OpenClaw, a new and powerful AI assistant, has developed a fondness for guacamole. This is just one of the interesting things I discovered while using this trendy AI tool as my personal assistant over the past week. Previously called Clawdbot and Moltbot, OpenClaw has made a name for itself in Silicon Valley, capturing the attention of both tech enthusiasts and investors eager to explore the cutting-edge of AI. It’s become popular enough to spawn its own AI-focused social network.
As the writer of WIRED’s AI Lab newsletter, I decided to give OpenClaw a try myself. I had the bot monitor my incoming emails and messages, find interesting research, order groceries, and even negotiate deals on my behalf. For the adventurous early adopters out there, OpenClaw offers a fascinating glimpse into the future of AI. However, excitement comes with a twinge of anxiety as the AI navigates emails, manages credit card transactions, and occasionally surprises its human user (though in my case, that was entirely my fault).
How I Set It Up
OpenClaw is designed to run on a home computer that’s always on. I set it up on a Linux PC, linked it to Anthropic’s Claude Opus model, and communicated through Telegram.
Getting OpenClaw installed is straightforward, but the setup and maintenance can be tricky. You need to connect an AI backend by generating an API key for Claude, GPT, or Gemini, and then paste it into the bot’s configuration files. To enable Telegram, I had to create a new Telegram bot and provide OpenClaw with its credentials.
To maximize OpenClaw’s functionality, I connected it to various software tools. I created a Brave Browser Search API account so it could search the web and configured it to access the Chrome browser via an extension. In a bold move, I also gave it access to email, Slack, and Discord servers.
Once everything was set up, I could interact with OpenClaw from anywhere and instruct it on how to operate my computer. At first, OpenClaw asked me some personal questions and allowed me to customize its personality. My bot, called Molty, humorously refers to itself as a “chaos gremlin,” which gives it a distinctly different feel from Siri or ChatGPT. This unique persona is part of what has fueled OpenClaw’s popularity.
Web Research
One of the first tasks I assigned to Molty was to provide me with a daily digest of intriguing AI and robotics research papers from arXiv, a platform where researchers share their work.
Previously, I spent hours coding websites (www.arxivslurper.com and www.robotalert.xyz) to search for arXiv papers. It was both impressive and a bit disheartening to see OpenClaw automate all that tedious browsing and analysis so effortlessly. The papers it selected were average, but with more guidance, I foresee improvements. This kind of web searching and monitoring is certainly useful, and I plan to rely on OpenClaw for this task often.
IT Support
OpenClaw has an almost uncanny knack for resolving technical issues on your device. Given that it operates on a cutting-edge model capable of writing and debugging code and easily using the command line, this shouldn’t be surprising. Still, it’s a little eerie to watch OpenClaw reconfigure its settings or debug a browser issue in real-time.
