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Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

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Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#281

Post by alexjplant »

mattlondon wrote: post #31
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #26

So what is a "claw" exactly? An ai that you let loose on your email etc? And we run it in a container and use a local llm for "safety" but it has access to all our data and the web?

I think for me it is an agent that runs on some schedule, checks some sort of inbox (or not) and does things based on that. Optionally it has all of your credentials for email, PayPal, whatever so that it can do things on your behalf. Basically cron-for-agents. Before we had to go prompt an agent to do something right now but this allows them to be async, with more of a YOLO-outlook on permissions to use your creds,…

I'd like to deploy it to trawl various communities that I frequent for interesting information and synthesize it for me... basically automate the goofing off that I do by reading about music gear. This way I stay apprised of the broader market and get the lowdown on new stuff without wading through pages of chaff. Financial market and tech news are also good candidates.

Of course this would be in a read-only fashion and it'd send summary messages via Signal or something. Not about to have this thing buy stuff or send messages for me.

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#282

Post by logicprog »

leprechaun1066 wrote: post #215
logicprog wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't seem to be promoting every new monstrosity? "m definitely a bit sus'd to run OpenClaw specifically - giving my private data/keys to 400K lines of vibe coded monster that is being actively attacked at scale is not very appealing at all. Already seeing reports of exposed instances, RCE vulnerabilities, supply chain poisoning, malicious or compromised skills in the registry, it feels like a complete wild we…

> just like LLM agents were a new layer on top of LLMs, Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents, taking the orchestration, scheduling, context, tool calls and a kind of persistence to a next level. Layers of "I have no idea what the machine is doing" on top of other layers of "I have no idea what the machine is doing". This will end well...

Yeah, in the interest of full disclosure, while Claws seem like a fun toy to me, I tried ZeroClaw out and it was... kind of awful. There's no ability to see what tools agents are running, and what the results of those tools are, or cancel actions, or anything, and tools fail often enough (if you're trying to mind security to at least some degree) that the things just hallucinate wildly and don't do anything useful.

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#283

Post by qup »

sixtyj wrote: post #238
claytonaalves wrote: post #219

I'm impressed with how we moved from "AI is dangerous", "Skynet", "don't give AI internet access or we are doomed", "don't let AI escape" to "Hey AI, here is internet, do whatever you want".

And be nice and careful, please. :) Claw to user: Give me your card credentials and bank account. I will be very careful because I have read my skills.md Mac Minis should be offered with some warning, as it is on pack of cigarettes :) Not everybody installs some claw that runs in sandbox/container.

Isn't the Mac mini the container?

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#284

Post by simonw »

trehalose wrote: post #278
squidbeak wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People excited by a new tech's possibilities aren't lunatics and psychos.

The ones who give it free reign to run any code it finds on the internet on their own personal computers with no security precautions are maybe getting a little too excited about it.

That's one of the main reasons there's a small run on buying Mac Minis.

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#285

Post by arbuge »

claytonaalves wrote: post #219

I'm impressed with how we moved from "AI is dangerous", "Skynet", "don't give AI internet access or we are doomed", "don't let AI escape" to "Hey AI, here is internet, do whatever you want".

Humans are inherently curious creatures. The excitement of discovery is a strong driving force that overrides many others, and it can be found across the IQ spectrum.

Perhaps not in equal measure across that spectrum, but omnipresent nonetheless.

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#286

Post by simonw »

qup wrote: post #283
sixtyj wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And be nice and careful, please. :) Claw to user: Give me your card credentials and bank account. I will be very careful because I have read my skills.md Mac Minis should be offered with some warning, as it is on pack of cigarettes :) Not everybody installs some claw that runs in sandbox/container.

Isn't the Mac mini the container?

It is... but then many people hook it up to their personal iCloud account and give it access to their email, at which point the container isn't really helping!

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#287

Post by wolvesechoes »

arbuge wrote: post #285
claytonaalves wrote: post #219

I'm impressed with how we moved from "AI is dangerous", "Skynet", "don't give AI internet access or we are doomed", "don't let AI escape" to "Hey AI, here is internet, do whatever you want".

Humans are inherently curious creatures. The excitement of discovery is a strong driving force that overrides many others, and it can be found across the IQ spectrum. Perhaps not in equal measure across that spectrum, but omnipresent nonetheless.

> Humans are inherently curious creatures.

You misspelled greedy.

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#288

Post by trcf23 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #245
trcf23 wrote: post #235

Has anyone find a useful way to to something with Claws without massive security risk? As a n8n user, i still don't understand the business value it adds beyond being exciting... Any resources or blog post to share on that?

> Has anyone find a useful way to to something with Claws without massive security risk? Not really, no. I guess the amount of integrations is what people are raving about or something? I think one of the first thing I did when I got access to codex, was to write a harness that lets me fire off jobs via a webui on a remote access, and made it possible for codex to edit and restart it's own process, and send notificat…

Well for the OpenAi part, there was another HN thread on it where several people pointed out it was a marketing move more than a technical one.

If Anthropic is able to spend millions for TV commercial to attract laypeople, OpenAi can certainly do the same to gain traction from dev/hacky folks i guess.

One thing i've done so far -not with claws- is to create several n8n workflows like: reading an email, creating a draft + label, connecting to my backend or CRM, etc which allow me to control all that from Claude or Claude Code if needed.

It's been a nice productivity boost but I do accept/review all changes beforehand. I guess the reviewing is what makes it different from openclaws

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#289

Post by GTP »

I'm genuinely wondering if this sort of AI revolution (or bubble, depending on which side you're in) is worth it. Yes, there are some cool use cases. But, you have to balance those with increased GPU, RAM and storage prices, and OSS projects struggling to keep up with people opening pull requests or vulnerability disclosures that turn out to be AI slop. Which lead GitHub to introduce the possibility to disable pull requests on repositories. Additionally, all the compute used for running LLMs in the cloud seems to have a significant environmental impact. Is it worth it, or are we being fooled by a technology that looks very cool on the surface, but that so far didn’t deliver on the promises of being able to carry complex tasks fully autonomously?

Re: Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

#290

Post by nsonha »

I find it dubious that a technical person claims to "just bought a new Mac mini to properly tinker with claws over the weekend". Like can they not just play with it on an old laptop lying around? A virtual machine? Or why did they not buy a Pi instead? Openclaw works with linux so not sure how this whole Mac mini cliche even started, obviously an overkill for something that only relays api calls.
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