"Chatbots give up. Agents improvise."
That's how Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, describes when he realized AI was about to change how people use technology.
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.
He described the realization during a TED Talk recorded on Thursday.
He said it happened in early 2025, on a trip to Marrakesh, Morocco. He was staring at his phone.
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.
It did anyway, he said.
Steinberger said he sent the bot a voice note — 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.
"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.'"
He said he described the agent — then called Clawdbot — on X, but got little traction.
Then, he did "something stupid," he said.
"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."
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.
Steinberger worried the bot might have exposed his personal data. It hadn't.
Instead, the bot became a viral sensation, and Steinberger joined OpenAI in February for an undisclosed sum. The product's popularity has become increasingly important in Silicon Valley, too, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calling it "the new computer" in March.
Steinberger joked that its growth doesn't follow the usual up-and-to-the-right business maturation curve. Instead, the charts show OpenClaw's use has skyrocketed, with a near-straight-line trajectory.
"By far, my favorite quote is from a friend, who looked at this," he told the TED audience while pointing to the chart. "He said, 'Peter, this is not hockey stick growth. This is stripper pole.'"
