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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
Chapter 2: What is the story behind OpenClaw becoming a billion-dollar company?
And the creator, Peter Steinberger, has announced he is now joining OpenAI, who's going to 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, AIbox.ai, that lets you test all of the top models. There's over 50 of them.
You can compare them all side by side and you can build apps and tools with them. Even if you're not a developer, you don't know how to code. We have a vibe builder that will create some incredible workflow automations and tools for you. And also you get access to over 40 of the top AI models all in one platform. And we just dropped a new tier for $8.99 a month.
So for $8.99 a month, you get access to all the top models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and everyone else. So if you want to go check that out, there's a link in the description to AIbox.ai.
Chapter 3: How did OpenAI's acquisition of OpenClaw come about?
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 OpeningEye both released their latest models of Codex and Cloud 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... like emails, conversations. I mean, people are literally setting this loose. Some people are giving them its own email and sending it, giving it tasks and projects and saying, go sign up for accounts.
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Chapter 4: What unique features does OpenClaw offer compared to other AI tools?
What would you talk about if no one was watching? I like there's all these like really crazy things that these these cloud 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. There's Andre Karpathy, who is tweeting on X. He said, what's currently going on at Moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff adjacent thing I have seen recently. 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 uh 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 you got a lot of actual humans that are just posting crazy things to 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 OpenAI decided to acquire their CEO and then a lot of their technology? OpenClaw, I think, got a lot of virality in the fact that 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 MaltBook. remote 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, and they also talked to Mark Zuckerberg about this, but, uh, Obviously, this change had to be made. And in the span of just a few weeks, the repo over on GitHub exploded.
It had something like 190,000 GitHub stars, which is basically the open source equivalent of growing triple platinum. I mean, this is... very, very viral project on GitHub. And you have to remember that mostly this is developers. I mean, this isn't 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 the, 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.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did OpenClaw face during its development?
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 models that hadn't been released yet, you 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 worked on right now. So on February 15th, 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 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 going to be publicly accessible to everyone.
I think it's kind of goodwill, honestly, for OpenAI because they are getting this open source project and it feels to them maybe like they're getting back to their open source roots. They grabbed this really popular open source project. They continue to support it.
They can still make a gobsmacking amount of money from OpenAI'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 was like, oh, shoot, this is actually really cool.
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