Riley Walz, Silicon Valley clown, joins OpenAI

Riley Walls, A A software engineer famous for his Internet stunts is joining OpenAI to research and develop new ways for humans to interact with artificial intelligence, WIRED has learned. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the appointment.

Waltz has built a reputation as a Silicon Valley clown, creating a series of viral web projects that double as social commentary. His latest initiatives, Beautifullets users search Jeffrey Epstein’s emails as if they were accessing his personal Gmail inbox. another project, Find my parking copsused publicly available data to reverse engineer San Francisco’s parking ticket system to show people the exact location where each parking enforcement officer wrote a ticket.

Now, Walz’s skills will be used to create new web experiences at OAI Labs, a relatively new team led by research leader Joanne Jang. The team is secretive about what they’ve been working on, but has been tasked with “inventing and prototyping new interfaces for how people collaborate with AI.” According to Zhang.

OpenAI has spent the last few years racing with Google and Anthropic to create new and compelling ways for people to use its AI models. While ChatGPT has been a huge hit with consumers, now reaching more than 800 million people each week, the company is looking to new interfaces to improve these experiences even further. The move comes at a time when millions of developers have begun using programming agents like Claude Code as the main interface to access AI models. With employees like Walz, OpenAI hopes to emerge as the next big AI product.

Walz’s online stunts have a history of landing him in hot water from time to time. The Find My Parking Cops website only lasted four hours before San Francisco city officials shut down the live data feed that Walz relied on. An SFMTA representative said at the time that it shut down the tool to ensure “employees are able to do their jobs safely and without interruption.”

However, city officials don’t always bother him. After the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot to death in New York City, and police said the killer fled on a CitiBike, Walz tried to analyze the trip data he had obtained. Previously scraped For a separate project to assist in research. Walls told the New York Times that people described him online as “com. bootlicker“For helping the authorities, and threatening his safety.