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 hiring.

Walz has built a reputation as a Silicon Valley jester and created a series of viral web projects that double as social commentary. Its most recent initiative, Jmail, allows users to search for Jeffrey Epstein’s emails as if they were 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 in creating new web experiences will be put to good use in OAI Labs, a relatively new team led by head of research Joanne Jang. The team remains secretive about what it’s working on, but has been tasked with “inventing and prototyping new interfaces for how people collaborate with AI,” according to Jang.

OpenAI has spent the last few years competing with Google and Anthropic to create compelling new ways to use its AI models. While ChatGPT has seen great success with consumers, now reaching more than 800 million people each week, the company is considering new interfaces to improve these experiences. The move comes as millions of developers have started using coding agents like Claude Code as their primary interface for accessing AI models. With hires like Walz, OpenAI hopes to get ahead of the next big AI product.

Walz’s online stunts have sometimes landed him in hot water. The Find My Parking Cops website lasted only four hours before San Francisco city officials shut down the live data feed that Walz’s tool relied on. A representative for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency said at the time that it shut down the tool to ensure “employees can do their jobs safely and without interruption.”

However, it is not always the municipal authorities who give him a hard time. After the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot to death in New York and police said the killer fled on a CitiBike, Walz attempted to analyze travel data he had previously collected for a separate project to aid the search. Walz told the New York Times that people online called him a “bootlicker” for helping authorities and threatening his safety.