Comment by orsorna
7 days ago
Was the project really ever valued that high? Seems like something that can be easily replicated and even properly thought out (re: pi). This guy just ran the social media hype train the right way.
7 days ago
Was the project really ever valued that high? Seems like something that can be easily replicated and even properly thought out (re: pi). This guy just ran the social media hype train the right way.
Reminds me of Facebook, there was nothing particularly interesting about a PHP app that stored photos and text in a flat user environment.
Yet somehow the network effects worked out well and the website was the preeminent social network for almost a decade.
Social media is the king of network effects. Almost nothing else compares. See how quickly people drop AI products for the next one that does the same thing but slightly better. To switch from ChatGPT to Gemini I don't have to convince all of my friends and family to do the same.
> See how quickly people drop AI products for the next one that does the same thing but slightly better.
> To switch from ChatGPT to Gemini I don't have to convince all of my friends and family to do the same.
Except Gemini is a complete joke that can’t even complete request on iOS unless you keep scree unlocked or keep the app in the foreground. So I’m not sure how it proves your point.
1 reply →
> Social media is the king of network effects. Almost nothing else compares.
Ecommerce is close second
Technology does not determine the success of a company. I’ve seen amazing tech fail, and things strapped together with ducktape and bubblegum be a wild success.
The instant someone makes a better version of openclaw -literally- everyone is going to jump ship.
There is no lock in at all.
Except in this case there's no network effect for autonomous agents. In fact, Peter is going to be working mostly on an OpenAI locked down, ecosystem tied agent, which means it's going to be worse than OpenClaw, but with a nicer out of the box experience.
If you're on OpenAI, and I'm on Anthropic, can we interoperate? What level are we even trying to interoperate on? The network effect is that, hey, my stuff is working here, your stuff is working over there. So do we move to your set of tools, or my set of tools, or do we mismash between them, as our relationship and power dynamics choose for us.
1 reply →
facebook is still preeminent social network today
“Just” is doing some heavy lifting here.
It's kind of crazy that this kind of thing can cause so much hype. It is even useful? I just really don't see any utility in being able to access an LLM via Telegram or whatever.
I think a lot of this is orchestrated behind the scenes. Above author has taken money from AI companies since he’s a popular “influencer”.
And it makes a lot of sense - there’s billions of dollars on the line here and these companies made tech that is extremely good at imitating humans. Cambridge analytica was a thing before LLMs, this kinda tool is a wet dream for engineering sentiment.
the ability to almost "discover" or create hype is highly valued despite most of the time it being luck and one hit wonders... See many of the apps that had virality and got quickly acquired and then just hemorrhaged. Openclaw is cool, but not for the tech, just some of the magic of the oddities and getting caught on somehow, and acquiring is betting that they can somehow keep doing that again.
A lot of the functionality I'm not using because of security concerns, but a lot of the magic comes down to just having a platform for orchestrating AI agents. It's honestly nice just for simple sysadmin stuff "run this cron job and text me a tl;dr if anything goes wrong" or simple personal assistant tasks like"remind me if anyone messaged me a question in the last 3 days and I haven't answered".
It's also cool having the ability to dispatch tasks to dumber agents running on the GPU vs smarter (but costlier) ones in the cloud
but why?
2 replies →
In Asia people do a big chunk of their business via chatbots. OpenClaw is a security dumpster fire but something like OpenClaw but secure would turbocharge that use case.
If you give your agent a lot of quantified self data, that unlocks a lot of powerful autonomous behavior. Having your calendar, your business specific browsing history and relevant chat logs makes it easy to do meeting prep, "presearch" and so forth.
Curious how you make something that has data exfiltration as a feature secure.
12 replies →
There's been some crypto shenanigans as well that the author claimed not to be behind... looking back at it, even if the author indeed wasn't behind it, I think the crypto bros hyping up his project ended up helping him out with this outcome in the end.
Can you elaborate on this more or point a link for some context?
4 replies →
Wasn't this the same guy that responded with a shrug to thousands of malware packages on their vibe-repo? I'd say an OpenAI signing bonus is more than enough of a reward to give up that leaky ship!
Clawhub was locked down, I couldn’t publish new skills even as a previous contributor. Not what I‘d call a shrug.
I missed Clawhub—y’all following anywhere besides HN? Is it all on that Twitter site?