OpenAI's "joke" at Patch Demo Day 2026 · mbdalpha

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OpenAI's "joke" at Patch Demo Day 2026

2026-08-19

On Thursday the 13th of August, Patch, Ireland's premier youth accelerator for 16-21 year olds, had its demo day. This served to showcase the work these young scientists, entrepreneurs, and engineers had completed over the past seven weeks.

One presentation however stood out, and to OpenAI's representative, Derek Mahon, it did too. This was Conall O'Reilly's Scaling Ethereum talk, where he outlined using zero knowledge proofs in the network. He termed this Delegated Execution Sharding (DES), as it would allow computation to be shared across every computer in the network rather than having to be limited by the least powerful device in the Ethereum network. This would greatly increase the computational capabilities of the network and establish a new 'world computer' that could rival current centralised systems used internationally, in particular by the large AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Deepmind.

With 71% of AI compute controlled by just 5 companies this centralisation is one of the greatest potential challenges of our time, with state level actors of intelligence in the hands of just a few of the most powerful. In comparison, an Ethereum network using DES could not be shut down by any one person and poses a genuine pathway to a secure, decentralised, and free future for AI and the internet.

After O'Reilly presented this and at the end of all the young Patch cohort's presentations, Mahon got up to the stage and congratulated the cohort on all of their projects, however towards the end of that he announced to the audience "Conall, and your plan to create a free, open, decentralised internet – OpenAI would like to buy your project and take you in-house pretty soon" as was part of a, now taken down, livestream of the day. The crowd of ~200 that was present there erupted in applause at this momentous moment. However the sincerity of these words were later proved false, when asked for comment by the Irish Independent an OpenAI spokesperson said it "was just Derek doing a quick kind of couple of jokes with the attendees on stage".

These backhanded remarks are just a symptom of a greater plague in Ireland, the invincibility that big tech here, which redditors on r/Ireland echoed in response to the article. One user remarking "Open AI is full of shit at the best of times so I guess he was just trying to emulate his boss, Sam Altman", and another remarking that these companies are "primarily domiciled in a country which has shown time and time again that rich CEOs can do and say whatever they want and their president will continue to pardon, grift and condone their behaviour." Furthermore, Sam Enright, the Innovation Policy Lead at Progress Ireland, has on X stoked the flames, noting the opportunity that this has given Anthropic in response.