Walz built a reputation as the clown of Silicon Valley and created a series of viral web projects that also served as social commentary. Their most recent initiative, Gmail, lets users search Jeffrey Epstein’s emails as if they were accessing his personal Gmail inbox. Another project, Find My Parking Cops, used publicly available data to reverse engineer San Francisco’s parking ticket system to show the public where each parking enforcement officer last wrote a ticket.
Now, Walz’s skills creating new web experiences will be put to use in OAI Labs, a relatively new team led by research leader Joan Jang. The team is secretive about what it’s working on, but according to Zhang, it is tasked with “inventing and prototyping new interfaces for how people collaborate with AI.”
OpenAI has spent the last several years competing with Google and Anthropic to create new, compelling ways for people to use their AI models. While ChatGPT has been a hit among consumers, now reaching over 800 million people every week, the company is keeping an eye on new interfaces to improve these experiences. The move comes as millions of developers have started using coding agents like Cloud Code as their main interface to access AI models. With hires like Walz, OpenAI hopes to break out into the next big AI product.
Walz’s online stunts have gotten him into trouble from time to time. The Find My Parking Cops website ran for only four hours before San Francisco city officials shut down the live data feed that Walz’s tool relied on. A representative for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency said at the time that it turned off the equipment to ensure “employees are able to do their jobs safely and without disruption.”
However, it’s not like city officials are always giving him a hard time. After the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot to death in New York City, and police said the killer had fled on a CitiBike, Walz tried to analyze travel data he had previously prepared for a separate project to help in the search. Walz told The New York Times that people who tried to help authorities called him a “bootlicker” online and threatened his safety.
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