THIS BILLION SECONDS: AI@70 -- EP 3: TALK TO THE CLAW

Pete Steinberger set the world on fire with OpenClaw, the first general-purpose agent - and one with a soul. We'll look at how being in the right time and the right place with the right vibe fundamentally changed the public perception of AI.

It took about three years after the release of ChatGPT for AI tools to get to the point where they could be truly useful.

The first folks to gain those benefits were software engineers.

It makes sense.

The folks designing AI system are software engineers.

They built tools for themselves.

It turned out that the tools they were building for themselves were helpful for other software engineers.

The most important of these tools was an agent known as Claude Code.

Released by Anthropic in February 2025, it helped engineers write and test and maintain their code.

It wasn't outstanding - but it was better than anything anyone had ever seen before.

And then the AI got a whole lot better.

Between February and November of 2025, AI 'crossed the watershed', capable of performing tasks involving hundreds of steps over the course of an hour or more.