I spend between 1 and 2h a day on hn and I barely know what openclaw is. I've seen it mentioned once or twice and checked their website but that's all.
If one lets AI FOMO since the release of chatgpt drive them they'd be glued to their screen 24/7.
OAI wants to keep the hype train going. That is all. OpenClaw is just a project that attracted the interests of people messing about with LLMs. Which as a proportion of economically active people is.... tiny.
They brought him (Pete) over as he seems to have some way of thinking about LLMs in the form of a product. Will he have repeatable success on a large scale? Who knows. I doubt it personally.
Once I was working for a consulting & development company; they were trying to enter sector ABC by stuffing up a team of people, so I was told, who had interest in sector ABC stuff and want to do some projects there.
While they were deep in software development in general, no body of them read any of the essential/required daily industrial news (also not that one related to doing software development in sector ABC)
:-)
So no, even people somehow attached to a topic are not necessarily somehow deeper involved.
Most people are just "not that deep in there" as most people on HN.