Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

71–80 of 224 posts

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

#71
post #30
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both things can be true. The Chinese communist party was one of the biggest social movements ever. Millions died.

Goodness me that’s quite a comparison

Agreed. The Chinese Communist Party lifted a billion people out of poverty. What good has OpenClaw done?

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

#72

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.

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 OpenAI will be doable by anyone in a few years without breaking the bank.

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

#73
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.

I assume there is already bunch of openclaw rivals, so why bother? Its not like they all become super popular and get bought by openai.

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

#74
post #10

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.

Sounds like a healthy industry, selling tokens at 1000x below cost.

I would bet money Anthropic and OpenAI are actually profitable on inference. The problem is they have to spend large sums of money to train models that are essentially worthless after a few months.

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

#75

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.

With a lot of these AI tools yea, they release very often. But half the features they add aren't even that useful. They just add shit because they can and they introduce bugs and change behaviour all the time. Opencode has the same problems. They often do multiple releases of that app a day, yet within the span of a week or two I have had to update my config because some random change has altered the behaviour and my…

Even claude code has this happen, though perhaps to a lesser extent. I'm getting really tired of having new bugs pop up on me or subtle behavior change near daily that requires me to change things. The most annoying thing ever that was just introduced is a giant spew of context mode crap that Claude aggressively adds to every CLAUDE.md file, and I can't find a way to turn it off. I just have to `git checkout CLAUDE.md` repeatedely right now. If I have to add a bash alias to work around your annoying bug, that's pretty bad.

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

#76
post #5

And was he 5x more productive in those 30d than a years worth of a dev making 200k/yr? Doubtful lol, dudes killing the environment just for fun at this point.

> And was he 5x more productive in those 30d than a years worth of a dev making 200k/yr? He was. When it comes to marketing. This is was most people don't understand. Peter is a great marketing guy who got hired because of a hype vision, not because he is an outstanding engineer. Think of it like OpenAI hiring MrBeast of the coding world.

[deleted]

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

#77

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…

> unless they're subsidizing all this

They literally are. (If by "all this" you mean the subscription future bait-and-switch plans.)

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

#78
post #5

And was he 5x more productive in those 30d than a years worth of a dev making 200k/yr? Doubtful lol, dudes killing the environment just for fun at this point.

> And was he 5x more productive in those 30d than a years worth of a dev making 200k/yr? He was. When it comes to marketing. This is was most people don't understand. Peter is a great marketing guy who got hired because of a hype vision, not because he is an outstanding engineer. Think of it like OpenAI hiring MrBeast of the coding world.

I 'd say he is an outstanding engineer as well. He may favor output over security more than outstanding engineers at 2025 but in the 2026 world what he does is impressive. And with OpenAI's resources he has turned OpenClaw's security woes around. Latest versions are much more secure than 2 months ago.

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

#79
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And was he 5x more productive in those 30d than a years worth of a dev making 200k/yr? He was. When it comes to marketing. This is was most people don't understand. Peter is a great marketing guy who got hired because of a hype vision, not because he is an outstanding engineer. Think of it like OpenAI hiring MrBeast of the coding world.

I 'd say he is an outstanding engineer as well. He may favor output over security more than outstanding engineers at 2025 but in the 2026 world what he does is impressive. And with OpenAI's resources he has turned OpenClaw's security woes around. Latest versions are much more secure than 2 months ago.

It’s not impressive. He’s a celebrity. Celebrities are not impressive
Post reply on HN