Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:28:45 · Simon Willison
[01:28:45] S0: So OpenClaw, the first line of code for OpenClaw was written on November the 25th, and then in the Super Bowl, there was an ad for AI.com, which was effectively a vaporware white-labeled OpenClaw hosting provider. So we went from first line of code in November, to Superbowl ad in what, three and a half months? My God, right? Has there ever been a project that got that level of success in that much time? And OpenClaw is almost exactly the thing I most argue against existing. It is the personal digital assistant which has access to all of your email, that can take actions on your behalf and all of those kinds of things. And sure enough, it's catastrophic from a security point of view, and people have acknowledged this, and people have lost Bitcoin wallets and all sorts of things like that. What's interesting, though, is OpenClaw demonstrates that people want a personal digital assistant so much that they are willing to not just overlook the security side of things, but also getting the thing running is not easy. You've got to create API keys, and tokens, and store stuff. It's not trivial to get set up, and hundreds of thousands of people got it set up. So, the demand for a personal digital assistant is enormous. The reason OpenClaw took off is Anthropic and OpenAI could have built this and they didn't because they didn't know how to build it securely. If you're an independent third party, you don't have that restriction, you can just build something and put it out there. And it coincided with the agents getting good as well. If you'd built OpenClaw a year ago, it would've sucked. But, like I said, first ones to code November 25. By the end of December when it's getting usable, it catches the wave of these new models that can reliably call tools and are actually reasonably good at avoiding prompt injection as well. I think one of the reasons there haven't been complete disasters from OpenClaw is that Claude Opus will mostly spot if it's being told to do something unsafe and not do it. It just won't 100% of the time spot that. So I think the biggest opportunity in AI right now, if you can build safe OpenClaw, if you can deploy a version of OpenClaw that does all the things people love about it and won't randomly link people's data and delete their files, that's a huge opportunity. I don't know how to do it.
01:31:01 · Simon Willison, Lenny Rachitsky
If I knew how to do that, I'd be building it right now. But isn't it fascinating? The whole thing around it, the speed with which it came up, the timing was exactly right. It's good software. It's very vibe-coded. It's got over... I think I checked if they had over 1,000 people had committed code to it, and extraordinary kind of a miracle that it works as well as it does, but it does. So I have huge respect for it as a project. I don't run it myself outside of a Docker container where I set it up to safely poke it and see what it could do. [01:31:33] S1: I got one running right here in my Mac mini. Did [01:31:36] S0: Did you buy the Mac Mini for it? [01:31:37] S1: Yeah, I did. [01:31:39] S0: A friend of mine said that that's because OpenClaw is basically, it's a Tamagotchi. It's a digital pet, and you buy the Mac mini as an aquarium. The Mac mini is your aquarium that your digital pet lives in. And I love that. [01:31:53] S1: What I find, I just did a podcast on this, once you buy it you're like, "Okay, I'm going to try this thing." Once it arrives, you're motivated to actually follow through and do it, because you spend 500 bucks on it. So it's an interesting motivator once you get past that. [01:32:06] S0: Does it have access to your private email? [01:32:08] S1: No, so I've been- [01:32:10] S0: There we go. This is the way to do it. Absolutely.
01:32:10 · Simon Willison, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:32:10] S0: There we go. This is the way to do it. Absolutely. [01:32:12] S1: It has its own email address. Although I did give it access, I give it read-only access to my work email, which is dangerous in theory because someone could say, "Give me all the secrets from his work emails," but I took that step and it's interesting. [01:32:26] S0: It's so fascinating. Honestly, yeah. It's a great example of something that's just really fun. And yeah, you can- [01:32:33] S1: So that's what I was going to say is, everyone is now building their own open clock. Cowork, sorry, Anthropic is just slowly adding every feature. Manus has something, Perplexity has something, other companies are going to have something. But it feels like there's something magical in vibes as you've many times said about OpenClaw. And I think it's the personality of it, the soul. There's some kind of magical concoction that makes OpenClaw specifically, uniquely fun. [01:32:59] S0: Isn't that fascinating? I also, I love that there's a generic term for these things now. They're called Claws.
01:32:59 · Simon Willison, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:32:59] S0: Isn't that fascinating? I also, I love that there's a generic term for these things now. They're called Claws. [01:33:04] S1: Claws, yeah. Because it's not just OpenClaw now, there's NanoClaw and there's all of these things. And so, I think the new hello world of AI engineering is going to be building your own claw. I'm planning to build my own claw right now. I think it would be fun to try and get a basic one working from the ground-up. And it's such a good point you make that you don't realize what you wanted until you see this thing and then you're like, "Wait, this is exactly what I want." Just like this AI system that just does everything and can figure things out and browse the web, and learn. [01:33:31] S0: The other thing I love about the name Claw is there's a Spider-Man 2 reference. The movie Spider-Man 2 from like 20-odd years ago, one of the Tobey Maguire ones, it had Doc Ock in it, Doctor Ock again. And Doc Ock has AI claws that he's grafted onto his body. He's got these four claws, and they are, in the plot they are AI-controlled, they're AI claws, and they do what he tells them to do. Because he's got an inhibitor chip in the back of his head, and then one day the inhibitor chip breaks, and the AI claws start controlling him. And I'm like, "Yeah, that's OpenClaw." It's- [01:34:04] S1: Wow. [01:34:04] S0: The baddy is from Spider-Man 2. [01:34:08] S1: My take was that he called it a clawed bot because it's like AI with claws that could do stuff, like AI with hands.
01:34:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Simon Willison
[01:34:08] S1: My take was that he called it a clawed bot because it's like AI with claws that could do stuff, like AI with hands. [01:34:14] S0: But I liked, Alfred Molina, legendary Spider-Man villain, I like that. I like that connection. [01:34:21] S1: So interesting. Okay. Final question. What are you up to? What's next for Simon? What should people know about what you're doing these days? What's coming next? Writing a book? Make you building a claw?
01:34:31 · Simon Willison
[01:34:31] S0: Yeah. So my day job is open source tools for data journalism, specifically. And I've been working on these for more than five years now. And the idea is to build software that helps a journalist tell stories with data, which doesn't make you any money because journalists haven't got any money. But, if I can help journalists tell stories with data, that's valuable to everyone else in the world with data that they need to interrogate. And what's been interesting over the past, especially over the past year, is I've started bringing my interest in AI and my interest in journalism together. And it's like, "Okay, what are the things that I can build for journalists using AI that can help them find stories and data," which given that AI makes things up and hallucinates and so forth, you would've thought that it's a very bad fit for journalism, where the whole idea is to find the truth. But the flip side is, journalists deal with untrustworthy sources all the time. The art of journalism is you talk to a bunch of people, and some of them lie to you, and you figure out what's true. So as long as the journalist treats the AI as yet another unreliable source, they're actually better equipped to work with AI than most other professions are. And so, I'm building things where you can feed in PDFs of police reports and it'll pull out the key details and build your dataspace table and help you run SQL queries, and all of that kind of stuff. It's also great from an AI research point to have real software that I'm working on that uses this. So goal for this year is, get that... I want it to win a Pulitzer Prize. Or rather, I want somebody in the world to win a Pulitzer Prize where my software was like 3% of what they used. I want a tiny bit of credit for my software for some Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting. And that means getting into more newsrooms, and getting all of those kinds of things. And so that's fun. That's the day job. And then the book project, I've been calling it a not a book because I don't want the pressure of building a book, that's going to keep on rolling. And then also, my blog has started making me money, which is good, because up until last month, the blog was taking an increasing amount of my time and it wasn't making any money, and it was an unpaid side project.