I would say it updated me towards longer time horizons. I expected AutoGPT to be a big deal. Instead, it didn't really work that well. I expected OpenClaw to be a big deal, but it still isn't that big of a deal. I live in Mountain View and talk to rationalists and programmers all the time, and I don't know a single person who is having an AI agent do a substantial amount of their everyday computer errands outside of work.
I figured GPT 4 was smart enough to, like, be people's personal secretary and randomly pop up with useful ideas for them, but there's clearly something that is harder than I think about it.
It was a coalescing of things, not a direct update for me. I was deep enough in daily use for coding and infosec agents that much of the hype seemed like "yeah, this is 6-12 months early, and a horrible idea to trust too soon".
I didn't fully realize just how much of the moltbook and true hype was fantasy/grift (a few 10k people claiming to be 100s of K of autonomous bots making commerce and finance magic, at least in part to try to monetize random tokens like $CLAW and such). But I was skeptical that there was much there on that level.
It was definitely proof that far more automation and longer-running semi-supervised activities were on a shorter horizon than many of us thought, even in the business.
The last 7 months have been within my bounds for innovation - so much of the promise and hype have become more real. Actually functional autonomy has increased from minutes to tens of minutes due to longer context windows, WAY better harnesses, a lot of evolution of knowledge in how to build/monitor guardrails (skills, triggers, adversarial agent roles, etc.). And yes, because of the hype bubble of OpenClaw lighting a fire under the more responsible mass of developers and providers. And users.
OpenClaw scared me a bit and struck me as an "agentic is here" moment. Had I made predictions on what the last 7+ months would look like, there would have been a lot more obvious steps/updates by now. That said, I count myself as one without the background knowledge to accurately evaluate the technical advancements in AI. My reaction to OpenClaw might be just one way I'm wrong...maybe I overreacted.
I would love to hear from those better informed and equipped to address this. Was OpenClaw a big deal to you? Are you surprised that the last 7 months haven't had more headline-worthy OpenClaw like moments? Or is this just how progress goes, in fits and starts? [Don't throw tomatoes at me, but] could it even suggest AI progress might actually be slowing? Or that the low hanging fruit at least has been picked when it comes to LLMs and LLM-wrapped agents?