“Chatbots give up. Agents improvise.”<\/p>\n
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That’s how Peter Steinberger<\/a>, the creator of OpenClaw, describes when he realized AI was about to change how people use technology.<\/p>\n At that moment, most AI tools were language models that ingested information and returned text. Steinberger saw something different: bots that could automate computer tasks traditionally done by humans.<\/p>\n He described the realization during a TED Talk recorded on Thursday.<\/p>\n He said it happened in early 2025, on a trip to Marrakesh, Morocco. He was staring at his phone.<\/p>\n Before the trip, he said he had built a text-based AI bot to help navigate the city, find restaurants, and translate conversations. He hadn’t built it to handle voice messages.<\/p>\n It did anyway, he said.<\/p>\n Steinberger said he sent the bot a voice note \u2014 and it took just nine seconds to ingest the message, inspect the file, recognize it was audio, access a voice-to-text translation feature via an OpenAI key, convert it to an easier-to-read format, send the information to the server, and then respond.<\/p>\n “I had what I can only describe as a ‘holy shit’ moment,” Steinberger told the TED talk audience. “I very vividly remember the situation when I was standing there, and I was like ‘How did you do that?’ and the agent replied, and I’m not kidding you: ‘The Mad Lad figured it out on its own.'”<\/p>\n He said he described the agent \u2014 then called Clawdbot<\/a> \u2014 on X, but got little traction.<\/p>\n Then, he did “something stupid,” he said.<\/p>\n “Remember, this agent, by default, can do anything you can do on your computer,” he said. “So obviously, I put it in a public Discord and invited random people.”<\/p>\n The experiment spiraled quickly, he said. Users around the world started deploying it, hackers tried to break it, and journalists began blowing up his phone.<\/p>\n Steinberger worried the bot might have exposed his personal data. It hadn’t.<\/p>\n Instead, the bot became a viral sensation, and Steinberger joined OpenAI in February<\/a> for an undisclosed sum. The product’s popularity has become increasingly important in Silicon Valley, too, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calling it<\/a> “the new computer” in March.<\/p>\n