OpenAI Hires ‘Jester’ Who Hacked Silicon Valley for Fun

Riley Walz has built a reputation pranking San Francisco with viral tech stunts. Now the 23-year-old engineer is taking his experiments to OpenAI. 

Walz, known for reverse engineering city systems and launching provocative web tools, is joining the company behind ChatGPT. He will join OAI Labs, a team focused on prototyping new ways for people to interact with artificial intelligence systems.

From viral ranks to OAI labs

WIRED reported that Walz is joining OpenAI to work on OAI Labs led by research leader Joanne Jang. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the hire. 

Jang said the team is tasked with “inventing and prototyping new interfaces for how people collaborate with AI.”

Walz became widely known for projects that remix public data into searchable, consumer-friendly tools. His website tracked San Francisco parking enforcement officers in near real time after he reverse-engineered the city’s ticket numbering system. 

The site displayed officers’ initials and badge numbers and showed where tickets were issued across the city. It went viral and shut down within four hours. 

“What unfolded with this website directly involved our employees and put their safety at risk, and that’s not OK,” Parisa Safarzadeh, a spokeswoman for the agency, told The New York Times. 

Walz said that he isn’t anti-parking enforcement and described his projects as a way to exercise his curiosity. “You have to follow through on your ideas because if you don’t, you might stop having them. It’s like a muscle you have to keep using,” Walz emphasized. 

His other stunts include creating a fake Manhattan steakhouse on Google Maps and opening it for one night, building The Panama Playlists to reveal Spotify listening habits of public figures, and co-founding Numerous.ai, a platform that embeds chatbots within spreadsheets. 

A focus on new AI interfaces

According to WIRED, OpenAI has spent the past several years expanding ChatGPT into a global product with more than 800 million weekly users. At the same time, the company faces competition from Google and Anthropic as developers experiment with coding agents and alternative AI interfaces. 

OAI Labs operates as a relatively new group inside OpenAI with a mandate to explore how people collaborate with AI systems. However, the team hasn’t publicly detailed its projects. 

Walz’s background focuses on building novel web experiences that make complex systems visible and interactive. For instance, The New York Times noted that his parking ticket project relied on publicly accessible data that required a ticket identification number to view. After figuring out the pattern in the city’s ticket numbers, he pulled up all the tickets at once and turned the data into a searchable map.

Walz has not faced any criminal charges or penalties for his pranks to date. In interviews, he has expressed hope that he can keep building side projects that test the boundaries of public data and digital platforms.See how Nvidia, Amazon, SoftBank, sovereign wealth funds, and more powered OpenAI’s record $110B funding round at $730B valuation.

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