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Comment by tietjens

4 days ago

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...