My gut feeling is that OpenAI is desperately searching for The Killer App™ for LLMs and hired Peter to help guide them there.

OpenAI has tried a lot of experiments over the years - custom GPTs, the Orion browser, Codex, the Sora "TikTok but AI" app, and all have either been uninspired or more-or-less clones of other products (like Codex as a response to Claude Code).

OpenClaw feels compelling, fresh, sci-fi, and potentially a genuinely useful product once matured.

More to the point, OpenAI needs _some_ kind of hyper-compelling product to justify its insane hype, valuation, and investments, and Peter's work with OpenClaw seems very promising.

(All of this is complete speculation on my part. No insider knowledge or domain expertise here.)

Regardless of what you think of OpenClaw, Peter is a great hire - he's been at the forefront of brute-forcing app development with coding agents.

OpenAI has been running around headless for at least two years now. I've build systems like openclaw, based on email, at my day job and told OAI during an interview that they needed to build this or get smoked when someone else does. I guess aqi-hire is easier than building a team that can develop software internally.

Of course the S in openclaw is for security.

Same here, seems 100% marketing move. The trend continues.

While insecure and not something I would use myself (yet) one thing OpenClaw has managed to do is to show people the potential that AI still has.

But... how is it even useful? Do you use it? Is it a good idea for anyone to, uh, use it? Is it a product that you or any other "vibe coder" cannot ~~build~~ tell Claude Code to build on the go, if he wants to communicate with Claude Code via WhatsApp for some reason? Sure, product doesn't need to be some sophisticated technology to be worth something, it could also just have user base because it succeeded at marketing, but does this particular product even benefit from network effects? What is this shit? Why anybody cares?

Seriously, I just don't understand what's going on. To me it looks like all world just has gone crazy.

> This guy just single handedly released something useful (and very insecure) before anyone else.

It has been interesting to watch this take off. It wasn't the first or even best agent framework and it deliberately avoided all of the hard problems that others were trying to solve, like security.

What it did have was unnatural levels of hype and PR. A lot of that PR, ironically, came from all of the things that were happening because it had so many problems with security and so many examples of bad behavior. The chaos and lack of guardrails made it successful.

Single-handed made me smirk. It was vibe coded.