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I’m joining OpenAI

steipete.me

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Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#451

Post by noelsusman »

It likely won't matter much in the end, but I do think this could be a significant mistake for OpenAI.

OpenAI has two real competitors: Anthropic in the enterprise space and Google in the consumer space. Google fell far behind early on and ceded a lot of important market share to ChatGPT. They're catching up, but the runaway success of ChatGPT provides OpenAI with a huge runway among consumers.

In the enterprise space, OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft has been a gold mine. Every company on the planet has a deep relationship with Microsoft, so being able to say "hey just add this to your Microsoft plan" has been huge for OpenAI.

The thing about enterprise is the stakes are high. Every time OpenAI signals that they're not taking AI safety seriously, Anthropic pops another bottle of champagne. This is one of those moments.

Again, I doubt it matters much either way, but if OpenAI does end up blowing up, decisions like this will be in the large pile of reasons why.

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#452

Post by gip »

elxr wrote: post #258
piker wrote: post #3

Did this guy just exit the first one man billion-dollar startup for... less than a billion?

The fact that 1 billion is the threshold you chose to highlight shows the ridiculousness of this industry. Openclaw is an amazing piece of hard work and novel software engineering, but I can't imagine OpenAI/anthropic/google not being able to compete with it for 1/20th that number (with solid hiring of course).

I think that’s fair.. building a competing product would likely be relatively easy and inexpensive. But that’s true for most software now: it’s becoming easier to build, and the barriers to entry are lower.

I love Anthropic and OpenAI equally but some people have a problem with OpenAI. I think they want to reposition themselves as a company that actively supports the community, open source, and earns developers’ goodwill. I attended a meeting recently, and there was a lot of genuine excitement from developers. Haven't seen that in a long time.

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#453

Post by yoyohello13 »

bakugo wrote: post #421
AJRF wrote: post #29

The amount of negative posts about this on twitter is crazy, I've not seen any positive posts. Jealousy or something else?

100% jealousy, similar to how anyone who posts a negative reaction to a crypto rugpull scam is just jealous that they didn't get to pull the scam themselves.

In this case I think it is largely jealousy, it's just a guy getting a new job at the end of the day.

But come on, negativity around a rugpull is jealousy? Are you so jaded you can't imagine people objecting to the total lack of morality required to do a crypto rugpull? I personally get annoyed about something like Trump Coin because seeing people rewarded for being dirt bags offends my sense of justice. If you need a more pragmatic reason, rewarding dirtbaggery leads to a less safe society.

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#454

Post by noelsusman »

hadlock wrote: post #195
johnwheeler wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just dislike Sam Altman, and I think he's just using this as a marketing ploy, which is more dishonesty from him. People keep saying OpenClaw is hype. I installed it, but I never tried to run it, and I don't know what the compelling reason is to. Supposedly you can talk to your agent from your iMessage? Who cares? Why not just talk to Claude Code?

The big draw of open claw is the memory architecture. Because you effectively start from scratch every time you open a new claude chat. Open Claw on the other hand, it compacts regularly, but also generates daily digests, and uses vector search, and then uses thoughtful memory retrieval techniques to add relevant context to your queries. Recent things get weighted more heavily, but full text search of all chats is st…

I can just look at my front porch to see if there's a solar panel there, or failing that I can click a single button on my phone and search "solar" on my gmail and find out where my solar panel is. Having an agent do that for me saves me like... 5 seconds?

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#455

Post by BonoboIO »

Peter is already a multimillionaire — he had an exit a few years ago for around $100 million. By his own account, he's spending $10,000+ per month on LLM tokens and other development costs. As long as OpenClaw stays open source and it remains possible to use all providers, this is totally fine by me.

Honestly, Anthropic really dropped the ball here. They could have had such an easy integration and gained invaluable research data on how people actually want to use AI — testing workflows, real-world use cases, etc. Instead, OpenAI swoops in and gets all of that. Massive missed opportunity.

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#456

Post by Der_Einzige »

behnamoh wrote: post #88
Tangokat wrote: post #54

Incredibly depressing comments in this thread. He keeps OpenClaw open. He gets to work on what he finds most exciting and helps reach as many people as possible. Inspiring, what dreams are made of really. Top comments are about money and misguided racism. Personally I'm excited to see what he can do with more resources, OpenClaw clearly has a lot of potential but also a lot of improvements needed for his mum to use i…

He said on Lex Fridman podcast that he has no intention of joining any company; that was a couple days ago.

Lex Friedman is a fraud/charlatan and shouldn’t be listened to.

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#457

Post by m00dy »

elxr wrote: post #258
piker wrote: post #3

Did this guy just exit the first one man billion-dollar startup for... less than a billion?

The fact that 1 billion is the threshold you chose to highlight shows the ridiculousness of this industry. Openclaw is an amazing piece of hard work and novel software engineering, but I can't imagine OpenAI/anthropic/google not being able to compete with it for 1/20th that number (with solid hiring of course).

novel software engineering ? Did you look at the code ?

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#458

Post by rlt »

motoboi wrote: post #409
TSiege wrote: post #336

There are a few take aways I think the detractors and celebrators here are missing. 1. OpenAI is saying with this statement "You could be multimillion while having AI do all the work for you." This buy out for something vibe coded and built around another open source project is meant to keep the hype going. The project is entirely open source and OpenAI could have easily done this themselves if they weren't so worrie…

This is basically acquihire. Peter seems really a genius and they better poach him before Anthropic do.

Is he? My impression of Clawdbot was it was a good idea but not particularly technically impressive or even well-written. I had all kinds of issues setting it up.

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#459

Post by godelski »

nilkn wrote: post #387
TSiege wrote: post #336

There are a few take aways I think the detractors and celebrators here are missing. 1. OpenAI is saying with this statement "You could be multimillion while having AI do all the work for you." This buy out for something vibe coded and built around another open source project is meant to keep the hype going. The project is entirely open source and OpenAI could have easily done this themselves if they weren't so worrie…

This comment is filled with speculation which I think is mostly unfounded and unnecessarily negative in its orientation. Let's take the safety point. Yes, OpenClaw is infamously not exactly safe. Your interpretation is that, by hiring Peter, OpenAI must no longer care about safety. Another interpretation, though, is that offered by Peter himself, in this blog post: "My next mission is to build an agent that even my m…

  > To conclude from this that OpenAI has abandoned its entire safety posture seems, at the very least, premature
So because Peter said the next version is going to be safe means it'll be safe? I prefer to judge people by their actions more than their words. The fact that OpenClaw is not just unsafe but, as you put it, infamously so, only begs the question "why wasn't it built safely the first time?"

As for Altman, I'm left with a similar question. For a man who routinely talks about the dangers of AI and how it poses an existential threat to humanity he sure doesn't spend much focus on safety research and theory. Yes, they do fund these things but they pale in comparison. I'm sorry, but to claim something might kill all humans and potentially all life is a pretty big claim. I don't trust OpenAI for safety because they routinely do things in unsafe ways. Like they released Sora allowing people to generate videos in the likeness of others. That helped it go viral. And then they implemented some safety features. A minimal attempt to refuse the generation of deepfakes is such a low safety bar. It shows where their priorities are and it wasn't the first nor the last

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