Funny you should say that
In the previous thread, Bob Mulroy said:
I keep wanting to subscribe to Grok, but it seems to be for entertainment only. It won’t pay bills, analyze investments, monitor my garden robot, or anything substantial.
I think it’ll read books for you and provide a teenager’s insight though.
Grok can’t, but OpenClaw can. The question is – do you really want it to?
I got in a conversation with someone I know the other day who is running an OpenClaw instance. It interested me enough that I’ve spent the afternoon asking Grok to explain how it works.
OpenClaw is a free program. It will run under Windows, Mac or Linux – but it’s by far better on Linux. Generally, you give it its own dedicated computer, phone chip, Gmail account and so on.
Then you give it tasks. Like, create a briefing first thing in the morning – say, all the stuff on your calendar, any meetings or appointments, the news headlines. You can ask it to scan for any new papers on your speciality and report back with a summary. It can find interesting items and write first drafts of blog posts (I swear I’m not doing this). It can separate the spam from the real emails.
Apparently, it really shines for large coding processes with multiple modules. Unlike a Grok or Claude that solves a particular problem and hands it back to you, OpenClaw monitors all the moving parts and remembers where you’ve been.
It learns from you and stores your preferences. It will take any tone you like. For the less technical user, you can communicate with it via WhatsApp(!) or any other messaging service.
It has what is described as a ‘heartbeat’ – a regular schedule on which it wakes up, does a job, passes the results to you and goes back to sleep. This article explains some of the things people use it for.
For a lot of things, it needs the help of another LLM – like Claude or GPT. For that, you pay. How much it costs depends on how much it needs. My acquaintance said when he ran it under Windows, it was costing £10 a day on tokens just to run its self-repair program. I think we’ve finally discovered how that AI companies plan to make their money back!
So unless you want it to buy movie tickets or make restaurant reservations for you, you’re better off sticking to lightweight Q&A with the free services. I sure would like to play with an instance for a while, though.
Posted: April 29th, 2026 under personal.
Comments: 3
Comments
Comment from QuasiModo
Time: April 29, 2026, 7:45 pm
AI has been heavily subsidized since it came out but they are running out of cash to burn, don’t be surprised if it all just goes away one day.
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: April 29, 2026, 7:49 pm
Not all of it, but a whole lot of it.
Comment from Giles
Time: April 29, 2026, 9:32 pm
Oooh, oooh, something I understand enough to comment on! 😉
OpenClaw itself doesn’t have any built-in AI — it’s a tool that knows how to drive one (or several). People are still trying to sort out the terminology here, but it’s probably best described as an “agentic harness”, which is ghastly but here we are.
It basically handles stuff like interfacing with WhatsApp or Telegram or whatever, and provides access to the Internet from the computer it’s running on, plus places to store files and memories — stuff like that.
The actual AI is normally separate — you can run it locally but you need pretty decent hardware to do that (think a fancy gaming rig as a starting point) and it’s a hobby in and of itself to get it up and running.
So people almost always use external providers. GPT and Claude are the best, but there are a bunch of competitors — and the cheapest of these are cheap enough that you can get a month’s worth of usage out of the free tier on their respective platforms.
And yeah even with the subsidies that QuasiModo mentioned, using Claude for mine costs about $25 every couple of days. If they were charging at cost it would likely be more like $75.
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