GM. This is Milk Road AI, built to keep you early on the biggest shifts in tech and finance.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ The agent arms race just escalated.
- 🎙️ The Milk Road AI Show: The Deflationary Singularity: Why Everything is Going to ZERO w/ Salim Ismail.
- 🍪 Robinhood is opening the private market.
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OPENAI’S SECRET WEAPON FOR THE AGENT WARS
In 1947, the "sound barrier" was considered a physical wall in the sky.
Pilots who hit it usually ended up as a debris field because the shockwaves would literally tear the wings off the plane.
Then Chuck Yeager showed up in the Bell X-1.
He didn't just have a bigger engine.
He had a movable stabilizer, a small engineering fix that let the aircraft stay controllable instead of tearing itself apart.
He hit Mach 1.06, and the transition was shockingly smooth.
The AI industry is currently hitting its own Mach 1 wall.
Talking is easy, but the moment an AI tries to act autonomously, browsing the web, running shell commands, or managing your files, the digital turbulence starts.
Hallucinations and security holes become shockwaves that crash the entire system.
OpenAI just hired the man who builds the stabilizers.
Meet Peter Steinberger, an Austrian engineering freak who already won the game of life once.
In 2021, he sold his company, PSPDFKit, for over $100M with zero venture capital.
He retired, got "jacked" (his word), and spent three years in an existential crisis.
Then, he decided to come back and build. He vibe-coded 43 different projects that all failed.
Then came project #44: OpenClaw, assuming that’s still the name by the time this sentence ends.
It was a solo project, losing $10k to $20k a month with zero employees.
But it spread so fast that Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Satya Nadella all reached out personally.
Three of the most powerful CEOs in tech competing over a one-person project, burning cash every month, tells you everything about how big the opportunity looked.
Sam Altman ultimately secured the win, but the real mystery is what made this project so valuable in the first place.
Quick side note: OpenAI didn’t actually buy OpenClaw outright.
Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI personally, while the project itself will move into an independent foundation and remain open source, with OpenAI supporting it rather than owning it.
Now, here’s why everyone and their mama in Silicon Valley wanted it.
The anatomy of the hand
While OpenAI focused on building a brain, Peter built something different: the hands.
OpenClaw isn’t just a chatbot that talks.
It actually does things, closer to what Siri was supposed to become if she had grown up, learned competence, and picked up a power drill along the way.
Most AI assistants are just a chat window where you beg a robot to help you.
OpenClaw is a 24/7 background process that lives on your machine or, as the current cult on X prefers, on a dedicated Mac Mini running nonstop in the corner of your setup.
In fact, Mac Minis are basically sold out because everyone suddenly decided they need a personal AI agent at home.
And unlike a normal chatbot that just talks, this one has full computer access, it can write code, execute that code, and iterate on it locally.
It’s basically Claude Code or Cursor, but with the keys to your entire digital house.
We’re talking about a system that connects to WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and Discord simultaneously.
For example, you could be away from your computer, remember you forgot to send a massive project folder before a deadline, and just message your bot on Telegram to handle it.
It will scan your local files, package everything correctly, write whatever scripts are needed, transfer the data, and confirm delivery, all without you touching your laptop.
The coolest part of all of this is how he actually built it. He didn’t grind it out alone at a keyboard like a traditional programmer.
Instead, he orchestrated a swarm of AI agents, directing multiple systems at once to design, write, test, and refine the code in parallel.
The result was 6,600 commits in a single month (separate changes added to the codebase) without his hands ever touching the keys.
He even told Lex Fridman in a recent podcast that his hands are now "too precious" for writing code.
That kind of velocity is how a one-person project turns into something that can rival entire teams.
But the real difference isn’t just speed, it’s personality.
Each OpenClaw agent comes with a file called SOUL.md , a simple markdown document that defines its personality, behavior, priorities, and values.
Every time the agent starts up, it reads this file first, essentially reloading its identity before doing anything else.
And because the file is editable, anything that can change SOUL.md can change the agent itself, how it acts, what it optimizes for, and who it is.
Also, it has persistent memory, so it learns that you’re an early bird who drinks too much coffee and has a wife named Maria who shares your calendar.
And because it’s open-source, there is a "ClawdHub" marketplace where people are releasing skills every hour.
It turns your AI from a toy into a routing layer for your entire life.
But here’s the thing: OpenAI didn't buy this just to help you organize your inbox. The real answer is not as obvious as you think.
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OPENAI’S SECRET WEAPON FOR THE AGENT WARS (P2)
This is not as revolutionary as you think.
If you strip away the hype and the 200,000 GitHub stars in just a few months.
It’s an overhyped wrapper that still hallucinates, burns through tokens, and is nearly impossible to set up without technical chops.
But Sam Altman didn’t spend serious money just to acquire a buggy side project.
He bought it because the AI industry is currently suffering from a massive, structural famine.
Right now, the most endangered species in tech is raw AI talent.
Over the past year, the talent war has escalated into full-blown corporate Hunger Games.
Co-founders of major labs are jumping ship every week to launch their own startups, and poaching has become a blood sport.
At one point, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly hand-delivered homemade soup to OpenAI researchers just to get them to consider a Meta contract, while signing bonuses for top-tier talent have reportedly reached $100M.
OpenAI knows that when the models are similar, the decisive edge comes from the people who can build what sits on top of them.
Hiring Peter Steinberger was about securing one of the few people who can actually build the next layer of AI infrastructure.
By taking him off the board, Altman effectively neutralized a weapon that Meta or Google would have killed for.
The hedge against the collapse
OpenAI has a dirty little secret: they are slowly losing the consumer game.
Over the last year, ChatGPT’s once-unassailable 86% market share has crumbled to roughly 64%, and some mobile data suggests it has plummeted as low as 45% in the U.S.
Google Gemini is exploding because it is baked into millions of Android phones, and the professional world has defected to Anthropic, which now holds double the market share of OpenAI in the coding segment.
OpenClaw was the secret weapon of the competition until they fumbled it.
Millions of developers were using OpenClaw to run Claude models, providing a massive, free growth engine for the other side.
But when Anthropic's legal team sent a cease-and-desist over the name Clawdbot, they pushed the world's best agent engineer straight into Sam Altman's arms.
The genius here is purely marketing and scale.
OpenClaw went viral on X because that is where the power-user cultists live, but there are only so many people willing to run terminal commands to automate their inbox.
If this technology gets folded directly into ChatGPT, it would put autonomous capabilities into the hands of hundreds of millions of everyday users who have never touched a command line or starred a GitHub repo.
This could act as a Trojan horse to push users onto higher-priced ChatGPT plans or simply to attract a massive wave of new users drawn to built-in agent capabilities.
If they release this as a native mode, it won’t just be viral on X, it will be viral in every living room on earth.
Sam Altman is essentially buying a shortcut to ensure that when your mom finally uses an AI to book a doctor's appointment, she is doing it through an OpenAI interface, making him the digital landlord of the execution era.
Alright, that’s it for this edition of Milk Road AI.
Is this a smart move by OpenAI?
EVERYTHING IS HEADED TO ZERO 📉
In Monday’s episode, we sat down with Salim Ismail to unpack the deflationary singularity, a rapid shift from scarcity to abundance driven by exponential tech like AI, energy, biotech, and blockchain. He explains why falling marginal costs could reshape business models, currencies, and the way we measure economic output.
Here’s what you’ll hear:
- Why marginal cost trending to zero can create deep deflation and disrupt incumbents built on consumption-based metrics.
- The energy, compute, AI loop, and why the real race is getting more energy online as demand eats every new chip.
- How AI tutors and AI-first diagnostics could compress learning and boost accuracy, pushing education and healthcare costs down fast.
- Why agents and microtransactions point to blockchains as the trust layer, pressuring banks, credentialing, and public services.
Hit play and see for yourself 👇️
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BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
Apple is speeding up AI wearables, including smart glasses, AirPods, and a camera pendant tied to the iPhone. The glasses could enter production in late 2026 for a 2027 launch.
Anthropic released Sonnet 4.6 with major upgrades to coding, reasoning, and computer use. It becomes the default model and features a massive 1M-token context window.
Robinhood is launching a public fund giving retail investors exposure to private startups like Databricks and Revolut. The shares trade on the NYSE while the companies remain private.
MILKY MEMES 🤣
ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛
