Riley Walz, a software engineer known for viral online projects, has been hired by OpenAI. He will join the secretive OAI Labs team to research new human-AI interaction interfaces.
OpenAI is seeking novel product interfaces to enhance user experiences beyond ChatGPT, amid competition and the rise of coding agents. Walz's background involves creating provocative tools that often leverage public data for social commentary.
His projects have previously drawn official backlash and public criticism, highlighting the controversial nature of his work. This includes tools that analyzed parking ticket data and CitiBike trip records.
Main topics: Riley Walz's hiring at OpenAI, the mission of OAI Labs, OpenAI's product interface strategy, and the controversial nature of Walz's past projects.
Riley Walz, a software engineer famous for his online stunts, is joining OpenAI to research and develop new ways for humans to interact with AI, WIRED has learned. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the hire.
Walz built a reputation as Silicon Valley’s jester and has created a series of viral web projects that double as social commentary. His most recent initiative, Jmail, lets users search Jeffrey Epstein’s emails as if they’re accessing his personal Gmail inbox. Another project, Find My Parking Cops, used publicly available data to reverse engineer San Francisco's parking ticket system to show people exactly where each parking enforcement officer last wrote a ticket.
Now, Walz’s skills creating novel web experiences will be put to use in OAI Labs, a relatively new team led by research leader Joanne Jang. The team is secretive about what it’s been working on but has been tasked with “inventing and prototyping new interfaces for how people collaborate with AI,” according to Jang.
OpenAI has spent the past several years racing with Google and Anthropic to create new, compelling ways for people to use its AI models. While ChatGPT has been a hit with consumers, now reaching more than 800 million people every week, the company is eyeing new interfaces to improve these experiences. The move comes as millions of developers have started using coding agents such as Claude Code as their main interface to access AI models. With hires like Walz, OpenAI hopes to get ahead of the next big AI product.
Walz’s online stunts have landed him in hot water from time to time. The Find My Parking Cops website lasted just four hours before San Francisco city officials shut down the live data feed Walz’s tool relied on. A San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency representative said at the time that it shut down the tool to ensure “employees are able to do their jobs safely and without disruption.”
It’s not always city officials giving him a hard time, though. After the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead in New York City, and police said the killer had fled on a CitiBike, Walz tried to analyze trip data he had previously scraped for a separate project to help with the search. Walz told The New York Times that people online called him a “bootlicker” for helping authorities and threatened his safety.
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