Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 224 posts

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#201

Post by danpalmer »

vntok wrote: post #130
danpalmer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All that automation allows us to run extremely lean" He has a different opinion of what it means to be lean than almost everyone else. That's fine, he's allowed to, but it's something you have to understand to make sense of any of his comments on things. He has a radically different set of values to most people.

His team is basically him and two other humans, powering an ambitious well-known project so successful an industry titan ended up acquihiring him/them. That's pretty lean, no?

But it costs $1.3m USD a month to run, not including their salaries. That's the cost of a team of 50-200 staff, depending on where you're hiring.

I don't think there's any way most people would call that lean. It's lean in exactly 1 axis which is people, but no one really cares about that, people is always a proxy for cost.

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#202

Post by lxgr »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #184
lxgr wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is lean, the execution is slop.

I wonder if compilers were ever considered 'slop' If these methods prove successful it isn't going to matter. A user doesn't care if code is 'slop' or artisanal, so long as the app/site/whatever works. If you can combine autonomous flows (and millions of dollars in tokens) to produce work comparable to a traditional engineering team, then why would the user care which wrote the app/site/whatever?

If the site works, continues working, can be extended and maintained etc., it’s not slop.

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#203

Post by isodev »

This is ridiculous, and what do you have to show for $1.3M? So many sustainable projects that can meaningfully improve the planet with even half that funding and he is just converting water and cash to CO2. The scope of the waste is so fucked up, criminal even.

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#204

Post by WickyNilliams »

vntok wrote: post #130
danpalmer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All that automation allows us to run extremely lean" He has a different opinion of what it means to be lean than almost everyone else. That's fine, he's allowed to, but it's something you have to understand to make sense of any of his comments on things. He has a radically different set of values to most people.

His team is basically him and two other humans, powering an ambitious well-known project so successful an industry titan ended up acquihiring him/them. That's pretty lean, no?

He said in another thread there's 6 people involved. 6 people for this project doesn't feel lean, without even considering the enormous LLM spend/complexity

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#205

Post by WickyNilliams »

christoph wrote: post #54
Nzen wrote: post #23

tl;dr Peter Steinberger shared a product demo for CodexBar [0] with a graph of OpenAI token usage. This graph shows one million spent, prefers gpt-5.5 and spent twenty thousand today. [0] https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar However, I do not see a strong reason to believe that this is his actual, personal usage. It could be all openclaw usage or some subset of openai usage, given that he is inside them. I suspect it…

I view this type of post (his, not yours) as meta deception. I only became aware of this type of deception and its power from a bit of reading in to magicians and stage craft in the last few months. There’s a video on YouTube as well that does a great job of breaking down a Derren Brown stunt that uses it to great effect manipulating the TV viewing audience. I’d actually seen the original DB episode years before when…

Could you link to the video?

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#206

Post by hansmayer »

browningstreet wrote: post #164
hansmayer wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t use openclaw myself anymore Firstly, who TF would use that crap in the first place at all ? Yeah, he did some crap he got paid for. So did the people who created the addictive algorithms for social and media or creators of the brainrot videos that infest kids' minds. Should we applaud them too?

You can hate it, but pretending it has no value isn’t a meaningful counter, esp given its user base. Gary Tan built GBrain on it. Poor logical fallacy-ing on your part.

What increase in ARR did he create? Let's stop bullshitting and get down to numbers.

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#207

Post by wiseowise »

liamwire wrote: post #178
sdevonoes wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not impressive. He’s a celebrity. Celebrities are not impressive

What? Many celebrities are so specifically because they're impressive. Athletes and musicians being the two most obvious examples.

Not this one.

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#208

Post by tim333 »

therealpygon wrote: post #125
Tiberium wrote: post #24

This is quite a misleading title because this is the raw API cost, but he (obviously) has unlimited usage as an OpenAI employee. Moreover, if you use e.g. the $200 Codex sub, you get about ~$5k-$6k monthly API usage if you spend every week of your usage, if not more, which shows that the raw API cost is not how much it (likely) costs to OpenAI, unless they're subsidizing all this. He did clarify that it was with fast…

Hey guys, I’m super good at using tokens. Business: Amazing, that’s great what did you do? I ran 50 instances and had them all fix the same bugs at the same time and then analyzed the results of all 50 runs to have AI score each of the attempts, then sort them, then compare them to each other in a round robin tournament style double elimination to ensure I got the best result. Then I had AI convert this into a skill,…

Peter Steinberger is of course currently employed by OpenAI and it probably benefits them for him to find ways for their customers to do that.

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#209

Post by tim333 »

hansmayer wrote: post #156
pama wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peter shows the near-term future. Raw API consumer price cost is arbitrary. (The frontier labs can put a 100x markup to cover other operational expenses.) The true cost of inference with same-capability models keeps dropping at dizzying rates, especially at the data-center batch size. (Due to both NVidia hardware and algorithmic changes.) So the developments that Peter can achieve today with internal support from Ope…

Peter shows shit. What did Peter meaningfully achieve? What additional revenue is he creating? ah yes - shit and more shit on all accounts as it seems.

>OpenClaw hit 346K GitHub stars in under five months. 38 million monthly visitors, 3.2 million active users, 44,000+ ClawHub skills, 500K+ running instances, and 180 startups generating $320K+/month. OpenAI acquired the project in February. (https://openclawvps.io/blog/openclaw-statistics)

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#210

Post by tim333 »

WickyNilliams wrote: post #204
vntok wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His team is basically him and two other humans, powering an ambitious well-known project so successful an industry titan ended up acquihiring him/them. That's pretty lean, no?

He said in another thread there's 6 people involved. 6 people for this project doesn't feel lean, without even considering the enormous LLM spend/complexity

3.2M active users. Not a huge staff to user ratio? One per half million users.
Post reply on HN