Latest / In The Loop / Why OpenClaw is the most important software invention since ChatGPT
Transcript
- 0:00This episode is about Open Claw, the open source AI agent tool
- 0:04that went from a side project by just a single Austrian developer
- 0:09to what the CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, a couple of weeks
- 0:12ago described as probably the single most important release of
- 0:16software probably ever. He compared it to Windows,
- 0:19Linux, HTML, and announced that NVIDIA were building their
- 0:22entire enterprise agent strategy on top of it.
- 0:25In today's episode, I'm going to explain how this project became
- 0:30such a global sensation. I'm going to explain exactly why
- 0:34it's one of the most important software updates ever, why it's
- 0:38potentially more important than the web browser, than Linux,
- 0:41than even the iPhone operating system.
- 0:43And I'm going to also explain what it actually is, what's
- 0:47innovative about it, what's new, and what it means for all of us.
- 0:51This is In the Loop with Jack Harton.
- 0:54Hope you enjoy the show. Let's start with what open core
- 1:07actually is, because the first thing to understand about open
- 1:09Core is it's it's not just a normal agent.
- 1:11You know, yes, it is a chat bot still because, you know, all
- 1:15agents are mostly chat bots and it feels mostly the same, but
- 1:17underneath it's something very, very different.
- 1:20Essentially what open core is, is a long running no dot JS
- 1:22background service, often called a demon.
- 1:25So in software terms, that is essentially a computer program
- 1:30that runs as a background process.
- 1:32So it doesn't rely on a user to initiate the process.
- 1:37So it might handle typically on a, you know, a device, maybe
- 1:40something like automatically connecting to your Wi-Fi.
- 1:42Now open claw connects to your file system, your browser, any
- 1:47APIs, your calendar, your e-mail.
- 1:49It's on your laptop. It can run on a schedule.
- 1:52It monitors all those applications for things that are
- 1:55happening called events. It can change a series of
- 1:58actions together and skills together, and it can message
- 2:01you, you know, on text or Messenger or WhatsApp or
- 2:05whatever it might be when it needs your input or attention.
- 2:08Now, if you compare that to ChatGPT, which is a conversation
- 2:12that you must start, whereas as long as your PC is open or you
- 2:15got something to host it and keep it running, it's literally
- 2:20always on. Then there's the interface, or
- 2:23in this particular case, the lack of a web interface.
- 2:25So there's no open claw, you know, web app that you make an
- 2:28account with and log into. Instead, it works inside over 15
- 2:32different messaging platforms that, you know, WhatsApp,
- 2:35Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, iMessage, Microsoft
- 2:39Teams, Google Chart. And you can just very simply
- 2:41text it the same way that you'd text someone that is in your
- 2:44team, you know, reschedule my Thursday meeting or, you know,
- 2:48go to my emails, summarize them all, triage and prioritize them
- 2:52all, write e-mail responses, and then I'll approve them.
- 2:55Summarize the PDFs that have been sent to me across all these
- 2:58different, you know, Microsoft Teams are Slack chats.
- 3:01And I have to say, these types of things, when you try them,
- 3:03they are quite magical. And that zero friction approach
- 3:06to an agent doing something for you is why the adoption curve
- 3:10has been so fast. I mean, staggeringly fast.
- 3:14It's faster than ChatGPT, roughly 20 times faster by a
- 3:19many visitor growth numbers. You know, every AI company spent
- 3:22billions trying to get people to come to their own interface,
- 3:25whereas Open Cloud simply went to them.
- 3:28And you know, Anthropic and all the big platforms have of course
- 3:30copied almost all of it. They copied the messaging first
- 3:34approach with Cloud Code or Cloud Code channel, shall I call
- 3:37it. They've got Bishop, Telegram and
- 3:39Discord integrations within a few more weeks that brought out
- 3:43dispatch, that brought out schedules.
- 3:45So many of the different features that Open Claw built,
- 3:48they've provided to users as part of the $20 or whatever
- 3:53membership T you're on, but in a much more secure and Safeway.
- 3:57And I think the speed of their response tells you a lot.
- 3:59An open eye even went and bought Open Claw.
- 4:02Now buying Open Claw is more buying the talent and the
- 4:05people, which was basically just the main Austrian developer who
- 4:08built it all because it was all open source and everybody could
- 4:12access the technology and see how it was built anyway.
- 4:29Now the skills and MCP ecosystem is where it gets really
- 4:33interesting because a skill in Open Core is just a markdown
- 4:37file, so a document type, so just a document type containing
- 4:41human readable, so normal text instructions for a specific
- 4:44task. Now if you've listened to last
- 4:46week's episode, you'll understand exactly what a skill
- 4:49is. I really recommend going listen
- 4:51to that episode if you haven't. And it's one of the most
- 4:53underutilized new capabilities that all AI systems globally are
- 4:58now adopting. And any of those skills are able
- 5:00to call into and connect to MCP servers.
- 5:03So model context protocol, which is basically a wrap around of
- 5:08integrations APIs. So it makes it really easy for
- 5:11an agent to take actions in different systems.
- 5:13So suddenly this agent has access to a huge ecosystem of
- 5:17skills and a huge ecosystem of integrations and control of your
- 5:21entire PC, and it can run around the clock for you.
- 5:25You can see why it's an incredibly innovative approach
- 5:29to how agents can do work for people.
- 5:31And that community really blew up.
- 5:32So Claw Hub hosts more than 13,000 community contributed
- 5:37skills and basically each skill is like a mini app for an agent.
- 5:41And then there's also memory open.
- 5:42Claw stores everything in just markdown on your local machine,
- 5:46such human readable. You can look at it, you can edit
- 5:49it, and it essentially builds a three layer memory system.
- 5:53And then what's really interesting about open claw is
- 5:55the token economics. So obviously tokens are when
- 5:59word start getting generated by an LLMA tickle.
- 6:02A typical ChatGPT prompt uses maybe a few 1000 tokens and a
- 6:07genetic open claw task where the agent plans, executes, checks
- 6:11your PC does work, re pawns, re executes, all whilst you know
- 6:16you're having a shower. It can consume 1000 times more
- 6:21tokens and chat chi BT. So you can just imagine a
- 6:23continuously running background agent, the kind that Jensen
- 6:26Huang is envisioning everyone having, is going to burn
- 6:30millions times more tokens per day than a single chat chi BT
- 6:34conversation. Now obviously the CEO of the
- 6:37company that sells everybody computer chips wants this to be
- 6:41how everyone consumes credits, because obviously that means
- 6:44everyone needs more computer chips from them.
- 7:02So yeah, I think this dovetails really nicely into our Jensen
- 7:04firing is so excited because he called Open Claw the operating
- 7:07system of agentic computers. It's huge big conference just a
- 7:11couple of weeks ago. So he said, and I quote Mac and
- 7:14Windows are the operating systems for the personal
- 7:16computer and Open Core is the operating system for personal
- 7:20AI. You know, Windows and Apple made
- 7:22personal computers accessible just to everybody, and Open
- 7:25Claw, in his framing, does the exact same for personal agents.
- 7:30And the deeper analogy is Linux. You know, Linux has become
- 7:33basically the invisible infrastructure of the Internet.
- 7:36You know, every cloud server, every Android phone, every smart
- 7:39devices runs on a Linux, and they built all operating systems
- 7:43on top of Linux. And Jensen is betting that Open
- 7:45Claw becomes that invisible infrastructure of the agent era.
- 7:49Linux took 30 years to reach ubiquitous global adoption.
- 7:53Open Claw, on the other hand, surpassed that in three weeks.
- 7:56Yes, you heard that right. Linux is one of the most
- 8:00important open source technologies ever invented, is
- 8:03literally the basis of most technology, and Open Claw has
- 8:07become more widely adopted than Linux in just a few weeks.
- 8:12So yeah, NVIDIA have obviously announced massive plans to make
- 8:15Open Claw the fundamental pillar of its strategy so it can then
- 8:20increase token generation globally from say 2 million
- 8:24tokens per second, which is where we're at today, to about
- 8:27700 million tokens a second, which is about 350% increase.
- 8:32The scale of what Jensen Huang is describing is obviously just
- 8:35ridiculous. You know, NVIDIA currently has
- 8:3843,000 employees and he projects 75,000 human employees alongside
- 8:447 and a half million open call like AI agents over the next 10
- 8:48years. For NVIDIA alone, that's about
- 8:50100 digital workers per person and the things that you can get
- 8:54open call to do, and very soon all the main platforms are going
- 8:58to enable you to do the same on their systems.
- 9:01The scale of production is quite outrageous and the number of
- 9:05tokens that are going to be consumed is ridiculous, which
- 9:09means that obviously Nvidia's chips are going to be very, very
- 9:11important. So for those that you know, want
- 9:13to jump into testing this, what I'd say is that you can a wait
- 9:18for this to be fully released on all main systems that you feel
- 9:22really comfortable with and trusted.
- 9:24When that starts to happen, you know, core code and core Co
- 9:27works, let's say, has already started doing that.
- 9:29I'm going to do an episode as a full breakdown, but if you
- 9:33really want to get into it and I would recommend people having a
- 9:35go, I'll give you a few tips here and also how to do it
- 9:38safely. So if you want to set it up,
- 9:54ideally you have clock code maybe running in an IDE like
- 9:58Visual Studio Codes. And then it makes it really,
- 10:00really simple because it will just help you get through it
- 10:03all. So if you want to do it, you can
- 10:04go and look for Open Claw on GitHub and obviously just pull
- 10:10it into whatever ID you're using.
- 10:12You can go and search for Open Claw, clone the repo, go and
- 10:17find the web URL, pull it into Claw code and you'll be able to
- 10:21get guided through it. Quite frankly, I pick a use
- 10:23case. It's quite simple, you know,
- 10:25daily updates through my emails, for example, all that triaging
- 10:29of emails. That's quite a nice one to get
- 10:30into. If you've not got claw code in
- 10:32like an ID or whatever, maybe go and check out Rep or cursor.
- 10:36It's really, really simple. It honestly takes just a few
- 10:38minutes if you haven't. The experience is a bit
- 10:40friendlier if you're not used to being in, you know, Visual
- 10:43Studio Code. And again, just find the repo,
- 10:47get it in there, and you'll get guided through the process.
- 10:50The one tip I'd really give for everyone is do not run this on
- 10:54your main machine. So do not use this on your main
- 10:57laptop. It's why people have been
- 10:59rushing out to buy Mac minis. I think in the future, Mac minis
- 11:02are going to be very, very, very popular because as we need 24/7
- 11:08agents, you need your local machine to be turned on for an
- 11:11agent to be doing work. And so I think just Mac Mini's
- 11:14running in the background all the time and going to just have
- 11:17agents. And it means I think we're going
- 11:19to have Mac mini's always on in the background just to enable
- 11:21our agents to do work for us. But anyway, don't set all of
- 11:25this up on your local machine because there's a massive
- 11:27security risk. You know, I think it was like a
- 11:29third of all public skills made had some form of malicious
- 11:35software or malicious prompt injecting hiddens inside it.
- 11:39So do just be super careful there.
- 11:41Once you give this access to your PC, it can literally go and
- 11:44access your personal e-mail, your banking details,
- 11:47everything. So I'm not just saying this to
- 11:48be, you know, fear mongering because it's very easy to be
- 11:51safe, but just make sure that you don't use your local main
- 11:55PC. So where does this leave us?
- 11:58Well, Jensen Huang called Open Claw probably the single most
- 12:01important release of software probably ever.
- 12:04And the claim is obviously incredibly self-serving The it's
- 12:08a trillion dollar thesis on how can we sell loads of computer
- 12:12chips because the world is consuming loads of tokens from
- 12:16large language models. I think it's probably correct or
- 12:19at least closer to correct than it may be first sounds.
- 12:22This is the greatest leap towards the dream of agents
- 12:25that, you know, people have talked about online for so long
- 12:29and every model provider is racing to add open clause
- 12:32features to their products. So I think very, very soon
- 12:36you're going to see these type of capabilities democratized and
- 12:40accessible to everyone. Anyway, thanks for listening and
- 12:43I'll see you next week.