The Big Y #306
Claw Mania
Hi! 👋 Welcome to The Big Y!
These days I would argue that most AI innovation and progress are driven by one of the big AI labs, spitting out new models that reach new heights and launching new products built on top of those models. But the OpenClaw phenomenon has been a twist on the usual story, an example of grassroots driven innovation.
Moltbook, OpenClaw, and the surrounding projects that have popped up in their wake highlight that strong ideas combined with network effects can still be effective. Most advantages in AI right now can be linked back to unique and superior data as a foundation, but it turns out that we can still build fun software. One of things that still works is the network effect of something cool.
This bottoms up, grassroots style innovation is in strong contrast to the large amounts of cash that many AI startups are raising (see the $1B raised by AMI in the tidbit below) to keep up with the competition. And it is also fascinating to see how quickly these projects are being acquired by the large players, OpenClaw into OpenAI and Moltbook into Meta. And now, Nvidia is releasing their own NemoClaw to try to bring the agents into enterprises.
Keeping up in the AI world is hard, we’re hearing rumors that Meta has delayed the release of their model due to performance reasons, which we know that they’ve sunk a lot of money into. In this perspective, it is fun to see that the human element of excitement still can drive innovation to widespread adoption without billions of dollars in funding.
The Tidbit: Yann LeCun’s new startup, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI), has raised $1B at a $3.5B valuation. It sounds like they are planning on building world models for AI, arguing that they are aiming to fill a gap that current LLMs cannot sort out, aka understanding the interactions of the real world.
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