a company but now he was working on this kind of just solo on his own.
I think he talked about having interest after this thing started going viral.
OpenAI and Meta both talked to him.
Meta's pitch.
Apparently, according to him, was Mark Zuckerberg, who spent a week using OpenClaw and sending detailed feedback to him on it, which I mean honestly.
That alone is pretty cool.
OpenAI's pitch was a little bit more structural.
They're like hey, we can give you compute, we can give you infrastructure, we can give you access to basically all of the latest models and research.
So some some models that hadn't been released yet, he could test them out and kind of work with it.
And I mean, they're obviously the front runner to a lot of all of AI.
So I think that was pretty cool.
They showed him some of their quote unquote cool projects that are being, you know, worked on right now.
So on February 15 Sam Altman posted that Steinberger was going to be joining OpenAI.
To quote drive, the next generation of personal agents.
OpenClaw, Sam Altman said, was going to live on as an open source project under a foundation, with OpenAI continuing to support it.
So it's not like OpenAI is, you know, going to turn this into a for-profit per se, but it's going to be a foundation.
It's going to be open source.
All of the people that have been working on it and submitting tickets, like it's still gonna be publicly accessible to everyone.
I think it's kind of goodwill honestly, for open ai because they are getting this open source project or and it feels to them maybe like they're getting back to their open source roots, they grab this really popular open source project, they continue to support it.
They can still make a, you know, gobsmacking amount of money from open ai's chat, gpt and all of their other products, but they still kind of have this, And so I think it's interesting.
A lot of people were asking Steinberger like why he went with OpenAI instead of going with someone like Anthropic or Meta or whatever.
And he said that he could have made OpenClaw into a massive company, but that building a big company was something that's very exciting.
I believe his last company he sold was like $100 million.
So I think, or 100 million euros.
So like he's previously done very well for himself.
I don't think he wanted to repeat the process.
It's kind of this fun side thing.
It went really viral.
And so this is kind of an exciting way for him to get into a big company, have a really big impact with his current project without having, I think, the overhead and the headache of running a massive company.
I think it's interesting.
Also like there is some really funny posts where people are asking him like hey, how come you didn't go with like Anthropic?
Why did you go with OpenAI?
And he said the only notes Anthropic sent me were love notes from their legal department.
So I think it was for him.
Anthropic wasn't, you know, they're basically just sending the cease and desist.
Meanwhile, everyone's like, oh, shoot, this is actually really cool.
Meta, I will also say released in Manus, their also previously acquired company, a very similar tool that they're launching and they're rolling into WhatsApp and a bunch of their other tools as well.
So they didn't actually end up acquiring this, but I think they just kind of built their own version as well.
It's kind of the classic meta way to do things.
I think this is really interesting.
For now, OpenClaw is going to be, there's some warnings, right?
Like the security is definitely an issue that needs to be solved.
But I think at the same time, this is getting access to the biggest AI company in the entire world to help funnel it and power it.
And with all of the compute and resources of OpenAI, I think it's going to be something that is incredibly useful.
And I think people should also not forget that Cloud Code, which has become the most popular coding tool for developers prior to OpenClaw, of course, was also a side project of a developer over at Anthropic that became incredibly popular.
So sometimes these side projects, these vibe coded things turn out to be massive products for the company.
And this is looks like the case with OpenClaw as well.
So it's gonna be exciting to follow along and see where this technology goes.
I mean I'm still seeing him on X saying okay, like He said something, like he had 3800 PRs submitted to him and he has to go and review every single thing before he's able to submit it.
But he's like, he said he's like reviewing 600 manually a day or something crazy like that.
And he's got a lot to go.
So a lot of people are trying to contribute to this open source project.
A lot of people are excited about it.
And it's obviously a lot of work.
But I thought it was interesting, even with this whole acquisition and him getting pulled into opening.
He's still actively grinding on this.
Like this is his baby.
He loves it.
He's not abandoning it.
So that's kind of cool.
All right.
Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast.
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