I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times.
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer, and this is Hard Fork. This week, phone-to-phone combat in the streets. We'll talk about the tech industry's response to ICE killings in Minneapolis. Then it's the reason Mac minis are sold out across San Francisco. We'll tell you about the sensation now known as Moltbot. And finally, it's time once again for Hat GPT.
So today we want to start by turning our attention to Minneapolis and the ongoing confrontation between ICE officers and protesters. Kevin and I have both been horrified by the fatal shooting of Alex Prey, the second fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen by federal agents this month. And while we don't often turn our attention directly to matters of politics and protests on the show, we both believe that the tech industry is playing a role in this story, and that we would be remiss if we did not look at the elements of what is going on in Minneapolis that are ours.
Yeah, I've been really horrified by what's been going on in Minneapolis. I have family in Minneapolis. They're scared. Some of them are leaving. It is a really tense and hard time in American civic life right now, and I think we should talk today about not just how the big tech companies and their leaders are acting right now, but what role technology itself is playing in some of the reaction to these shootings.
Yeah, and I think the tech industry is playing a significant role in what is happening right now. It is an infrastructure provider behind many of the key tools that are being used in this fight. I would say primarily a lot of the surveillance tech that ICE is relying on to identify and detain migrants, but also the social platforms where, once again, we're seeing violence being turned into content and influencers on both sides trying to make it go viral. And then you just have the dimension of the fact that there is actually now state power, the government, that is using these tools in ways that we have not seen before in America. So there's a lot to talk about here.
Yeah. So let's start with the CEOs. At the start of this week, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and Tim Cook of Apple each made statements or sent internal memos to their employees, kind of lamenting what was going on. These were slightly different in the way they were worded, but they all sort of came after employees at some of these companies have been urging their CEOs to speak up, to say something. Sam Altman had an internal Slack message to OpenAI employees that said that he had spent some time talking with Trump officials, and he described ICE as going too far. He also said that he thought that part of loving the country is the American duty to push back against overreach. Dario also discussed it in a post he made on X, where he called the events in Minnesota a horror. And Tim Cook sent an internal message to Apple employees saying that, quote, 'this is a time for de-escalation.' So we're not seeing the kind of full-throated denunciations that we might have seen, you know, with the first Trump presidency from some of these leaders, but they are saying, at least to their own employees, that they are not happy about what's going on.
Yeah, and I would say that in several of these cases, we are seeing these CEOs say about the least that they possibly could. Like you can tell, I would say particularly in the Altman and Cook statements, they are very afraid of irritating the White House. And at the same time, they're facing a lot of pressure from their employees to say something, and so I think this represents their best efforts to find a middle path. Personally, I found it a little weak.
Yeah. Like as a general rule, I don't like when CEOs or other business leaders talk insincerely out of obligation. I think we saw some of that several years ago from the left. I think we saw some of that during the sort of first months of the Trump administration, aimed at appeasing the right. Like I just don't like when CEOs talk in ways that are not their own views. In some of these cases, I'm sure these are sincerely held views, but it just seemed to me like, why are we doing this?
Well, I think the reason that we're doing this is because these guys are politicians, too. They are, in their own way, heads of state. They represent hundreds of millions of users and giant employee bases, and so they have to get in there and play politics. And I'm sure they hate it, but the fact is that in these cases, they have to. Yeah, and I think we should say, like, it is risky to do this in this current environment. Like there was a post from Chris Olah, who's one of the co-founders of Anthropic, who posted a very heartfelt and, I think, sincere message about how horrified he was by what was happening in Minneapolis. And Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, the sort of White House adviser, reposted it and basically said, 'Look, this is the AI companies. They're building this bias into their models. If they talk like this, this is how their AI models are going to talk.' So there is a cost politically to saying something right now. And so I don't want to be totally dismissive of the people who are doing that. I think they are displaying some backbone. But as you said, it's like in some of these cases, they're saying about as little as they could.
Mhm. So Casey, one of the last times we talked about political violence on the show was after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, when we talked about some of the online commentary and how weaponized it was feeling out there. How these sort of platforms were becoming places full of rage bait and incendiary, provocative content, and how that was sort of like bad for us as a society. I'm curious, like, does this feel like another case of that to you, or what are you seeing out there?
I think there are definitely ways where it's similar, Kevin. People are drawn to conflict, and so are social networks, right? This is why Charlie Kirk was so successful in his way, is that he would create these conflicts by visiting college campuses, staging debates, and those conflicts would then, you know, go viral in ways that served him. We're seeing a similar thing here where the Trump administration uses spectacle as one of its main weapons. And if it can create a crisis that begets a bunch of video, that can serve their interest, too. I think the real difference here is that Charlie Kirk did not have the power of the state behind him, and Trump does, right? Like Trump has an army behind him. He has thousands of ICE agents and other federal agents. And so we have just seen, after he returned to power, the way that various Trump administration officials would bring along influencers and their entourages when they would go about their business. So like last year, Kristi Noem brought a bunch of right-wing influencers with her when she visited an ICE operation happening in Portland. And another important thing here, Kevin, is the way that the Minneapolis operation began after a video alleging fraud in daycare centers went viral on X. So in this very real way, a social platform is setting the president's policy agenda. So that's just very different from the Kirk stuff. The stakes are a lot higher here, right?
I think in a lot of public spaces, like what's happening in Minneapolis is not a 50/50 issue. Like I think it's a pretty widely held belief that federal agents should not be shooting protesters in the streets. But on X, it's like you see people defending it. You see people spreading these like conspiracy theories. You see people circulating this manipulated footage and these like deepfaked images that purport to show, like, you know, more of a violent standoff than there was. And it just seems like a platform that has either decided to put its thumb on the scale in favor of the administration and its responses, or where just a lot of this is going on unchecked.
Yeah, I mean, you know, you predicted after Trump won that X was going to become state media, and I think that it basically has. This is where the Trump administration goes to get their policy ideas and to advance, you know, whatever operation they're working on at the moment. And so you have just seen all across X administration officials making their case that this ICE campaign is justified or necessary.
Yeah, and I think another difference between what's going on now and the Charlie Kirk assassination is that the government itself is getting involved in actually producing some of this content. There was a great story by two reporters at The Washington Post last year about ICE's media strategy, which was based on a bunch of internal agency documents and messages they got. And what I found remarkable about this is that ICE, like some other federal agencies, now essentially has like a team of content creators who work at the agency and who are spending every day trying to sort of like steer the narrative using, you know, the sort of same techniques that a brand or a celebrity would. They're out there, you know, using paid social media tools. They have like a team of producers and editors and video makers who are out there making clips. It seems like these agencies are not just thinking that their jobs are enforcing the law. It seems like they are also trying to control the narrative around how they enforce the law.
And I would say almost to the point where like winning on social media has become almost the entire point, right? Like yes, there are policy objectives here, but in a very real way, they seem secondary to getting the most retweets.
Yes. Yeah. So that feels new, right? So in addition to the government actively working to kind of seize and control the narrative online about these events, we also have the rise of AI tools that are making it very hard for people to know what's real and what's not.
So my colleagues at The New York Times had some reports on the way that AI was being used to alter images of Alex Prey, the victim of this shooting. One was doctored to make him look like he was pointing a gun at an agent, although it was actually a phone. Another was used to enhance a blurry freeze frame from a video of this shooting.
And we should put 'enhance' in air quotes because it didn't actually enhance it. It just made a bunch of stuff up.
Right, exactly. So it was sort of upscaled in this way that like introduced some errors into the image. So Casey, I can't imagine this was surprising to you. We've seen this kind of thing after most major news events in the past couple of years, but did anything stick out to you about the actual media that was being circulated?
Well, I mean, when it comes to like online detectives who want to participate in the story of the day, that is not new. That's been going on for well over a decade. But Kevin, the White House released this AI-altered image of a civil rights attorney named Nikima Levy Armstrong who went to an anti-ICE protest last week and was arrested. And in the aftermath of her arrest, the White House puts out this image to make her look like she's crying her eyes out when in fact she was not. And it's kind of a weird story because like DHS had already released the original unaltered image like before this altered one came out. But once the one of her crying, which again she wasn't doing, comes out, like JD Vance, the vice president, retweets the image. So the thing that this just has me thinking about is this phrase that got associated with Russia in the 2010s, which is 'nothing is true and everything is possible.' And it just referred to the way that Putin and his, you know, lieutenants would try to shape a world where you just sort of couldn't trust anything that you were seeing anymore. That the state invested huge resources into just blurring the line between truth and fiction. And if you wanted to know what was really happening, you were just going to have to invest enormous amounts of resources. And the way that this serves the administration is this concept we've talked about a few times on the show that I love, which is called the liar's dividend, which means that because people know that evidence can be fabricated, no matter what evidence you see now, you're always wondering, was this maybe fabricated? And that just erodes trust in our society more broadly. So I think it's hugely irresponsible for the vice president to be sharing these sorts of images. But when the administration has been asked, what are you doing here? Like why are you sharing these obviously doctored images? A spokesman for the White House just said, 'the memes will continue,' which I honestly found chilling.
Yeah. What do you think the platforms should be doing about this? Should they be taking down doctored images? Should they be applying some sort of label? Like what is the correct response here?
Well, so I go back to the way that platforms handled this during the first Trump administration, where they were much likelier to act. You know, during the 2020 election, when President Trump was sharing misinformation about mail-in voting ballots, Twitter put a label on his post that directed people to high-quality information about how mail-in voting actually worked. Now, of course, Twitter doesn't exist. Elon Musk owns X. And if anybody is going to correct anything, it's going to be in this Community Notes feature, which is just sort of this volunteer crowdsourcing effort. And I'm glad that it exists. In the, you know, like I'd rather have it than not have it. But of course, it's unpredictable, doesn't always appear in a sort of timely fashion. It's my view that platforms have a strong interest in labeling obviously AI-generated content. I think that if you want people to trust your platform, you should take steps to help them understand what they're seeing is real and false. But of course, in many cases, they're going to be terrified to do that because there might be a mean tweet about them.
Right, exactly. And I think for me, what I've been thinking about is less the platform response and more like I've been thinking a lot about the AI companies. Obviously, you know, I have AI on the brain sort of permanently. But I think this is actually why these companies should support regulation for the technology that they're building, because right now they're in kind of this fragile state where they can't really speak up against the administration in very forceful terms without risking some kind of retaliation, some new law, just a bunch of mean tweets. Like there are actual political risks to taking a stand on something. Even something if they were to come out now and say, 'Oh, we're going to like apply a label to AI-generated images that are misleading, or we're going to have some kind of watermarking system,' I think some people in the Trump administration would interpret that as like a response to what they were doing, and they would get mad about it.
Yeah, they'd call it censorship.
Exactly. So I think this is actually the case for like regulation that is passed by Congress, that is signed into law, and that persists across administrations, so that you don't have to kind of operate in this like weird limbo where you're trying to do the right thing but you're scared that the administration will punish you for that, and anything that you do is going to be seen correctly or not as a reactive countermeasure instead of just having one set of rules that apply across all administrations.
I think one set of rules is a great idea. I think we should pursue this. I also think that if you find yourself in a situation where there's a presidential administration that decides it wants to lie about what is happening and is willing to fabricate evidence to support those lies, platform policy is only going to help you so much. I want it to exist. I want to be able to trust in it. I just want to also point out there are limits to it.
I want to talk about this other dynamic here, Kevin, which in my head I've been calling the battle of phone versus phone, right? Smartphones are playing a central role in this conflict. And while of course phones have long been part of protests, I feel like we're seeing a direct confrontation between the state and the protesters involving the phone in a way that we haven't quite seen before.
Yeah, this stuck out to me too, as I was looking at some of the awful videos of the shooting of Alex Prey. Everyone's holding phones, right? This is now like a standard part of any confrontation with law enforcement in this country, is if there's anyone around to witness it, there's going to be phones pointed at it. Someone is going to be filming that.
Absolutely. Alex Prey was holding a phone when he was shot. Renee Good's partner was filming when Renee was shot. And videos of their killings have spread on social networks and I think have significantly shifted public opinion against the Trump administration. You know, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota said, 'Carry your phone with you at all times in order to help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans.' Okay, so this is a dynamic I think we have seen before. You can go all the way back to the Arab Spring and look at the way that people were posting on Twitter, you know, images of, you know, state violence. Here's, I think, the twist. The Trump administration has been doing two things. One, they've been putting pressure on American citizens not to film, right? The DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a press briefing in July, 'violence is anything that threatens them and their safety. So it is doxing them. It's videotaping them where they're at when they're out on operations.' Also, Tricia McLaughlin, who's the DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said in a statement, quote, 'Videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online is doxing our agents. We will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.' So there's this recognition in the Trump administration that being filmed and having your video put on social media is dangerous to you. And we've started to see a lot of threats against people who are doing this. And we should just say, like, it is not illegal to film law enforcement. It is not doxing to post the name or the image of a federal agent who is operating on behalf of the state. Like these people wear badges, or at least they're supposed to, because we want this sort of public accountability. And if they are acting in ways that are illegal or unethical, we want to be able to hold those individuals accountable. But I agree that there's this sort of feeling among certain members of the administration that these phones present a danger.
Absolutely. And when you consider the fact that all of these ICE agents are just permanently masked when they're out in the world, it makes you wonder, Kevin, what are they more scared of? Is it the guns that some of these protesters may be legally carrying, as Alex Prey was? Or is it the phones that are in their hands? Is it the threat that someone will find out who they are and what they're doing and link it back to their actual identity?
There's this final thing that we're seeing in this phone versus phone battle though, Kevin, and this is where I also think that we're in just kind of some new territory, which is the Trump administration is bringing their own phones to the battle, right? They're bringing along those conservative influencers. They're giving them, you know, talking points and ideas for what sorts of videos they might post. There's a long tradition of the government using celebrities and influencers to promote their worldview or, you know, various things that they're doing. But the thing in Minneapolis that just seems really different to me is it is almost like phone-to-phone combat between Americans, right? Where you have the protesters who are trying to document what is happening and you have the administration which is trying to shoot photos and videos to suggest that these are sort of like very effective anti-immigration raids.
Yeah, and I think for me the question is what happens when the videos, the artifacts that these phones are producing themselves become untrustworthy. You know, when, as you mentioned, people were filming the Arab Spring to try to bring accountability to their leaders, when people started taping their encounters with law enforcement 10 or 15 years ago, it was seen as sort of verifiable proof that what you saw filmed from these cameras was what actually happened. And I don't think we can make that assumption anymore. I think we are no longer in the sort of era of video being proof that something happened, or pictures, or any other form of media. I think we have entered this kind of postmodern state where like things need to be interpreted in context and there is no one canonical source of truth.
That is true. And yet at the same time, like I have a more optimistic view of where we are at least in this moment, because this particular shooting, the Prey shooting, was shot from many different angles. Journalists put a lot of work in to verify the videos that were posted. And interestingly, as they spread on social media, there was not a big movement to say these videos are fake. There just wasn't.
And in fact, I think the video of Prey's killing shocked the conscience of many Americans, some of whom had previously been fully aligned with the Trump administration in these anti-immigration raids. Right? We saw the NRA criticize the administration's portrayal of Alex Prey's killing, which I think really shocked a lot of people. And so, in a very grim moment, this was the silver lining for me, was that actually Americans do still trust the video that they are seeing, including the video that's being shared on social media, and they are not immediately leaping to, 'I am being lied to. This is just sort of manufactured evidence from partisans.' Now, of course, the question is how long will that state of affairs hold as AI tools improve? Does that bargain sort of break? But I don't know, there's something that is happening here where it's like if enough people see it, if the video is captured from enough different angles, and if the administration isn't willing to just lie at an ever greater scale and manufacture ever more evidence to support their version, maybe the truth survives here.
Yeah. Well, that's a hopeful note to end this discussion on, and I'm glad we talked about this.
Casey, did you watch the Alex Honnold free solo of the Taipei 101 on Netflix?
I was able to watch about 60 seconds of it, and my palm started sweating so much I thought I was an eight-mile.
Yes, it was very nerve-wracking. But speaking of extreme risk-takers, daredevils, people who take their lives into their own hands, I hear you have actually been experimenting with some new technology this week.
I have, Kevin. I have installed Moltbot, formerly known as Clawbot, onto my laptop, and I've said, 'Damn the consequences.'
Yes. And this is kind of the AI version of a free solo up the Taipei 101. My understanding is this is like insane behavior. So please tell me about Clawbot, which we should say is not affiliated with the Anthropic Claude chatbot. It is spelled, or was spelled, C-L-A-W-D.
So claw, like a lobster is clawed.
Yes. And has since changed its name to Moltbot, I guess, because of some copyright concerns.
Well, when lobsters shed their shells, they're molting. And so now the former Clawbot is Moltbot. And this thing was the talk of the town. Over the past weekend, I saw many, many people who work in tech in San Francisco becoming obsessed with this tool, talking about how it was, you know, running their entire lives. And I am glad that you experimented with it so that I didn't have to, and now you can tell me about it. But let's just do our disclosures real quick because we are going to talk about Anthropic and other companies in this.
Well, my boyfriend works at Anthropic, and I work for The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity over alleged copyright violations.
Yeah. Well, so I first saw Clawbot on a post on MacStories by the great Federico Viticci. And Federico, like me, is always ready at the drop of a hat to make some new piece of software his entire personality. And Clawbot looked like one of those things. It is a free, open-source personal AI agent that you can run on your computer, plug it into various systems, services, and AI tools, and if all goes according to plan, you will have something resembling a little genie inside your computer who can work for you.
So, Casey, who created this bot?
So, Clawbot, now Moltbot, was created by a developer named Peter Steinberger. He has worked on many, many kind of cool, hacky, tinkery projects. You can go to his GitHub and see like dozens of projects that he has worked on that are all in this kind of do-it-yourself vein. He started Clawbot to scratch his own itch. Basically, he just observed that there was no great personal assistant agent yet on the market, and he wondered if he could figure out a way to use Claude Code through WhatsApp. And that's how the whole project began.
Okay. So, you saw this and thought, 'I should try this.' So, how easy or hard was it to set up?
Well, I would say the setup is pretty easy. If you've installed Claude Code, it will feel quite familiar. You go to the Moltbot website, you grab a little one-line piece of code, you put it in your terminal, and it will begin the setup process. And I saw a lot of people over the weekend talking about how they were buying Mac minis to install this thing, sort of like give it its own computer.
What is the deal with that? Why are people doing this on separate computers rather than their main computer?
Yeah. Well, like when you free solo a giant skyscraper, Kevin, there is some risk involved with installing an AI agent onto your main machine. A few of the risks I would name: there is the risk that somebody can just kind of hack into your computer. Clawbot can connect to a messaging app like Telegram. If somebody hacks into your Telegram account, theoretically, they could actually just take over your entire computer and do anything on your computer that you could.
Yeah. So, we should just say like, don't do this. Don't do what Casey says, not as he does. This is a very bad idea, and you like to, I don't know, live on the edge a little bit, or what were you thinking?
Yeah. Well, what I was thinking was, first of all, I have like disabled the Telegram integration. So, I have, you know, gotten rid of that particular attack surface, and I'm also being careful.
How are you buying your drugs?
Um, no comment. Um, so yeah. So anyway, that's one of the risks. You have the prompt injection attack risk, which is that, you know, you will visit a website that has some hidden instructions buried in it, and the agent will see it and will follow those instructions. That's very hard to protect against. And so basically, if you're going to use something like this, you would be better off putting it in what they call a sandbox, some sort of contained environment where it only has access to a narrow range of tools and nothing that has access to, for example, your bank account. So that's the right way to do it. I tried to do it in a way that is undeniably risky. But, you know, I've tried to take the precautions I can. I'm only connecting it to services that, you know, are not life or death for me. You know, as I'm sure we'll get into, the main thing that I've been doing with Clawbot is just trying to build a personal daily briefing for myself. I do not have it working for me as like a full-time AI employee who's, you know, out browsing the web and doing a bunch of, you know, errands on my behalf every day.
Right, which is the kind of thing that I saw people experimenting with, or at least, you know, posting about this weekend. And like we've been talking a lot about like agentic AI systems. How is this different? Is it just that it can like connect to stuff that Claude Code or Codex or all these other coding tools can't?
Yeah, so the first thing to say is that yes, this actually is a lot like Claude Code or maybe Codex from OpenAI. And you can get a lot of the same benefits out of one of those tools as you can with Clawbot. Clawbot though tries to offer a few things to distinguish it. So number one, it runs locally on your computer. That's important to a lot of people. There are actually ways to restrict the amount of data that it is sending back into the cloud. Two, it has a better memory system than Claude Code does currently. You know, in Claude Code, you're always trying to cram everything into a context window, and often you'll run out of context window, and it has to compact the conversation, and you often feel like you're just kind of starting from scratch, and Claude can't remember what you did yesterday. What Moltbot does is it just writes memories to a markdown file, and then it continuously revisits that. And in my experience, it has been a little bit better at understanding. For example, if you built a tool with it the previous day and you might want to make a tweak to it, it knows where to look to go find that project and edit it, which sounds very simple, but it's actually something that Claude Code is very bad at and has frustrated me constantly.
Like if North Korean state hackers are like infiltrating your machine and stealing your money, like it'll sort of leave them a nice little markdown file that they can return to the next time they want to steal from you.
That's right. It'll say, 'Here's exactly how to break into the vault.' Okay. Yeah.
Okay, good. You're really reassuring me here. So, give me a sense of like what Moltbot is doing for you. Give me like one example of something that it has done that other AI tools have not been able to do.
Well, yeah. So, you know, I did again danger zone, but I wired it up to my email and my calendar.
Oh my god. And I thought I didn't know I was in the presence of evil incarnate. You are truly doing the most out here. What happened to you?
I'm always on the hunt for something interesting to write about is the honest answer to that question, and I want to see if maybe this would be one of those things.
As one of my mentors used to say, it'll either be a good time or a good story.
There you go. There you go. And I would say this is like probably more in the realm of good story than good time. Yes. But yeah, so you know, I connected it to my email, my calendar, a few other services, and I thought it would be great if in the morning when I visited my Clawbot and I just write 'good morning,' I would get a nice briefing that would have things like, here's the weather, here are some important emails you should answer, here are the calendar events that you have going on today. And then I thought, okay, now I want to make it extremely specific to me, right? Because like this is maybe where AI can help me get beyond the very basic stuff like email, calendar. And so I said, 'I want you to tell me whenever there is a new pro-wrestling pay-per-view on TV. I want you to tell me when there's a new episode of RuPaul's Drag Race. Every Thursday, I want you to tell me what movies are coming out this week and who stars in them and give me a one-sentence synopsis.' And so I just start, you know, again, you're typing into the box. You're saying, 'Here's what I think the best daily briefing would look like for me.' And by hook and by crook, over a handful of days, I got something, Kevin, that works about 70% of the time.
This is why you can't buy RAM, because you need your RuPaul's Drag Race briefing.
Yeah, it's definitely me and not the like, you know, 800 data centers that are being built all over the world.
I have not seen this in action yet. Can you just show me or like tell me how you actually use this thing?
Yeah, I can show it to you. So, let's see. I'll open up my Clawbot here, and this is running in... you're going to see this in a browser window, but this is running locally. So let's see that.
No, I have it trained on your voice to not respond to anything you say.
But you know, I can just type 'good morning' in here, and it'll think for a second, and then it'll like pull up a briefing. But you know, you can see it's like a plain beige chat window. Nothing fancy. A lot of people are messaging Moltbot through third-party messaging apps. So there are ways to hook it up to WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram, various other messaging apps. That's very convenient. Means you can easily access it from your phone, but of course then there's a lot of risk involved.
What can it do? Show me one thing it can do.
Yeah. Oh. So, it's going to pull up the briefing that I've been putting together. So, you're going to see it's going to come up here. It's going to show you like, here's the weather. Here's some emails you might want to look at. Here are some overdue tasks that you have in your to-do app. You're also probably noticing that it's taking a really long time. Now, I want to say something about this thing that I did,
Which was I wanted to be able to get this sort of daily briefing that I've described just by typing the words "good morning" into Clawbot. And now I've already done this a few times this morning as I was testing and preparing for this segment. So that might be why this broke. But I just want to point out that in this moment, the thing that I built did not work. So, you know, one reason why I was excited to talk about Claude Code on a recent episode was I felt like this had gotten to a point where if you told Claude Code to do something, it basically would just work. And I am telling you, I do not personally believe in my own experience that Claudebot is yet at that level. I now run into this every day that I use it where I will tell it to do something and something will break along the way and it won't quite work. So what is going on under the hood? Here's the great part of vibe coding. I have no idea and I never will.
Yes. This thing is wild and I think we should just make again a little like caveat that you should not install this on your machine unless you know what you are doing and are willing to take some risks. Put it on your ex-boyfriend's machine.
So, I mean, look, here's the thing. I entered into this thinking this might be something really fantastic that could be a new way that I use my computer. And over the first few days of using it, my expectations have been managed, I would say, very far downward. The security risks, as you mentioned, are like not at all resolved. This is not a safe tool to use for a lot of things. But honestly, in some ways, just as important to me, it just does not enable that much new stuff, right? You can spend a lot of time hacking around, wiring up various services, having that feeling that you're being productive, and then when you look back on it a day later, you're like, "Okay, well, I have a very like complicated new widget that's telling me the weather." So why are people so worked up about this? Like the way that people were talking about Claudebot, Moltbot over the weekend, it was like the rapture had happened and Jesus had come back. So why are people so excited about this?
So here's my best guess. I think that Claudebot is a very compelling vision of the future, right? We have lived in a world where to do anything basically since the dawn of personal computing, you've needed a dedicated piece of software that had a discrete set of capabilities. And Claudebot and AI come along and they start to chip away at that vision of the world and they say, what if instead of having a bunch of apps on your computer, Kevin, there was just a genie who lived inside your computer and every time you had a wish, you could go to the genie and say, "Genie, I wish for you to make me a website?" And then abracadabra, to quote Lady Gaga, it exists. That is something that is really interesting. And while it is only barely beginning to become possible, I can imagine what a good version of Siri would look like in the year 2036.
Yeah. I mean, that was... Yes, it may arrive a little sooner than that. We'll see.
But that was my first thought was like, this is actually the thing that Apple said they were building into Siri. It seems like this one random developer has actually gone out and built. And maybe it doesn't work all the time. Maybe it's got all these risks, but it does feel like people are figuring out how to kind of stitch these tools together. I'll tell you about one example of an interaction with Maltbot that got me thinking somewhat excitedly and also nervously about the future. This is a user named Alex Finn who posted this screenshot of his moldbot and he says, "Can you make a reservation for me at this restaurant?" And then the bot says, "I can't book directly through OpenTable right now, but if you want me to just call them, I can call and book under your name." And the bot actually did sort of use a synthetic voice from ElevenLabs to like call the restaurant and place this reservation. So that to me was like, I have not verified that this example works. I have not tried this on my own machine. I will not be installing this bot because I value my security and my data. But this is the kind of thing where like if it does work in a sustained way, this would actually I think be a very useful tool for a lot of people.
Yeah. And this is honestly just what it is often like to cover technology is that you are writing about stuff that is directionally correct way too early and barely works. And I think a lot of people's relationship to stuff like that is they don't want to know about it because it's irrelevant to them. But I think for you and me, it's really important to pay attention to that frontier because it's been our observation particularly in the AI era. Stuff that barely works in January might be pretty freaking good by November. So that's why I have my eyes on this one is I think you're seeing it starting to capture people's imaginations and say, "Well, what if there was a safe version of this? What if this was just natively part of the operating system? What if I could trust it, you know, with all of my personal information? Maybe I would never have to visit OpenTable ever again, right? And what a world that would be."
Yeah. Casey, I want to talk a little bit about this tweet that I got a lot of heat for over the weekend. A heat tweet.
A heat tweet. So I was sort of watching all this happen, and everyone, you know, experimenting, tinkering with Cloudbot, Maltbot. And, you know, I started feeling like the gap that we are seeing between the people who are early adopters on this stuff is really diverging from the people who are more cautious, who are more skeptical, who really are only sort of using chatbots in the way people were using them in 2023. And I would say people got like very mad at me for making this. They thought I was sort of endorsing this like this early adoption mindset where you like turn over all of your decision-making to an AI chatbot and you let sort of these like clawed swarms like run your life. And I guess I'm curious whether you think I was right there or wrong. Like do you think there is something notable going on here?
Well, let's go to the text. Listen, if you ever want to know what's a gift you can give any man, ask him to read one of his tweets out loud. So, Kevin, why don't you read us this tweet?
Okay. I wrote, "I follow AI adoption pretty closely, and I've never seen such a yawning inside/outside gap. People in San Francisco are putting multi-agent Claude swarms in charge of their lives, consulting chatbots before every decision, wireheading to a degree only sci-fi writers dared to imagine. People elsewhere are still trying to get approval to use Copilot in Teams if they're using AI at all." And the backstory here is that I had just been meeting with some groups about their AI policy. You know, these are schools, nonprofits, people who sort of want to know like how should we be using this stuff? And I have been struck recently that so much of what people are struggling with are the same things they were struggling with a couple years ago, right? It's like what is my enterprise IT policy about letting people use AI? Should people be allowed to use AI to take notes in meetings or write performance reviews? It is like kind of these institutional rules for the sort of last generation of AI products. And what really has been striking to me is like how little people seem to believe that the future and the past are going to look very different from each other, that we are like heading into something new and strange and something that requires us to shift the way we think about these things.
So I think that what you're hitting on is a dynamic that has long been predicted among those who say that the diffusion of AI technologies will be slower than the accelerationists think because it will just run into a lot of institutional roadblocks and bottlenecks along the way. Like here in the real world, we do have IT policies. We do have companies that aren't going to let you install whatever AI tool you want in your laptop. And we have a startup ecosystem full of wireheads that doesn't have any IT policies. And the minute that some crazy new insecure open-source project comes out, they put it on their laptop to see what they can do. And so that dynamic, I think, is going to persist. And I think the question is, is there any real alpha to be gained by these wireheads who have access to Claudebot and who can try any new AI tools and can lean all the way in? Or do they wind up just kind of spinning their wheels a lot and running into a bunch of security problems and get their GitHub account compromised and have phony crypto coins associated with their names? There's going to be some variation. People are going to have different outcomes, but I think that's what we want to watch.
Yeah. And I'm worried about this sort of new axis of polarization that I think is starting to happen right now. It's like, do you think this technology is real and important or do you think it is fake and overhyped? And I think we are starting to see the results of that polarization where the minute something new comes out, you have, you know, thousands of people rushing to try it on GitHub and install it on their machines, and you have other people saying like, "Stop this train, you're all huge nerds and losers, and we should, you know, focus on the problems that people really have." And look, right now I think this is debatable whether these tools are actually supercharging people outside of maybe coding, which I think is its own special domain. Maybe this is all productivity theater and people are going to, you know, regret installing these things and they're going to go back to like using, you know, Google Calendar and Notes app and whatever else they're using like the rest of us. But I worry that in the world where this stuff does actually continue to improve, where it's not just productivity theater, where the people who are using things like whatever the, you know, the 17th version of cloud bodies that actually works, like those people may be way more productive than the people who are still doing things by hand. In the same way that I think if you are a coder today who writes your code by hand and doesn't use any of these AI-assisted coding tools, I think you're actually just much less competitive and much less well suited to succeed than the people who are using the tools that they're using.
I mean, maybe I think that if these tools wind up being as productive as you are suggesting, they will sell themselves to the mainstream, right? Like you don't have to convince anyone to get an email account or like buy a smartphone. They know that's going to be helpful in their lives. I think the concern that you're seeing among people who are more skeptical, and part of it is just, yes, like sort of like reflexive skepticism and maybe a resistance to change, but part of it is just it's actually not clear to me that this is going to help me in my life. And maybe this is actually just a tool that is being built by people who do not have my best interest at heart, who are mostly just trying to take my job away for their own, you know, purposes. So to the extent that these tools can help empower people, help them make money, help them get and keep their jobs, help them find work that they like to do, I think you're going to see very enthusiastic adoption. But if it just remains, uh, this is kind of something that's getting better and better at doing the thing that I'm currently being paid to do, you better believe we're going to continue to see a lot of resistance.
Yeah. I don't like, I'm not saying that people should be excited or enthusiastic or to adopt every new tool the minute it's out. I think there are very good reasons to be worried about and skeptical of some of the, you know, the hype that's out there. At the same time, I do want people to understand what the tools are capable of doing. And right now we have a situation where, as you said, like if you are at a big company, if you are at a sort of more traditional organization, you are probably not able to use this stuff, at least not at work on your work devices. If people are experimenting with this stuff and decide this is not for me, like that feels like a totally fine outcome to me. But I think if people aren't even aware that these tools are out there, that people who are using them are getting some, you know, benefits from it, I just worry that they're going to get left behind. And I was thinking about this in part because of something else that happened this weekend, which is that Andrej Karpathy, the sort of legendary AI researcher, kind of came down off Mount Olympus to give his sort of, you know, one of his regular pronouncements about the state of these AI coding tools. And he said that programs like Claude Code and Codex are easily the biggest change to my basic work coding workflow in two decades of programming, and it happened over the course of a few weeks. This is one of the most accomplished programmers in the world, someone who has built and maintained like huge complex systems, saying that he is sort of trying to adjust to this new era, that his job, his old job, the job that he spent his whole career doing has essentially been taken over. And like if that is true for him, it is also true for other programmers. And if that is also true for programmers, it is probably true for people in other areas and or will be soon.
Yeah. Well, the good news is everyone on the Hard Fork show is now fully aware of all of this. So, if you listen to the show, you're caught up. And if you don't, once again, you're out of luck.
Yep. Listen to the podcast. That's the moral of the story.
Casey, it's time for Hat GPT.
Hat GPT, Kevin, of course, the game we play where we put a bunch of the week's top stories into a hat, draw them at random, and discuss them until the other person gets bored and says stop generating.
Should we use our Hard Fork hat?
Please produce the Hard Fork hat. This is an official piece of Hard Fork merchandise.
