One of the hottest (literally) events at Nvidia’s big conference this year was the “Claw Bar.” San Jose conference goers lined up in 90-degree heat to learn how to use OpenClaw, the popular agent system Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised all week. I lined up too, next to a tech retiree who wanted to set up agents to juice his personal investments by getting real-time updates on new property foreclosures and city projects. An Nvidia employee working the booth wanted to set up an agent to pay his parking tickets.
It turned out the demo was more of a sales pitch for Nvidia’s DGX Spark, a desktop that runs AI models locally, than an OpenClaw how-to. The Nvidia engineer explained how it’s difficult to run anything much more complex than a weather check without something like DGX Spark, which was conveniently for sale and parked nearby. “Four hundred?” The retiree inquired about the price. “Four thousand,” the Nvidia engineer said.
While Nvidia says people are ponying up for the technology, it reminded me of a joke going around in Silicon Valley about how it costs $87 to have OpenClaw make a restaurant reservation, given stubbornly high token prices. A joke, but also probably not far off.