613: OpenClaw, OpenAI's $100bn Raise, Meta + Nvidia, Blue Origin TeraWave, Boris Cherny, Cursor, Datacenter Electricity, Creatine for Cognition, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
"permanent outcomes based on temporary factors?"
If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
—Ken Robinson
🛀💭👨👩👦👦👫👦🧒 Some years ago, my wife and I decided to stop at two kids.
Would we make a different decision today?
It’s interesting to look back at these incredibly consequential decisions. Even when you knew at the time that it was a Big Life Turning Point, it was still embedded in a context that shaped the outcome, and that context was always going to change.
It was based on a snapshot. 📸
Isn’t that what life is: permanent outcomes based on temporary factors? 🤔
I’m not the same person I was back then. Neither is my wife. Our lives look very different today.
How much did the sleepless nights of those early years weigh on the decision? I rarely think about them anymore, but they were a big deal at the time 🛏️ 🥱😩
My kids are older now, and their personalities have blossomed over the years. Back then, I was thinking of different people (not loving them any less, to be clear! ♥️♥️). Would that have had an impact?
Combine a few such changes, and would it have been enough to change the outcome? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No regrets. It was a good decision. But that doesn’t mean that a different decision wouldn’t also have been a good one.
The deeper point is that these Big Turning Points are never made in a vacuum. Like with any decision-making, skill is involved.
So it seems worth reviewing the game tape so that when another Big One comes, you’re better prepared and will remember to open the aperture wider and think about which of today's factors are temporary.
🛀💭🎨🤖💾 I wonder what AI art made by AIs for other AIs, with no humans expected to be anywhere in the loop, would be like.
Would it be giant binary blobs that register to AIs as having great aesthetic value?
Or would it be something stranger… Art optimized not for emotional resonance, but for internal AI states that have no human equivalents, so we never could ‘get’ it? Maybe maximally high-entropy data. Maybe certain elegant mathematical structures.
What makes me a little melancholy is that we might never be able to tell the difference between 'this looks like noise to me' and 'this is something truly profound'.
🌊☀️ It’s easy to forget, but rivers are solar-powered.
Gravity is just finishing what sunlight started.
🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴
🦞 OpenClaw: The First Single-Person Billion Dollar Company? 💰
OpenAI has hired Peter Steinberger because of his massively popular OpenClaw project (Clawdbot → Moltbot → OpenClaw), making him an offer he couldn’t refuse and reportedly outbidding and out-charming Meta — does Sam make even better soup than Zuck? 🍜
The most logical partner seemed like Anthropic, but they likely fumbled the ball by leading with lawyers on trademark issues rather than courting and charming him when they realized just how much API use Clawdbot was driving, and how fast it was growing.
The idea that we would see single-person billion-dollar companies thanks to increasing technological leverage has been discussed for a while by people like Naval Ravikant, among others.
We’ve already seen companies with very few employees get acquired for large sums, like Whatsapp (55 employees), Instagram (13 employees), YouTube (65 employees), Mojang (40 employees, makers of Minecraft).
We may be seeing the culmination of that trend with OpenAI + OpenClaw, though we don’t know the financial terms involved (but I assume the numbers are pretty juicy).
To give you an idea of how fast timelines are these days, the original Clawbot project was first published on November 25, 2025! So fast that the project didn’t even have time to be turned into an actual company.
When I started exploring AI, my goal was to have fun and inspire people. And here we are, the lobster is taking over the world. My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use. That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research.
Altman said that “OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support. The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it's important to us to support open source as part of that.”
It’ll be interesting to see how much support it actually gets going forward, and how much of Steinberger’s development efforts go directly into ChatGPT’s own agentic capabilities. While OpenClaw was technically open source, the vast majority of code was committed by Steinberger, so if his focus is now elsewhere, the project may lose steam.
OpenAI's track record with open source isn't encouraging here. GPT-OSS hasn’t exactly kept pace with Chinese open models since it was released last summer. Open source projects are clearly not a priority (which is understandable considering they’re trying to build hundreds of billions of infrastructure and kind of have their hands full, but still).
But OpenClaw may be a different animal (no pun intended) because it offers OpenAI another vector of attack against Anthropic, which has been ahead when it comes to agents and tool use 🤔
📈 OpenAI is Raising $100bn+ at $830bn+ valuation 😯
A few years ago, I would've said it couldn't be done: a private company raising this much money, this quickly (remember: they raised $40bn in March 2025)…
The first portion of the funding round will largely come from strategic investors including Amazon.com, SoftBank, Nvidia and Microsoft, the people said. If those companies invest near the highest ranges of what has been discussed, those commitments will near $100 billion.
It’s reported that Nvidia will provide $30bn 💰💰💰
That’s equivalent to all of Nvidia’s market cap in mid-2016, just 10 short years ago 🤯
And that’s just phase one. Phase two:
