Feb 20, 2026 · 56m · more-or-less
OpenClaw vs Meta vs OpenAI: The Personal Agent Wars Heat Up · More or Less Podcast
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In this episode of the More or Less podcast, hosts Dave Morin, Britt Morin, Jessica Lessin, and Sam Lessin analyze major tech developments, focusing on the OpenClaw Foundation, personal AI agents, executive poaching between Meta and OpenAI, and the future of software engineering jobs. Interspersed with unscripted personal banter—including Sam's backcountry skiing injury—the hosts debate whether raw AI intelligence will become a commoditized utility or drive massive economic shift across software ecosystems.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 81.1% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 4.9 Guest teaching 2.1 Guest disagreement 2.4 The hosts pushing back 2.4
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 29:00 Britt rejects Dave's software engineering labor optimism
Britt directly refutes Dave's thesis, taking the explicit under and insisting one top engineer managing agents will replace large teams of software developers.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 40:54 Dave bluntly denies that mainstream consumers will build appsDave flatly dismisses Britt's prediction that non-technical suburban parents will vibe code carpool apps, emphasizing the high baseline technical competence required.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 8:40 Britt breaks down hardware data ownership versus cloud platformsBritt educates the room on the structural difference between centralized cloud agents like Meta's Manus and locally deployed open-source agents like OpenClaw.
The host holds their own ▶ 34:05 Jessica draws historical parallel between software layoffs and journalism disruptionJessica dismantles Dave's conflation of total software produced with total engineers employed by citing the historical precedent of journalism's collapse despite overall information growth.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Podcast Title Sequence and Theme Song | 2 | 0 | 1 | 1 | Introductory housekeeping and banter about lunch and the week's technology news. Jessica and Britt preview upcoming topics including Meta's smartwatch plans and Sam's absence while skiing. | |
| Sam's Skiing Injury and Urgent Care Interlude | 1 | 0 | 2 | 3 | Sam Lessin logs on immediately after an intense skiing crash in Jackson Hole, claiming he might have broken a rib or collarbone. Jessica pushes back firmly, refusing to record until he goes to urgent care. | |
| OpenClaw Foundation Announcement & Dave Morin's Role | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Dave Morin announces his official appointment to the board of the new OpenClaw Foundation following Peter Steinberger's move to OpenAI. Dave provides background on the project's rapid open-source growth. | |
| The Personal Agent Wars: OpenClaw, OpenAI, and Meta | 6 | 4 | 3 | 2 | Britt sharply distinguishes cloud-based agents like Meta's Manus from local, hardware-bound agents like OpenClaw. Jessica and Dave discuss developer adoption and consumer preferences regarding local data ownership versus convenience. | |
| OpenAI vs. Meta Rivalry & Executive Poaching | 6 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Jessica details the executive rivalry between OpenAI and Meta highlighted by Charles Porch's departure. Dave contextualizes the historical timeline required to scale advertising businesses. | |
| Wearable AI Hardware & The "Internet of Things" Parallel | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2 | Britt criticizes big tech wearable designs for ignoring female fashion aesthetics. Dave draws a parallel between current AI gadget hype and the early 2010s Internet of Things era where screens were haphazardly attached to appliances. | |
| Ambient Recording, Memory Agents, and Personal CRMs | 5 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Jessica advocates for pervasive ambient recording for productivity, prompting Britt to probe how that squares with confidential journalistic ethics. They discuss personal memory CRMs and automated relationship tracking. | |
| Venture Mega-Rounds and the Pivot to Agentic Engineering | 6 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Dave outlines current startup valuation polarization, coining the Private Mag Seven driven by narrative capitalism. Britt and Dave highlight enterprise friction as mid-sized companies attempt to transition into agentic engineering. | |
| The Future of Software Engineering Jobs Debate | 7 | 5 | 6 | 7 | A vigorous debate erupts over the future headcount of Bay Area software engineers. Dave insists software volume will explode and developer demand will stay strong, whereas Jessica and Britt strongly counter that AI tooling and corporate cost-cutting will decimate engineering headcounts. | |
| Vibe Coding & Will Average Consumers Build Custom Apps? | 6 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Britt predicts everyday non-technical consumers will build and share custom apps within a year. Dave strongly pushes back, arguing that software engineering remains inherently technical and that non-technical users lack systems intuition. | |
| Government Tech Contracting, Sam's Return, and the Anthropic-Pentagon Dispute | 5 | 2 | 2 | 2 | Sam rejoins post-hospital with intact bones and immediately sides with Britt on the engineer reduction forecast. Jessica and Dave review leaked reports of Pentagon disputes with Anthropic over terms of use. | |
| The Commodity Value of Intelligence & Model Orchestration | 7 | 3 | 4 | 4 | Sam presents a thesis that raw intelligence is a rapidly cheapening commodity akin to deregulated power utilities. Dave agrees token costs will race to zero but stresses that value concentrates in orchestration layers like OpenClaw. | |
| Jessica's Announcement for the Indian Wells Tennis Event | 3 | 0 | 1 | 1 | Jessica promotes an upcoming Information VIP tennis event at Indian Wells. The co-hosts joke about letting their OpenClaw agents autonomously manage invite lists and group chats before concluding the episode. |
Statements from this episode (28)
The Information: Meta Resumes Plans to Develop a Smartwatch
“Information reported today that Meta's smartwatch plans are back on, so we can do a wonderful poll about who is going to buy a Meta smartwatch, considering I still don't have any smartwatches.”
Morin: OpenClaw is fastest-growing open-source project in internet history
“You know, this is the, as near as we can tell the fastest growing open source project in internet history.”
Britt Morin: Big Tech Cannot Competitively Replicate OpenClaw's Distributed Architecture
“It doesn't make sense for anyone else, like one of the big, you know, the big tech companies to have a competitive version of this because it's, they're not, and inherently it has to be open source. It has to be distributed. And so that's the big open cloud ad…”
Dave Morin: Perhaps Only Apple Can Deploy Personal AI to Edge Devices
“Perhaps only Apple has the technology and the ability to deploy personal AI to, you know, the edge, I guess onto people's personal devices. Because that's their business.”
Jessica Lessin: Convenience, Not Privacy, Will Win Most AI Agent Users
“Privacy will win over some users, but probably most, the history of the internet has been won over by convenience”
Lessin: Subscriber sentiment data correlates with tech stock performance
“I did some really cool analysis of years of information, subscriber sentiment data that has to do with showing correlation to how public stocks move and newsflash turns out there is a correlation between the sentiment data and what public stocks, tech stocks d…”
Lessin: Instagram partnerships lead Charles Porch is joining OpenAI
“Charles, who ran Instagram, some of the most important relationships, including a lot of their celebrity relationships, is going to open AI. To do a similar role there.”
Britt Morin: Meta will not design an attractive smartwatch for women
“With their Meta glasses. Are they really going to design a cute wash for women? No. Like, so maybe in the future, once they actually design something relevant for me.”
Lessin: Meta glasses team wants feminine styles but faces hardware constraints
“Well, I, I've had conversations with the team working on the glasses about, like, more feminine form factors and styles. I think they're working. They want to just have a broader range. The electronics, though, are the size they are.”
Dave Morin: Wearable AI hardware lacks original ideas, echoing early IoT gimmicks
“And that's what this all feels like to me. It's like, nobody has any original ideas. So everybody's like, let's just put more electronics in people's pockets on their wrists on their face. And we'll see what ha you know, we'll see what works.”
Jessica Lessin: Recording and memory may be core to next hardware wave
“I think the concept of recording and memory might become core to this next. I mean, if you look at, if you consider health tracking as sort of the precursor to this wave, which I think it is, and it's the thing that's, Driving adoption. A lot of these things.”
Dave Morin: Narrative-driven AI founders can raise at billion-plus valuations
“The private Meg seven and any sort of founder that can command a serious narrative has the ability to raise at, you know, a billion plus valuations for very big, crazy visions.”
Morin: Roughly one-third of YC's winter batch is building OpenClaw projects
“The word on the street is something like a third of the, of Y Combinator is open claw already. And they're winter class.”
Britt Morin: Software engineer headcount will shrink as AI agents multiply output
“I think more people overall will be building software, but the number of actual software engineers will need to go down because one great engineer can do the work of many engineers and their job will likely be to like manage and oversee some of these software …”
Lessin: Bay Area software engineer headcount will drop to 300,000
“Well, so I will go down, in three years, I'll go down to 300,000, and then I think it probably drops.”
Dave Morin: Anthropic claims software engineering jobs will vanish in 12 months
“Anthropic says no one will be doing software engineering 12 months from now.”
Morin: Tech CEOs will not lay off half their software engineers
“Like if you are a major CEO in Silicon Valley, are you really gonna let go of 30% of your software engineers? 50% of your software engineers? There's no way.”
Morin: Building functional software with AI will remain deeply technical
“Also on this front, the technical people and the non-technical people and the skills that it takes to make this stuff really work, even though it's really powerful right now are still very technical. And I think that's not going to change for many years.”
Britt Morin: Everyday consumers will build custom apps within 12 months
“Share how many months or years you think before your, like, normie friends that don't live in the Bay Area are going to send you their app that they just made. Cause I think it's like, 12 months.”
Dave Morin: Everyday non-technical consumers are not going to build custom apps
“Britt, they're not gonna make apps.”
Jessica Lessin: Anthropic and Pentagon are clashing over terms of use
“Ok, so yes, Anthropic and the Pentagon are fighting over terms of use. Meanwhile, XAI and everyone else are tripping over themselves to get these government contracts.”
Lessin: Selling Raw AI Tokens Cannot Produce Profitable Businesses
“You also can't make any money as a company who sells tokens or intelligence.”
Morin: OpenClaw Users Route to Claude Opus 4.5 Over Codex for Personality
“In the open clock community, people actually choose to route to Claude particularly Opus Four Five, because they like the personality better than, say, Codex.”
Britt Morin: People Will Have AI Agent Doctors Managing Their Health
“We are going to have a doctor as an agent that is taking care of us. And if that doctor is continuously getting things wrong, even on the margins, like that's going to become a huge deal. And people will lose trust.”
Lessin: OpenAI CFO Says Firm Is Exploring IP Licensing for Drug Discovery
“Sarah Fryer told me that they're looking at licensing IP for, like, drug discovery, right? Because the business model, she's the CFO of OpenAI, like, and this is something they're just looking at.”