Riley Walz,A A software engineer known for his online acrobatics is joining OpenAI to research and develop fresh ways for humans to interact with artificial intelligence, WIRED has learned. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the hiring.
Now Walz’s skills in creating creative web solutions will be brought to bear on OAI Labs, a relatively fresh team led by research leader Joanne Jang. The team does not reveal what it is working on, but has been tasked with “inventing and prototyping new interfaces enabling human collaboration using artificial intelligence” according to Jang.
OpenAI has been racing against Google and Anthropic for the past few years to create fresh, compelling ways for people to operate AI models. While ChatGPT has been a success with consumers and now reaches more than 800 million people weekly, the company is looking for fresh interfaces to improve the experience. The move comes as millions of developers have started using coding agents like Claude Code as the primary interface for accessing AI models. Thanks to employees like Walz, OpenAI hopes to overtake the next huge AI product.
Walz’s stunts get him in a warm mood from time to time. The Find My Parking Cops website was operational for just four hours before the city of San Francisco shut down the current data feed on which Walz’s tool was based. A representative for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency said at the time that it had disabled the tool to ensure that “employees can do their jobs safely and without disruption.”
However, city authorities do not always cause him problems. After the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot and killed in Modern York and police said the killer fled on a CitiBike, Walz tried to analyze the travel data he had previously scraped to a separate project that will support in your search. Walz told The Modern York Times that people on the Internet called him “bootlicker” for helping the authorities and threatening his safety.