Riley Walz joins OpenAI to design new AI interfaces
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- Riley Walz, a software engineer known for viral web stunts, is joining OpenAI to research new ways for humans to interact with AI, a spokesperson confirmed to WIRED.
- Walz will work inside OAI Labs, a team led by research leader Joanne Jang that is tasked with "inventing and prototyping new interfaces for how people collaborate with AI."
- Walz's most-cited past projects include Jmail, a search tool for Jeffrey Epstein's emails styled like a Gmail inbox, and Find My Parking Cops, which used public data to map where San Francisco parking enforcement officers last wrote tickets.
- The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency shut down the Find My Parking Cops data feed within four hours, saying it did so to ensure employees could "do their jobs safely and without disruption."
- ChatGPT now reaches more than 800 million people every week, but OpenAI is racing Google and Anthropic to develop fresh interfaces as millions of developers shift to coding agents like Claude Code as their primary way to access AI models.
- After the UnitedHealthcare CEO was shot in New York City, Walz tried to help police trace the killer's CitiBike ride using trip data he had scraped for an earlier project; he told The New York Times he was called a "bootlicker" and received safety threats.
Why it matters: OpenAI is staffing its secretive OAI Labs team to compete with Google and Anthropic on the next interface beyond the chat box, and importing a viral-projects builder like Walz signals it wants unconventional approaches. With ChatGPT already at 800 million weekly users, the competitive frontier is shifting from raw model access to how people actually interact with AI, and Walz's track record of public-facing web experiments fits that brief.
