(Image credit: OpenClaw) (Image credit: OpenClaw) (Image credit: OpenClaw) Image 1 of 3 View Original
It’s at this point that I asked HammerClaw to give itself a grade, to which it offered itself a B- on accuracy for hallucinating and making up news stories. Now, I don’t want to say that all OpenClaw AI agents would do this, as we are running a relatively light local model. I would expect that larger local models would be able to identify what they need to do much more efficiently due to having a significantly higher model parameter count. With that in mind, I wondered if another AI model could help HammerClaw along a little bit with this task. And so, I went onto my OpenRouter account and opened a chat with the big, beefy 2.8 Trillion Parameter Kimi K3 .
Comparing a cloud-based frontier model like Kimi K3 and Gemma 4 12B just isn’t fair. One takes up terabytes of RAM to run, while Gemma fits inside a Mini PC that lives on my desk.
Instead of using Kimi K3 to run the AI itself, I tasked it with actually helping me set up the job that HammerClaw seemingly didn’t have the skills to pull off. This hybrid workflow – of using a local LLM in tandem with a more powerful one in the cloud- is a common setup for many AI enthusiasts. After about a dollar in tokens, it sent me a list of OpenClaw commands, skills, and instructions, after reading the current documentation for OpenClaw CLI to ensure it got everything right. It was flawless. I followed the instructions Kimi K3 gave me and entered them into an Ubuntu Terminal, where it successfully created a new skill for HammerClaw named ‘News-Intel,’ instructed me on how to enable the web-search functions, and set up the Cron jobs for the automated sends. Bearing in mind that I had never used OpenClaw before, it was all surprisingly smooth, even if our local model couldn’t do all of these tasks itself.
With everything set up, the buck is then passed back to our much humbler Gemma 4 12B model-powered HammerClaw to execute the rest – after all, this is supposed to be a test for how Local AI models function. I executed the command for a manual run while checking the operational logs, where it was successfully calling all of the tools, and thought, against all odds, HammerClaw might actually be able to do it. A few minutes later, I received a Telegram message. HammerClaw had managed to locally execute the task and send me a digest of ten news stories.
Of all of the things to automate, this is likely one of the simplest examples of how someone can use OpenClaw. While simple, it’ll also save me a bit of time every day staring at an RSS feed and looking for stories myself. But, it’s quite a distance away from the “speak, and it’ll do whatever you want it to!” promise that drew so many into a frenzy earlier this year.
If all you heard about OpenClaw is that it’s a magical AI agent that can do anything, as I’ve learned, it’s not quite the truth. Unless you’re well-versed in several elements, like understanding model choices and getting your head around what models perform well for tool-calling. Running a humble local setup might be fun, or interesting to tinker around with, but the true power for Local AI developers and tinkerers lies with the obvious: More power to run bigger, complex models, and more agents running tasks consecutively. In fact, we’ve taken a look at how these workflows can be used in practice with a mixture of Local and Cloud AI models for Tom’s Hardware Premium .
The issue here is that for our local model, this simple task – of running and sending us 10 news stories- could not set itself up, and that’s using hardware that already costs north of $1,500. As our resident local AI expert and GPU guru Jeff Kampman has recently tested, for those serious about AI who want real power without relying on the cloud entirely, you might want to save up your pennies to run stronger, faster local models, either using dedicated GPU-accelerated setups, or dedicated boxes such as the DGX Spark , or a cluster of Dell Pro Max GB10s , both of which will cost you north of $5,000. You’d hope that the models capable of running on that hardware wouldn’t fumble the setup of a relatively simple Cron job.
The real question is, will having a local AI inference box meaningfully change how you work, or the work you do, to pay for itself? For many, that’s the lingering question that many are asking themselves. For now, HammerClaw is sending me more articles every few hours, a task that can be performed by simple scripting. But the manual “sift” is being handled by an LLM. As neat as it is, I wouldn’t pay $1,500 for the privilege. Luckily, it’s not merely a box made for AI inference; there’s a whole computer attached.
Sayem Ahmed is the Subscription Editor at Tom's Hardware. He covers a broad range of deep dives into hardware, both new and old, including the CPUs,\u00a0GPUs, and everything else that uses a semiconductor. He has worked as a professional tech journalist since 2015 and has written for Gamespot, IGN, and Dexerto. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-25/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Sayem Ahmed Social Links Navigation Subscription Editor Sayem Ahmed is the Subscription Editor at Tom's Hardware. He covers a broad range of deep dives into hardware, both new and old, including the CPUs, GPUs, and everything else that uses a semiconductor. He has worked as a professional tech journalist since 2015 and has written for Gamespot, IGN, and Dexerto.
warezme Thanks for the realistic perspective. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/setting-up-openclaw-isnt-as-straightforward-as-the-internet-wants-you-to-think-running-local-ai-on-humble-hardware#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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