Three months ago, the tech industry was unaware of a lobster-themed AI coding project built by an under-the-radar Austrian software developer.
OpenClaw, as that creation is known, has enjoyed such a rapid ascent since then that it took center stage this week at GTC, Nvidia’s annual conference, where the leader of the world’s most valuable company called it “the most popular, open-source project in the history of humanity.”
“This is definitely the next ChatGPT,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on the sidelines of the developer event in Santa Clara, California. In his keynote, Huang described OpenClaw as the go-to option for building AI agents that can perform tasks like scouting eBay for deals and then placing bids, and said it “exceeded what Linux did in 30 years” in mere weeks.
The phenomenon is so pivotal to Nvidia that the chipmaker said at GTC that it’s building free accompanying security services — packaged as NemoClaw — intended to help spur more adoption of OpenClaw and get large businesses comfortable with its use.
Huang was validating what the rest of the market has been witnessing. An independent developer, rather than a giant, richly valued lab like OpenAI or Anthropic, came up with the next big thing in AI and, in doing so, exposed a potential major flaw in the investment thesis behind the large language models: They may be getting commoditized.