What actually happened to the whole Openclaw frenzy?

A while back you couldn't open reddit or youtube without sifting through tons of Openclaw content. And it wasn't just the internet that blew up, I remember seeing images from China where crowds would gather in the streets to get their instance set up by their local homelabber. Heck, even Nvidia jumped on the bandwaggon releasing some sort of enterprise version of it. And now, a few weeks later... radiosilence? What happened? I don't believe the AI-Cabal psyops story (e.g. the github stars conspiracy), nor that it was a bad idea or poorly executed (Hermes Agent was the real implementation) and since I never got around to install it myself, I'm wondering if people are still using it, if the hype materialized into something durable or if the thing has completely disappeared? And if it has disappeared, why that? Iirc the feeling conveyed when it first came out was: it's finally that magic AI assistant that truly does all the work for you. And it was the prospect to finally get out of a boring job because hey, you got this magic tool now that will slave away for you. And if that was the promise, and if it didn't materialize, why didn't it deliver? submitted by /u/Mr_Moonsilver [link] [comments]

Source: r/LocalLLaMA | 2026-07-30