00:00Shenzhen's also offering incentives for startups and developers to move to the city.
00:05Officials in Longgang District want to attract people who will build products using an AI agent called OpenClaw.
00:12Unlike chatbots, it can complete its own tasks, interacting with software, digital tools and even physical devices.
00:19Subsidies of up to $280,000 could be awarded to companies who will be expected to use OpenClaw
00:25to create AI skills packages and build applications that integrate AI agents with intelligent devices.
00:31The priority will be making smart applications for real-world industries like manufacturing,
00:37government services, industrial parks and healthcare.
00:40Firms can apply for funding to cover up to 30% of investments
00:43with successful products receiving additional rewards of up to $140,000.
00:49Start-up companies can also apply for relocation subsidies, housing support,
00:54healthcare benefits and school access for children.
00:56There will be discounts on office space,
00:59while certified AI communities could be given around half a million dollars in annual support.
01:04Let's talk now to Robert Nice, he's founding partner of H-Tree Capital,
01:08a London-based technology venture capital firm.
01:11Good to see you again, Rob.
01:12So, Chinese authorities want more people to use OpenClaw.
01:16We heard a little bit there about how it could work,
01:18but how can it actually help make companies more profitable?
01:22I think there's a lot of ways it can make any given job a lot more efficient if people try.
01:27Now, not everyone's going to take the initiative,
01:28but if your job is to type things in from one spreadsheet to another
01:32or take a PDF and copy data out of it,
01:35people that are creative are going to start doing that with tools like OpenClaw,
01:38and all of a sudden things that were a five-hour job are now a five-minute job.
01:42I think that creates a lot of other second-order impact
01:44where people have either more time or more ability to solve things
01:47they otherwise couldn't have done without the engineering skill set.
01:49So, it sounds like an amazing time saver with lots of possible advantages,
01:54but are there any downsides people should be watching out for?
01:58It's really fun, but, yeah, it's very early days and it's not terribly secure.
02:01So, most of these skills, the sort of tasks that it learns about every particular thing it's interacting with,
02:07a lot of these skills are open, meaning people write them themselves
02:10and contribute them into public repositories.
02:12And so, it leaves a lot of room for bad actors to come in there and potentially cause problems
02:16in terms of stealing data from companies, stealing personal data.
02:20Of course, there are ways of securing it, but every day with a platform this open,
02:24there's going to be new things that get introduced that create this problem.
02:27So, users have to be vigilant, and some of the users, in fact, if they're not technical,
02:30may not know what to even look for.
02:32So, some of these tasks that could be taken on by OpenClaw could effectively replace people's jobs, couldn't they?
02:39How important is it for job seekers and people in the workplace more generally
02:43to stay up to date with this kind of technology?
02:46I think that's what's really happening right now and what we see in the industry
02:50is that it's not necessarily a good engineer, a bad engineer, or the skill set is really around
02:55how much they adapt and how much are they able to use this to make themselves more effective.
02:59You know, I'm a terrible engineer myself, but using OpenClaw, I can go through
03:03and actually do a much better job building an application that doesn't have bugs in it.
03:06So, I think, you know, no matter where you are in the organization,
03:09there's going to be a bifurcation of the people that are able to use it to make themselves better
03:13and self-correct, and the people that are Luddites that won't try it
03:17and probably are the ones that are going to get hit the most by this wave.
03:20We have been talking about AI for some time as an emerging technology, haven't we?
03:24At what point does it stop being an emerging technology
03:27and start becoming an essential part of everyone's workflow?
03:32I think we're getting pretty darn close to it right now.
03:35I mean, I loaded up OpenClaw last month.
03:37I use it for fairly random things, but today I was looking at planning a flight,
03:41and it goes through, it finds the right routings, it finds the little edge cases
03:45I may have not thought of on my own, and it gives me a link right to the booking site,
03:48one click and buy.
03:49And to be fair, I could probably tell it to automatically buy the flight for me.
03:52I don't trust it that much yet.
03:53So, yeah, I think it's there.
03:55It's still raw and still rough, but for people that are excited about it, it's today.
04:00Robert, great to talk to you, as always.
04:01Thanks for coming on the program.
04:02Robert Nys there from H-Tree Capital.
04:04So, thanks for listening.
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