Comment by dispersed
4 days ago
I'd call it "suspicious" that this latest idiocy came out of nowhere and got pushed so hard to normies, when results like this are 100% predictable... if it wasn't also consistent with how the AI industry itself operates.
What is suspicious? What was “pushed”? The demand for a personal assistant AI bot is real. Even if I don’t personally share it.
One could reasonably ask: out of the hundreds (thousands?) of similar "personal AI assistant" tools out there, why did this specific one blow up so dramatically and in such a short period of time? https://www.star-history.com/#openclaw/openclaw&type=date&le...
But to be clear, I'm saying I don't think this is especially suspicious, because actual AI companies are releasing products in exactly the same way, with warning labels that they know users will ignore / aren't capable of assessing in the first place.
GitHub stars are not a reliable metric[1]. Neither is engagement on social media, which is ridden with bots. It would be safe to assume that a project promoting bots is also using them to appear popular.
This whole thing is a classic pump and dump scheme, which this technology has made easier and more accessible than ever. I wouldn't be surprised if the malware authors are the same people behind these projects.
[1]: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-31-milli...
It really is a huge bummer that the most important new technologies of this era have such a film of slime on them. Crypto, AI, whatever comes next, it's just no longer an era in which we can expect innovation to make our lives better. It enables grifters and scammers more than anyone else.
Like I say, the tech is cool but they are doomed to fail (partially because of grift) [although in context of crypto stablecoins/gold (paxos) is the one thing I liked and it did go great for me in terms of gold]
I hope it doesn't count as promotion but I had literally written a blog post about it and made an account literally named justforhn on mataroa when someone was discussing crypto with me in here or something
https://serjaimelannister.github.io/hn-words/
Yes, grifters latching onto the newest technology to sell snake oil is a brand new phenomenon and definitely not literally a fundamental part of new technology.