OpenClaw’s ChatGPT moment?

Nvidia boss dubs OpenClaw as "next ChatGPT," Southeast Asia rides the functional AI wave, and India scrambles to power AI infrastructure.

Read from your browser The Prompt Welcome to The Prompt, your Monday dive into the world of AI that puts Asia front and center. From Big Tech's power players to the region's scrappy disruptors, we cover it all. Subscribe to get full access to our AI reporting. Ensure our articles appear in your Google searches: Hello Betamax, The tech industry remains obsessed with finding the "next ChatGPT." Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is on the hunt for this next AI breakthrough - and he feels like he's caught something with OpenClaw. Breakthroughs, however, are easier to declare than to actually deliver. OpenClaw, the open-source platform made by Peter Steinberger, an Austrian developer, allows users to create an agent that's more powerful but more invasive than chatbots, as it can read and write files, run tools, and manage calendars, among other uses. It has generated significant market attention so far, but its current version raises more questions than answers. Peter Saddington, founder and general partner at StaaS Fund, for example, used OpenClaw (then known as Clawdbot) to schedule his workflow, create mini-apps, and automate his social media presence. But he had concerns about the security of the platform, as it had access to his Gmail, social media, and Slack credentials - giving the agent free rein over his online identity. He also noted how easy it was to target the bot with cyberattacks like prompt injection. And with security researchers finding over 40,000 instances in the wild of OpenClaw leaking API keys, chat histories, and account credentials, the safety concerns are warranted. But with Nvidia's help, OpenClaw could be moving toward enterprise use. The US tech giant recently unveiled NemoClaw, a software tool that lets companies create a safer OpenClaw agent build. But the risks of OpenClaw are still apparent. Its utility remains largely unproven, too. While it functions well in controlled demonstrations, its reliability when integrated into actual business workflows, with real dollars and cents at stake, is yet to be seen. Closer to home, the AI hype is also spreading across Southeast Asia. To help you get a grasp of what's hype and what's for real, my colleague Glenn published this landscape map of the relevant AI players in the region. In his piece, he also found that functional AI agents - or those built for specific workflows - are the most popular products built by AI startups in the region. These include companies like video creation platform Reforged Labs, document processing firm Staple, and HR tech firm X0PA. While a lot of people are yet to be convinced that the use of AI is worth all the resources (especially with Sam Altman reportedly "thinking hard" about questions like "should we have the ability to have sex with ChatGPT?"), the demand is already here, and it's setting the pace, not the logic, for everything that comes next. Miguel Cordon, journalist TOP AI READS FROM OUR DESK 1️⃣ The startups turning Southeast Asia's AI hype into working agents While global hype around agentic AI is immense, actual enterprise deployment has been stalled due to safety and reliability concerns. To win enterprise trust, Southeast Asian startups are moving away from fully autonomous LLMs, instead building industry-specific agents. This shows that enterprises don't actually want maximum AI autonomy. By intentionally restricting the capabilities of their models in favor of strict guardrails, regional startups are proving that safety and compliance are far stronger commercial draws than raw technological power. 2️⃣ The power problem behind India's AI ambitions India is playing catch-up to global leaders in AI, and its ambitions are bottlenecked by a shortage of data center capacity and the electricity required to power them. To solve this energy crunch, the Indian government is opening its historically restricted nuclear sector to private companies, betting on small modular reactors to fuel power-hungry AI workloads. With the government involved, it goes to show that the AI sector's needs are forcing nations to rewrite their energy playbooks and take on capital-intensive bets just to stay competitive. WHAT WE THINK 1️⃣ Less TikTok feed, more TV commercials Video Rebirth's Bach is an AI video engine created by a team of former Tencent and G42 veterans. The company uses a proprietary engine that focuses on consistency in lighting, motion, and physical logic. According to its website, it's focused on creating "instantly commercial-ready" videos. The hefty investment the company has received is another signal that AI video creation tools are getting good enough to move away from making viral TikTok videos, toward enterprise use cases. This angles Bach away from more consumer-facing products like OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo model. With AMD's investment arm, AMD Ventures, jumping in on Video Rebirth's US$80 million round, it seems like hardware players are all-in on industrial-grade applications as well. 2️⃣ Nvidia's playing the game wrong When Nvidia unveiled the newest version of its DLSS video game rendering system, the overall sentiment was negative. The first few iterations of the feature made games run better by using predictive models to render frames, but the updated DLSS 5 now tampers with the actual look of 3D models. While the negativity surrounding the announcement is justifiable (DLSS 5 really does make characters look like AI slop, it can only improve from here. DLSS 4, for example, was a noticeable improvement over the previous iteration in terms of looks. My aging graphics card and I can only hope for similar gains as DLSS 5 matures. But even if this means better performance from older hardware, it still feels like Nvidia's AI chase has left its once bread-and-butter gaming hardware business on the side, leaving gamers no choice but to cough up more dough for GPU and RAM upgrades. STANDOUT AI DEALS 1️⃣ Peak XV leads $6.6m round in AI startup BambooBox BambooBox serves enterprise clients in the US and India with its account-based marketing system. The company is betting that there's more demand globally, as it plans to use the fresh capital to expand to more markets. 2️⃣ SG data center firm DayOne seeks to increase loan to $7b The company is looking to expand in Malaysia. With land in Singapore coming at a premium, its northern neighbor is a prime candidate for more Singaporean data center firms to expand to. 3️⃣ Ex-Peak XV Partners execs launch $250m India VC fund AI is reportedly one of the focus areas for the new fund. Called Ambition Capital, the vehicle is said to be eyeing companies with "India-specific solutions," furthering the country's AI hub ambitions. WHAT'S BUZZING 1️⃣ "It's incumbent on us to work with democratically elected governments and to provide the unique capabilities we're world-class in to help the world be safer and be a benefit to the world," said Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at a town hall in January. The quotes were first reported last week. Hassabis was defending the company's growing embrace of Pentagon contracts, a hot-button topic today in Big Tech in the US. Hard to argue that the world can be a safer place if we have autonomous weapons, but leave it to execs to try and commercialize improved weaponry - all in the name of more contracts. 2️⃣ "This is wild," posted by Sebastien Krier, frontier policy development lead at Google DeepMind. Krier was reacting to a data analyst using ChatGPT and AlphaFold, Google DeepMind's protein structure predicting system, to find a cure for his dog's cancer. While not curing Rosie outright, the vaccine developed with the help of the AI tools did shrink her tumors, adding "considerable lifespan" to Rosie. Catch up on past issues of the newsletter here. In the meantime, if you have any feedback or ideas, feel free to get in touch with Huong, our managing editor, at huong@techinasia.com. ADVERTISE | SUBSCRIBE | HIRE | FIND JOBS P.S. Don't miss out on the biggest tech news and analysis. Add newsletter@techinasia.com to your address book, contacts, or safe sender list. Or simply move us into your inbox. 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