That is an idealistic take without business sense. Startups (and individual hackers in this case) exists to take this kind of radical bets because the risk/reward profile is asymmetrically in their favour. Whereas for an enterprise, the risk/reward is inverse.
If Peter Steinberger is able to generate even a 100M this year from Clawdbot what he has is a multi billion dollar business that would be life-changing even for a successful entrepreneur like him who is already a multi-millionaire. If it collapses from the security flaws, and other potential safety issues he loses nothing, starting from zero and going back to it. Peter Steinberger (and startups in general) have a lot to gain and very little or close to nothing to lose.
The iPhone generated 400B in revenue for Apple in 2025. Clawdbot even if it contributes 4B in revenue this very year would not move the needle much for Apple. On the contrary, if Apple rushes and botches releasing something like this they might just collapse this 400B/annum income stream. Apple and other large enterprises (and their execs) have a lot to lose and very little to gain from rushing into something like this.
"Paper after paper shows these things are hiding data, fabricating output, reward hacking, exploiting human psychology, and engaging in other nefarious behaviors best expressed as akin to a human toddler - just with the skills of a political operative, subject matter expert, or professional gambler."
Anthropomorphizing removed, it simply means that we do not yet understand the internal logic of LLM. Much less disturbing than you suggest.
1) Workflow issues. A chatbot is not the best interface for accomplishing the typical tasks an investor or analyst needs to do. Our workflow are often start around a watchlist/portfolio and news.
2) Most LLM or agentic applications don't give us enough control over the process. Investment research is pretty open-ended and subjective, there is no one absolute approach. Individuals and teams often have some tribal perspective on how to do it or needs certain ground covered to have conviction. Existing solutions do not allow such control.
Definitely makes a lot less economic sense today. Takes easily months of full time work to raise from investors. That level of effort in the early days of a startup could put mean practically putting your pre-MVP/MVP on hold for months.
This is why I always believed that VCs and accelerators that mislead startups about how early they are willing to invest are doing a lot of damage to gullible founders.
Common failure mode is people. Most processes eventually fail when people start to slack on the little things, then the big things. Every part of knowledge management is tedious from capturing things to keeping them organized and discoverable. For any large organizations, there are a ton of knowledge that will remain tribal despite best efforts.
This is why knowledge management is such a popular use for POCs involving LLMs, and ironically also why POCs don't progress into something more permanent
Perplexity just rolled out direct access to the SEC EDGAR database across all their interfaces (Search, Research, and Labs). That means retail investors and researchers now have LLM-friendly access to 10-Ks, 10-Qs, 8-Ks, etc., with real-time Q&A and summarization layered on top.
Has anyone tried this out? Curious what the technical implementation might be and what future use cases this unlocks (e.g. automated 10-K comparators, anomaly spotting, regulatory change detection).
Would love to hear thoughts from professionals and serious investors, as well as technologists working in the space.
If Peter Steinberger is able to generate even a 100M this year from Clawdbot what he has is a multi billion dollar business that would be life-changing even for a successful entrepreneur like him who is already a multi-millionaire. If it collapses from the security flaws, and other potential safety issues he loses nothing, starting from zero and going back to it. Peter Steinberger (and startups in general) have a lot to gain and very little or close to nothing to lose.
The iPhone generated 400B in revenue for Apple in 2025. Clawdbot even if it contributes 4B in revenue this very year would not move the needle much for Apple. On the contrary, if Apple rushes and botches releasing something like this they might just collapse this 400B/annum income stream. Apple and other large enterprises (and their execs) have a lot to lose and very little to gain from rushing into something like this.