This is a re-post, with edits, from my original post on LinkedIn.
Democratizing AI
I’ve been using OpenClaw for several months now, since it first was released as Clawdbot. And, honestly, this is what AI should have been all along. The sad part is that it took a developer tinkering as a hobby, then coming out of retirement, to create this project. A single developer. As someone whose career was spent at very large companies, including software and AI companies, it’s embarrassing!
ChatGPT was a marvel when it was released, you could chat with the entire knowledge of the internet. But now that feels like a small step up from Google search. I think AI was rushed and is still being rushed; to capture as much market share and profit – that’s how these things work unfortunately. For most people, it means their experience will be subpar and they’ll give up on it. It’s true, AI is more hype than real right now – especially in the walls of a company.
It reminds me that innovation often happens at the margins. It happens in silos or small communities or a humble startup. It happens increasingly in open source. Large companies like Microsoft (where I spent more than a decade), Amazon, Google and others simply don’t give space for innovation to happen. Interestingly, these companies were once where innovation did accelerate – but they got too big, too bureaucratic, too risk averse.
It’s for that reason that I think that Enterprise (large companies) will not drive AI innovation – it moves too fast. Microsoft was talking about “agentic experiences” over and over, ad nauseum, while Peter Steinberger built and shipped it, by himself. OpenClaw is now the most starred project on GitHub, higher than Linux, python, React and well, anything from a large software company. Take a look at the red line – that’s not the border, it’s the OpenClaw repository:
What is OpenClaw?
You might be wondering now, what in the world is OpenClaw, especially if you live under a rock (like most of my LinkedIn connections who operate in the “Enterprise” space 😊). OpenClaw democratizes agentic experiences, it brings the party to you. It’s not a separate app, it’s the chat app you already use: Telegram, Discord, iMessage, and dozens more. And it’s not a single agent; it can be, but it can also be a swarm of agents. And it’s not just reactive (you ask, it answers), it’s proactive!
I’m simple and slow, so let me explain a few things I’m doing. I want it to be my personal assistant. I gave it a name, a personality, a soul and the ability to learn about me. It tells me what’s on my calendar, it can manage it. It’s scouring the web for deals for RAM (I need to upgrade) and sends me a link to eBay when a deal pops up. It’s now managing my Proxmox virtual host, all of the virtual machines and all of the containers. I get a daily report on CPU, RAM, disk space, if backups fail, if something goes wrong and if it was able to fix it for me while I was asleep. It’s posting on social media for me. When I ask it to “vacuum the house,” it starts my Roborock vacuum cleaner – even if I’m miles away from home. It has all the knowledge from my Notion database. It built me a website, found a free tier and pushed code to it. It takes care of itself, it cleans up, it backs up itself and it commits things to memory. I don’t write code – I just ask it, like I would ask an employee, and it goes to work.
But as I said, I’m pretty simple. There are thousands of skills you can add. Skills to enable voice (like Alexa), enable calling real phones and speaking to the person on the other end, enable using credit cards and crypto to buy things for you. Skills to automate content creation, video creation – indeed people are running their entire businesses with it. People are making their “claw” trade crypto, futures, or prediction markets. And non-developers are building polished, amazing apps. People are using it send flyers in the mail or cold call leads, all automatically. There’s now an entire ecosystem around OpenClaw and competing solutions, like Hermes Agent and Nvidia’s NemoClaw – and you don’t need to be technical at all to get started.
I think the best way to get started is to pony up some money (yeah, there’s free ways to do it but more complicated) and get a hosted OpenClaw instance. I like MaxClaw — Cloud-Hosted AI Agent by MiniMax ($40/mo.) or Clawi.ai – Your Personal AI Assistant in the Cloud ($30/mo.). Just don’t go out and buy a Mac Mini for a few hundred bucks and try to do it yourself the first time – trust me. You can migrate to that later if you want to and PLEASE start with using a frontier model like OpenAI Codex or Anthropic Claude Opus/Sonnet – it makes all the difference in the world.
My message to you if you live in the corporate world: step outside it for just a bit. The consumer world will win AI. The Enterprise will have their friendly, guard railed, watered-down version to create ugly PowerPoints or analyze spreadsheets worse than an intern. But you could be using it now for your personal life or your business, side gig, or just for fun.
Are you using OpenClaw or something like it? Why or why not?