🦞 Five Things AI: OpenClaw, NemoClaw, OpenClaw, OpenClaw, OpenClaw
The lobsters are everywhere!
Heya and welcome to Five Things OpenClaw! 🦞
OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent exploding on GitHub four months after launch, is reshaping daily workflows by autonomously handling research, messaging via WhatsApp or iMessage, calendar management, and task delegation through subagents—all running locally on users' machines with flexible models, outpacing narrow chatbots and sluggish browser agents that even prompted Google to reshuffle its Project Mariner team. In China, it's drawing crowds from retirees in Shenzhen to ClawCons for non-techies, bridging the gap between intent and action with real "AI power to the people," as Hiten Shah puts it, though governments eye it warily and security risks loom with full data access. Nvidia's NemoClaw amps it up with guardrails, Nemotron models, and OpenShell runtime, unleashing wild creativity just weeks in—crazy momentum, but will Europe catch this wave or lag behind?
I just launched RunLobstr yesterday to give agents a skill to quickly analyze startup ideas - I figure that with the sudden popularity of coding agents people will develop more and more ideas to execute on. But first, let your OpenClaw agent use the lobstr skill and figure out if it is any good!
Enjoy this edition of Five Things AI! And don’t forget to check out GRID!
China Is Embracing OpenClaw, a New A.I. Agent, and the Government Is Wary
OpenClaw is a freely shared tool that functions as a virtual assistant, helping users conduct research, send texts or emails, and manage their calendars. Installed directly on a user’s computer, the A.I. agent can carry out tasks on its own, such as reading and responding to messages on apps like WhatsApp or iMessage, after an initial prompt by the user. Unlike most chatbots that rely on a single company’s A.I. model, OpenClaw can run on a variety of models.
OpenClaw, which was released four months ago, has already vaulted into this month’s top 10 most popular projects on GitHub, an online global community for coders. It has spurred excitement about the potential of agents to use artificial intelligence to help people become more efficient in their everyday lives.
That is just crazy. Will we see this in Europe as well? Hard to imagine.
Nvidia’s NemoClaw is OpenClaw with guardrails
NemoClaw can use any coding agent. While OpenClaw handles the runtime, memory, and skills, NemoClaw adds new and existing open source models, tools, and frameworks from Nvidia.
It can use, for example, Nvidia’s own Nemotron models (or any other model running locally or in the cloud), the company’s Dynamo inference engine, and a new open-source security runtime called OpenShell that is at the core of the Agent Toolkit.
I was really surprised by this announcement. This will change the perception of OpenClaw tremendously.
Lobster Boil
I checked in with Hiten Shah, one of my close friends who is building hard with OpenClaw. He summed it up in a single line: (AI) Power to the people.
This is why retirees are lining up in Shenzhen. This is why people with no GitHub account are showing up at ClawCons. For the first time, they can feel AI’s intelligence, even if it is not very good. Yet. Not a demo. Not a keynote promise. Not big boys burning billion dollars a month. A thing that actually does things on their behalf. The gap between what you want done and what gets done has always required either your own time or someone else’s labor. OpenClaw makes that gap feel smaller. That feeling, even in its rough and half-broken form, is new.
It’s a bit like Claude Desktop for the masses, isn’t it?
Here’s What OpenClaw Agents Are Doing Today
Claws are autonomous agents and can plan and execute tasks on their own, and, critically, spin up their own subagents to tackle specialized tasks, access files and themselves delegate tasks to other subagents.
They represent a big leap beyond question-and-answer-style AI chatbots as well as recent iterations of AI agents, which typically have narrow use cases and run for a set amount of time—although claws also come with a new set of security concerns. For claws to work as a true personal assistant, they need access to all of a user’s data.
There is so much creativity being unleashed right now and we are just a few weeks in.
Google Shakes Up Its Browser Agent Team Amid OpenClaw Craze
Momentum in the AI world has shifted dramatically in the last year toward agents like Claude Code and OpenClaw (whose creator was hired by OpenAI). Unlike web-browsing agents, these systems control computers through the command-line, which has proven to be a more reliable way to complete tasks. Some of these products include computer use as a feature, among other agentic abilities. By comparison, browser agents now seem somewhat limited as a stand-alone product.
I have been using browser agent a bit in the last few months and while I find them useful, the browsing process is also painfully slow and oftentimes I think I could do it faster myself…
