Riley Walz, the Jester of Silicon Valley, Is Joining OpenAI

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 ...