Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

61–70 of 224 posts

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

#61

So he's spent $20k in one day. There's not a chance in hell he's actually doing productive work with all these tokens. Grifters gonna grift. What a state of affairs.

At this point token spend is in itself the product.

Hopefully eventually we will go back to evaluating the output. Not that I am very hopeful that we learn to do it in sensible way.

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

#62

He used 600B tokens in 30 days. I use more than 150B/month with just 15 codex accounts. 60 accounts is "just" $12,000/month. So Peter could "save" 100x by using monthly accounts. Of course, he doesn't have to, as he works at OpenAI now.

What I truly don't understand, as a daily heavy Opus 4.7 user, is how you can coherently prompt 15 different parallel conversations at the same time. For me it's not even a "what the hell are you working on" so much as complete inability to understand how you can keep so many different processes working on distinct tasks. It simply doesn't map on to how I use these tools. I spend most of my day writing extremely deta…

I'm trying to recreate all the commercial EDA stack in open source. (RTL simulators, synthesis, formal proof tools, etc.)

Building compilers has a _lot_ of parallel tasks agents can work on.

Wish me luck..

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

#63
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you review the openclaw release schedule and code output you will see that yes, he was. I’m not saying you’ll like what you see, but the openclaw release schedule is well faster than human ability to assess it.

I am not joking when I say this, if you pay me 1.3 million dollars today, I will get so much more done with just a single 200$ codex sub in 30 days than he has in 30 days, I can promise you that. I just checked the code and feature outputs, and I can build all that in 15 days, for 1.3M USD. Fuck I would do it for 1M... Scratch that, if it's 300K then sure I could do the same too, if you paid me that for 30 days of wo…

I don't understand. Are you saying you're capable of building a rival to Openclaw in a few days, but you're just choosing not to? That's amazing.

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

#66

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…

How is it misleading if this would be the consumer's cost? Eventually Codex's subscription subsidization will diminish to near-zero, like the rest of the providers. It's extremely important that people understand how expensive these models currently are. Even $300k in raw API costs is alarming for the output.

> How is it misleading if this would be the consumer's cost?

Because it does not say “equivalent of”, it literally says he spent money that he did not spend

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

#68

He used 600B tokens in 30 days. I use more than 150B/month with just 15 codex accounts. 60 accounts is "just" $12,000/month. So Peter could "save" 100x by using monthly accounts. Of course, he doesn't have to, as he works at OpenAI now.

What I truly don't understand, as a daily heavy Opus 4.7 user, is how you can coherently prompt 15 different parallel conversations at the same time. For me it's not even a "what the hell are you working on" so much as complete inability to understand how you can keep so many different processes working on distinct tasks. It simply doesn't map on to how I use these tools. I spend most of my day writing extremely deta…

[deleted]

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

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I truly don't understand, as a daily heavy Opus 4.7 user, is how you can coherently prompt 15 different parallel conversations at the same time. For me it's not even a "what the hell are you working on" so much as complete inability to understand how you can keep so many different processes working on distinct tasks. It simply doesn't map on to how I use these tools. I spend most of my day writing extremely deta…

I'm trying to recreate all the commercial EDA stack in open source. (RTL simulators, synthesis, formal proof tools, etc.) Building compilers has a _lot_ of parallel tasks agents can work on. Wish me luck..

Good luck!

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

#70
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not joking when I say this, if you pay me 1.3 million dollars today, I will get so much more done with just a single 200$ codex sub in 30 days than he has in 30 days, I can promise you that. I just checked the code and feature outputs, and I can build all that in 15 days, for 1.3M USD. Fuck I would do it for 1M... Scratch that, if it's 300K then sure I could do the same too, if you paid me that for 30 days of wo…

I don't understand. Are you saying you're capable of building a rival to Openclaw in a few days, but you're just choosing not to? That's amazing.

everyone can build toys. Most people just have enough shame about publishing it.

The hard part is not building such toys, it's the convincing people with money to buy said toy. This is where he earned his applause.

Post reply on HN