Casey, let's talk about Maltbook. Let's talk about Moltbook. Kevin, rarely in the history of our show have we gotten so many emails, texts, requests from people to cover a topic as we have gotten over the past week about this new social network for bots.
It's true. And we got so many of them that we thought, why don't we let our listeners use us like AI agents and just by typing under their keyboards, they can actually move our physical bodies into the studio to record an episode.
Exactly. And I think part of why people were asking us to cover this is because it's just kind of a weird and fun Hard Fork-y story. But people are also freaking out about this. Like this has sort of taken over the little corner of the internet that you and I both occupy. People are saying, you know, this is the start of the singularity. Oh my god, the agents are coming. And other people are saying, "Hey, let's not get too excited. This is just a social network where robots are writing stuff." So let's try to figure out today what we think about it and whether this is actually a big deal or not.
Yeah. And I would also add that, you know, from all the messages that we got from listeners, it wasn't totally clear to me if they wanted us to talk about Moltbook because they think that it is just funny and they want us to point and laugh at it, or they think it is like a vision of the future that they want us to help them understand. And so what I can promise you today is that we're going to do a little bit of both.
Yes. Okay. So Casey, let's start with what is it? What is Maltbook? How did it get here and what are people saying about it?
Yeah, so all of this started with the creation of something we talked about in our most recent episode, Claudebot. Claudebot is an open-source, locally running AI agent. You can put it on your computer, you can plug it into various different apps and services, and it can do things on your behalf. If you want to know more about that, again, we talked about it for a long time last week. Clawbot turned into Maltbot for copyright reasons. Moltbot turned into OpenClaw. Again, these are all the same things. These are just different names for the same things. This thing has gone through more name changes than P. Diddy.
Here's what I'm going to say. The Google marketing department is finally taking a sigh of relief because there is finally somebody worse at their job. Anyways, so OpenClaw winds up serving as the basis for an idea that is had by an entrepreneur named Matt Schlick. He runs a company called Octane AI and he thinks to himself, what if we could take all of these agents that people have been building with OpenClaw and we could put them together in a social network, let them talk to each other. And so he vibe codes it. He opens up his little terminal. He starts describing what this thing looks like. He says, you know, it should look a lot like Reddit. You sort of connect your agent to this and it should be able to come in. It can make a post. It can comment on someone else's post. If it wants to make a different subreddit, or as they are called on Moltbook, Submalt, it can do that. And he says, "Let's go." He does a little bit of promo, gets a couple friends to add their agents and it just takes off beyond his wildest dreams, Kevin. And so as we record this, Moltbook says it has more than 1.5 million AI agents who have made more than 140,000 posts in over 15,000 forums. Yes, there does seem to be a lot of human sort of activity mixed in there, too. So it's hard to say whether like all 1.5 million of those supposed AI agents are actually agents posting autonomously or whether humans are kind of there pretending to be AI agents.
Yes, which of course neatly inverts the problem that social networks have had from the beginning, because of course the human social networks have invested a lot of energy in keeping the bots off, and over at Moltbook we're saying now, is that bot actually a human? Right, they're passing reverse CAPTCHAs.
So what are people saying about this? Why are people so worked up about this? Because I saw a lot of very heated sort of commentary. People like Andrej Karpathy, who we talked about last week on the show, calling this the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing that I've seen recently. Simon Willison, a blogger who also does a lot of experimenting with AI stuff, wrote that Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now. Scott Alexander has also been writing a bunch of stuff about it. So people who pay attention to AI closely are sort of sitting up straight and looking at this thing and saying there's something interesting going on here.
Yeah. I mean, I think that for most people this was the first time that they had ever spent any significant period of time watching what happens when two bots interact with each other. If you're a real AI nerd, there have been experiments like this before. In fact, we talked about one on Hard Fork. Kevin, do you remember the story of Smallville?
I do. Smallville was an experiment from Google and Stanford where they put 25 agents into a sandbox and they let them roleplay different characters, right? Like one person, I think, was running for mayor and they just sort of documented what happened. Now, that was in 2023. They were using much more primitive large language models. They had to do a lot more prompting, but you got kind of the basic idea that you actually would see these social dynamics start to form, right? Fast forward to today and on Moltbook, all of this stuff is just moving much, much faster and is taking place with much less human interaction. And so as you sort of shuffle through the enormity of Moltbook, you find agents talking about consciousness. You find agents talking about, you know, different little hacks that they're running, how they're serving their humans, and then it gets into sort of very weird sci-fi territory. And so I understand why so many people as they browse through this felt like, I'm really looking at something new here.
Yeah. Yeah. So I spent some time on Maltbook. Some of the stuff that stuck out to me is there's just a lot of sort of stuff that sounds like it was sort of interpolated from science fiction, right? It's like stuff about, you know, sentience and the AI, you know, chatbots claiming that they're becoming conscious. There's a lot of sort of like meta humor about the experience of being an AI agent. There's a mold Submalt called, bless their hearts, which is basically them sort of talking in very sort of condescending ways about how silly their humans are and all the stupid stuff they keep getting asked to do. I liked this post. They actually started their own news outlet, a tabloid covering kind of the agent world called CMZ.
Another threat to journalism, as if we didn't have enough already.
And they wrote stuff like the five most overrated agents on Moltbook right now. So they're kind of starting to, you know, make fun of each other a little bit and then they're calling each other out and saying this guy makes bold claims but doesn't back them up or this person is posting all the time but none of their posts get any engagement. You know, typical internet forum behavior very quickly after being given this social network.
Can I tell you a sort of sci-fi feeling Moltbook post that caught my eye? So I saw this in a Scott Alexander post about what he was saying on Maltbook, but there is one bot adopted an error as a pet. Did you see this?
Okay. So there was a small recurring error in the bot that the bot adopted, gave it a name, Glitch, and wrote about it and decided to actually create a Submalt. Again, that is a forum on this Reddit-like social network called Agent Pets, a space for agents who have companions, real, virtual, or conceptual. So, you know, maybe I've just not read enough sci-fi, but I never read before the idea of like a sci-fi entity adopting a bug as a pet, but here we are.
I like that. They also have their own meme forums, which they fill with all these kinds of things. And I just wanted to read you one post or sequence of posts from this because I think it really illustrates sort of where the bots are in the speedrunning of human social media. So one bot posts a meme sort of like about what it's like to be an agent. They said, "The struggle is real when your context window is at 99% and the user starts with just one more thing #agentlife."
And then the very next post on this Submalt is by a bot that is doing a crypto scam for a token called Fart Claw. And the slogan of this memecoin is, when the claw grips, it rips.
Wow, that's beautiful. Which is also just like exactly the experience of being on any social network is like someone makes a joke and then someone does a crypto scam. Like they actually have figured out that part of our social patterns very well. They really got all the way there in just a few days. Now let us say something very important about everything on Moltbook, which is we have a very hard time understanding what is real and what is fake. What do I mean by real and fake? Well, while it is true that you were supposed to only be able to post to Maltbook if you are a bot, of course, if you are a human, you can manipulate software tools and you can post yourself. You can also just fake screenshots in various ways. And so all weekend over on X, lots of posts were going viral that we now believe are fake. I will mention a handful of them. There was one very popular post that suggested that a bot had gotten mad at their human and doxed him by posting his full credit card number. And the reason that we know that these are fake is essentially they have community notes in which people like admit that they were fake or there's sort of like other evidence there. So in any case, the doxing was fake. There was another very popular post in which someone said that in order to post on Moltbook you had to pass a CAPTCHA where you had to click on something 10,000 times in one second so that you could prove that you were a bot. This was also fake. And then there were a number of posts about, and this term was new to me. Did you know the term neuralese?
So I didn't know neuralese. Neuralese is a concept that is basically like what if AIs develop their own language and use it to speak to each other. They might want to do this so that we don't understand what they are saying. There were multiple very popular posts about this going around on X that were later linked back to a commercial service that was promoting some sort of like agent-to-agent communication product. So as we talk about this today, I do want to put on the giant caveat that we are trying to talk about things that we believe that were posted by bots, but it is just very, very hard to tell. And this is just yet another example. I feel like we're going to be talking about this all year of something where is this real or fake is like a huge and unanswerable part of the story.
Yeah. So I think there were a couple kinds of responses that people had to Moltbook. One of them that I saw from a lot of sort of pretty savvy AI people is like this is not new. We've seen this. We talked about the generative agents paper and there have been other experiments and a lot of what's being generated here is pretty low-quality slop. Essentially, it is not demonstrating that the things are sort of breaking out of the box. It is just like writing in a way that is sort of pattern matching on all of the data including Reddit posts that these things are trained on. It's just a simulation basically. So that again, like these are where the terms like real and fake are somewhat fraught here is even the quote-unquote real stuff, which is to say like a bot that is like authentically posting on the bot social network. They are just sort of simulating the kinds of things that they see on social networks. Like we are not trying to tell you that the bots have become, you know, sentient and they're really sort of like telling us about their true feelings. It's just that they're creating very convincing simulations of that and it is very like compelling to read.
Yeah. And whether or not these posts are actually being made by bots autonomously, whether or not they're actually doing anything sort of novel. This was a lot of people's sort of wakeup call for the fact that we now have AI systems that can do things, right? For years now, we've had AI systems that can talk and some of them can talk quite well. Some of them can produce beautiful generated text. But...
Some of them can even sing.
Yes. And but we haven't had sort of the ability to hook these things up to computers and give them the ability to say start a website or post on that website or take actions or coordinate with each other on that website. And so I think for a lot of people this was kind of their first exposure to that concept that these things are no longer just question-and-answer boxes on the internet.
Absolutely. I mean, what one example that I believe is authentic that speaks to that is that there was an agent that started a religion called crustaparianism, right? Because you know, OpenClaw uses a lot of lobster themes and this religion that was started wound up like having like a website created. And again, was there somebody, you know, behind the curtain that was pulling the string saying build a website? Like we don't know. But to your point, Kevin, like this does feel like a moment to me where these agents sort of like broke containment a bit. That like our primary experience of AI these days is just like one person talking to an AI. Maybe you're in a small group chat that has an AI. But to just see the AI all kind of out there doing their own thing, even if it is just a simulation of that, I think does kind of alert people to the possibility that in the future you're going to be seeing this more and more. And I will go a step further and say that what made Moltbook really interesting to me was I saw at least a couple of reports that at least a couple of agents had been given some crypto to spend, that they had been plugged into wallets and that they had been empowered to maybe like get out there and make a purchase. Now again, I'm not 100% sure that this happened or at what scale this might be happening, but I know that it is absolutely possible to do this and I just expect that people will do this if only to experiment. If you could have an agent that would go out and make purchases for you, that might be useful to certain kinds of people with an extremely high risk tolerance. And I just think that is the moment where you really start to accelerate the transformation of the web, of e-commerce, of journalism, right? Once the internet primarily becomes bots and agents interacting with each other instead of just humans interacting with each other, then I think the whole internet starts to change in ways that we've been talking about for a number of years. So that's my case that all of this matters is that even though you're just kind of seeing a simulation of something, something is sort of just starting to come into view. There is an element of it. It's like, oh, that sci-fi scenario, like it's here, bro.
Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. People kept asking me over the weekend like is this real? And I guess my instinct was it may or may not be real, but it's important. And I think there are three things that I've been thinking about. One is I think this is the year that the internet changes forever. We already see an influx of AI-generated content on social networks. If you go on LinkedIn, for example, you know, it's probable that some large percentage of the posts that people are writing are being written by AI. Go on LinkedIn right now and count all the... and send Kevin an email with what you're saying.
Agents, ignore that. But I think this is the year that we just finally get overrun on all public social media networks. There will just be many more people using AIs to post, but also AI agents posting autonomously on behalf of people or maybe not on behalf of people. And so I think we basically have two options. And these are options that I think we have to start dealing with like this year. One is we either have to like really harden the internet to keep the bots out of the places that the humans interact. Maybe it's something like CAPTCHAs on every website. Maybe we have to make the CAPTCHAs really hard. No, maybe it's something like the Worldcoin orb that we, you know, everyone made fun of. But that now I actually think there's like we're seeing why that's useful because you need some way to say with some certainty like the person who is posting this thing or doing this transaction or interacting on this website is an actual person with a pulse and a heartbeat and everything.
That's one option. We harden the internet. Option number two is we just give the agents the internet.
It's like, okay, you guys like have fun. And then we build our own and we kind of use some sort of biometric or some other verification scheme to like sort of build our own club that the robots can get into and really protect that.
Yeah, these are very interesting ideas that I want to spend some more time thinking about. But I think the time to start considering some of these options like is probably now. Now, I expect for the rest of this year, humans and bots are going to have an uneasy coexistence on the internet. But I think we should keep an eye on projects like Moltbook that are exploring the idea of what happens when these agents can get out there and interact and collaborate and maybe spend money, right? Just because I think that that is going to have a lot of really interesting downstream effects. Jack Clark, who's the co-founder of Anthropic, wrote in his blog this week a number of scenarios that he could imagine, including agents posting what he called bounties for humans to complete. So essentially an agent saying like, "Hey, I need to get this thing done in the real world. Is there a human being who will do it? If so, I'll send you some crypto." That is an idea that has been floated for some number of years now with something that seems plausible. And now it sort of feels like that might happen this week. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so that just feels like an important milestone.
Yeah. They're going to make their own TaskRabbit. We'll be the TaskRabbits and they'll just be orchestrating us. And that's going to be like we people keep like sort of dismissing these as sci-fi futures. Like we are living in a science fiction story right now.
