Last night, London was a bit crazy. An AI hackathon, Demo Day surprisingly attracted 5000 people online, directly shooting to the top of the global trending list on platform X. It’s not any cryptocurrency tycoon, nor a Wall Street shark, the main character is an Austrian programmer named Peter Steinberger—the father of OpenClaw. He just joined OpenAI and flew to London for this student-organized event, almost couldn't make it due to visa issues.
Let me mention a few things that impressed me during this hackathon.
There’s a project called AgroMind that uses satellites to monitor farmland. The soybean production area in Brazil just showed signs of drought, and before the news was reported, it had already calculated the risks and automatically placed orders to hedge on the commodity exchange. This isn't AI; this is a trader who doesn't sleep while sitting in front of satellite images.
What's even better is AlphaMind. It compares your holdings to Buffett's, not just to comfort you with a graph, but truly helps you analyze risks and then automatically rebalances across multiple brokers. In the past, this was the job of Goldman Sachs; now you can manage it while sitting on the sofa with a cup of coffee.
There's also one called Highstreet AI, which specializes in creating 'digital employees' for small shops on the streets of London. Is the seafood shop owner overwhelmed with orders coming in via email, WhatsApp, and phone? A few agents collaborate: one reads the demands, one checks the inventory, and one issues invoices. The owner just needs to click 'approve' at the end. Saves 10 hours a week, and no need to learn any technical skills.
To be honest, what impressed me the most at this hackathon wasn't how cool the technology was, but the spirit of 'just get it done.' When Peter was asked whether agents would change the future of large models, he scratched his head and said, 'I don't know; I just use the tools at hand to make something fun.' The speech ran two hours over time, and he chatted with students without tickets in the rain, showing no airs.
As he was leaving, he said, 'You are not looking for meaning; you are creating meaning.'
That's quite right. In this wave of AI, don’t just watch; try it out yourself. What if?