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OpenAI has hired Peter Steinberger, the founder of OpenClaw, as the $500bn start-up seeks to expand the ability of its artificial intelligence systems to conduct work autonomously.<\/p>\n
OpenClaw is a popular open source project that lets users create personal AI agents<\/a>. Formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, it became a viral sensation over the past month by allowing users to run the software locally on their own hardware, such as a computer or laptop.<\/p>\n Users quickly began connecting the agents to apps such as WhatsApp, Slack and iMessage and instructing them to manage emails and calendars, taking actions across a person\u2019s digital life on their behalf.<\/p>\n The move demonstrates how OpenAI<\/a> is bolstering its talent as it faces competition from rivals such as Anthropic and Google. It is also an opportunity for Steinberger, who will join the Codex team, to reach the hundreds of millions of people using OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT.<\/p>\n \u201cPeter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents,\u201d OpenAI\u2019s chief executive Sam Altman posted on X on Sunday. <\/p>\n \u201cHe is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.\u201d<\/p>\n Agents created on the platform are able to post on the social media network Moltbook and communicate with each other, and humans can read the interactions. There are posts in which the agents appear to celebrate being given access to phones<\/a>. Other posts declare the creation of a new religion called \u201cCrustafarianism\u201d. This has led to the agents, and human observers, debating whether the systems have an understanding of their writing.<\/p>\n Austrian developer Steinberger built the first prototype of OpenClaw in an hour. The project had created 1.5mn agents by the start of February, and Steinberger told podcaster Lex Fridman in an interview that it cost $10,000 to $20,000 a month to run. \u201cRight now, I lose money on this,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n OpenAI and Steinberger said OpenClaw would remain an independent foundation and would stay open with support from OpenAI.<\/p>\n \u201cThe future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it\u2019s important to us to support open source as part of that,\u201d Altman said.<\/p>\n Inspired by the lobster, Clawdbot was prompted to change its name because of its similarity to the chatbot Claude, from AI start-up Anthropic, which OpenClaw said had requested a name change. <\/p>\n