How does a former OpenAI and Tesla researcher and engineer turn off the lights in his house?
Of course, we’re connecting them to an AI agent and asking the bot to do it for us, he said.
Andrej Karpathy, founder of Eureka Labs, co-founder of OpenAI, former AI director at Tesla, and engineer who coined the term “vibe coding,” said on the podcast “No Priors” that he built a system he calls “Dobby” (like Harry Potter’s house elf) to handle some of the household chores.
“I have a claw that basically takes care of the house, and I call him Dobby the elf claw,” he said in an interview published Friday. “We control all the lighting, HVAC, shades, pool, spa, and even security systems.”
AI claws are a new wave of autonomous AI agents that can perform actions on your behalf. Unlike traditional large-scale language models that respond with blocks of text, these systems can interact directly with apps and internet-connected devices to handle tasks such as research, scheduling, and home automation.
This tool has gained traction in recent months, with open source frameworks such as OpenClaw helping to popularize this approach. Silicon Valley giants and startups are currently racing to create competitors, with OpenAI acquiring OpenClaw and its creator Peter Steinberger in February.
Karpathy said he already uses the system for day-to-day operations, such as tracking delivery status.
“It sends a text to my WhatsApp,” he said. “You’ll see an image from outside, and it’ll say, ‘A FedEx truck just pulled up. You’ve received a new email. Would you like to check it?'”
He said the new system removed six apps from his phone and Dobby now has control over them all.
Karpathy’s setup also featured significant hardware enhancements. A few days before the interview, he posted on X that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gifted him a DGX station with a GB300 superchip designed for agentic AI workloads.
“She will create a beautiful and spacious home for Dobby the Claw House Elf and many other ideas,” Karpathy posted on Wednesday.
Karpathy said he can’t sleep over the system that controls his devices. He told Business Insider that Dobby connects to devices on his home’s local network, meaning those systems can’t be accessed directly from the internet.
In fact, he said it helps him rest.
“You can hear, ‘Dobby, it’s time to sleep,'” he said on the podcast. “That means all the lights go out.”