I think Karpathy[1] summarized why he thinks this is the case quite well (as described he was himself hyping it up a bit much, but there are some foundational reasons why it's a very interesting experiment).
"it's nothing new and it's a lot of scams and garbage, but it's just bigger than before, but I still think there will be something transformative there eventually"
Seems like a Rorschach test. If you think this sort of thing is gonna change the world in a good way: here's evidence of it getting to scale. If you think it's gonna be scams, garbage, and destruction: here's evidence of that.
Karpathy is one of the biggest tech grifters of our time, so finding out that he's jumped on this grift train as well comes as no surprise.
Actually, hang on... yep, to absolutely nobody's surprise, Simon Willison has also hyped this up on his blog just yesterday. The entire grift gang is here, folks.
Maybe it has always been this way but it seems like these days it's only a matter of time before anyone "authentic" (or at least seems authentic at first) turns into some type of grifter. If you have a big enough following there is too much money to be made not to grift.
I used to follow Fireship, I even have him connected on LinkedIn. Look where he is now. I also used to follow simonw, but I think he is going down the same spiral.
I completely and utterly disagree. Simon is no gifter. Intellectually lazy snobs think that any time someone has genuine delight and excitement about something that they’re “grifting.” Also, for anyone who is trying (regardless of whether they are succeeding) the to make money—that isn’t synonymous with “grifting.” God, some of you need a better relationship with a dictionary.
Plus, it seems some of y’all love to hate the very industry which puts a roof over your head. You’re hoping and praying that it all burns down—yet where will that leave you? How do you feel about becoming a plumber—-until the robots take that job?
> Plus, it seems some of y’all love to hate the very industry which puts a roof over your head. You’re hoping and praying that it all burns down—yet where will that leave you? How do you feel about becoming a plumber—-until the robots take that job?
This probably isn't a line of argument you want to go down. I've been unemployed for 7 months, in part due to how difficult it is to get so much as an intro call because so many people have totally automated the process of spamming every open job posting with as many resumes (many of which were likely LLM-generated as well) as possible.
In this case it's only about payout from views/engagement of posts.
There is no commercial interest from the developer of OpenClaw. He doesn't make any money from it. He made enough from selling his startup a few years back.
So when we suspected some companies to game the Twitter algorithm to make money, maybe they were not responsible for it at all.
For most people it works like that. Only a tiny minority keeps pushing after that point.
I just can't see an angle to OpenClaw that could provide a substantial financial gain for the creator. It's clearly a passion project. Like Ghostty from Mitchell Hashimoto.
[1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017442712388309406