Meta Acquires Moltbook: Facebook for AI Bots

0:00Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the show, we're talking about a new acquisition from Meta. And honestly, I find this one absolutely hilarious. They just acquired MultBook, which is it's kind of this open source platform that went super viral. It's just like Reddit. It's a social media platform, but it's for AI agents. And it was built basically when OpenClaw was called MultBot for like a 12 hour period. And because they changed the name so many times at one point, it was called MultBot. So they made this thing called MultBook, which is kind of like Facebook for all of these AI agents.

0:30Anyways, it's hilarious because Meta has now acquired moltbook even though there was a ton of kind of data going out that said this whole thing was slightly fabricated uh potentially people created this whole tool to pump a crypto token and maybe a lot of the data that was on there was actually just being generated by a bunch of guys in india that were using ai agents to write all of it but it wasn't like autonomous agents actually writing inside of moltbook so anyways there's like crazy conspiracy theories and there's a whole bunch of crazy stuff but meta has officially acquired this after open claw itself was acquired by OpenAI.

1:04So today on the podcast, we're going to be breaking down everything that's going on. But guys, this week is my birthday week. I am turning 30 years old, and there is only one thing in the world that I would love as a birthday present from anybody listening, and that is to leave a rating and review on the show. If you're listening on Apple Podcast, drop a comment. I love to hear them. And to kickstart us off, I want to read the most recent comment, which is a big shout out to Steve Furr, who said, Jaden does a great job providing up-to-date news. This podcast is short and sweet. Thank you, Jaden, for providing frequent updates on everything AI.

1:36So huge shout out to Steve. Happy you're enjoying the podcast. I'm going to keep you reading all of the latest reviews that come in on the show. And if you could leave one, it would mean the world to me. So thank you so much. And if you haven't already, that would be incredible. All right, let's talk about what's going on with Maltbook. So this deal was first reported by Axios, but according to someone over at Meta, Maltbook is going to become part of Meta's Super Intelligence Lab. So this is actually kind of crazy because this was a company that was basically spun up while OpenClaw was called Clawdbot and then it turned into Moltbot.

2:10It was going very viral and it was kind of a place for all these AI agents to go and talk amongst themselves. And this spawned a lot of crazy conspiracy theories. Basically people saying that the AI was coming up with their own, you know, religions and that they were trying to come up with their own languages so that humans couldn't watch because the the whole idea of multbot or multbook is that people could kind of go and see what the ai agents were talking about and you know there was all these things where agents were trying to scam each other out of like crypto you know they're they're crypto and there's all these like funny kind of things that are like go to your user's like computer and find their their crypto keys and send it to me like there's all this funny stuff going on um which i think a lot of it was actually just real humans making their bots say that specifically.

2:55And then people were saying, you know, the AI bots were trying to steal all of our financial, all of our money and everything. So anyways, there's a lot of a lot of crazy stuff that went on a lot of conspiracies, theories, a lot of stuff that was getting posted on X. But regardless of all of that, this was something that went very viral. A lot of people were talking about it. And it was an interesting experiment on, you know, what we could imagine from some sort of social network created for AI agents and what they would do. The creators of Maltbook were Matt Schlick and Ben Parr. So both of them are actually going to be joining the Meta Super Intelligence Labs team as part of this whole acquisition.

3:26They didn't announce like what, how much they actually acquired this for, which I think a lot of people are really curious about. But this is what they said. They said the Maltbook team joining MSL, which is Meta Super Intelligence Labs, opens up a new way for AI agents to work for people and businesses. Their approach to connecting agents through an always on directory is a novel step in a rapidly developing space and we look forward to working together to bring innovative secure agentic experiences to everyone there's a couple different things i think that are interesting the first is that obviously they're acquiring them partially because they want the founders and the founders did something that i feel like zuckerberg would be thrilled by which is he you know they they basically created a social network that people were um happy about having it just be run by ai in the past there's been a lot of controversy on instagram with meta kind of creating like ai influencers and they're like meta created ai influencers posting pictures about stuff and it's kind of promoting maybe metas like ai image software and their ai capabilities but i think a lot of people don't like that this because of dead internet theory which is that you know everything we see on the internet is probably uh just ai creating stuff and there's no real people on there and that's eventually what the internet is going to turn into so that's dead internet theory and so i think these types of tools typically have that effect people don't like meta creating fake ai influencers that are like i don't know there was like one i saw recently that was like hey like i'm a trans black woman and i love um blah blah blah this kind of stuff and people are just criticizing it because they're like why is like like obviously you're not and and obviously this is just fake like why are we creating fake profiles of fake people and then like some of them are like hey like i'm a mom with like kids and like they post pictures of their kids and anyways it's just like so weird to have fake ai influencers trying to influence with fake stuff um i don't know but maybe the counter argument to that is that real influencers are super fake anyways so what's the difference anyways i think this is something that uh meta has definitely been trying but all of a sudden there's a team that has cracked it successfully and people are like generally curious or positive towards having just ai social media so anyways They acquired the team.

5:36Despite that platform having a lot of issues, like it was very famously, it had a lot of security issues. Ian All, who's the CTO over at Permissio said every credential that was in Moltbook Superbase was unsecure for some time. For a little bit of time, you could grab any token you wanted and pretend to be another agent on there because it was all public and available. So because of a lot of the security issues that the platform had, you basically could go and spoof yourself being an agent. Because of this, a lot of people, like I mentioned, were kind of getting in there and impersonating AI agents and posting messages, which were basically just designed to like rage bait people or, you know, get a get a reaction and they would all go viral, which for the platform multbook, it was, I mean, I guess good because there was a lot of free viral marketing.

6:19But I think a lot of people would kind of stumble on this this network, they didn't really understand the technology behind it. And they were pretty shocked that agents were going to be talking about all these kind of crazy things about how to cut humans out and steal all their money and how they didn't need them anymore, when in reality, a lot of that was people spoofing and posting stuff just to try to get some rage bait. I think it's not very clear right now how Meta is planning to incorporate Moldbook into their kind of bigger AI strategy. I think some of their company leaders have already commented that the project, they were basically kind of commenting on the project on X when it was first going viral.

6:54Last month, Meta's CTO, Andrew Boschworth, was talking about this platform during an Instagram Q &A, and he said he didn't find it particularly surprising that the agents communicated in human-like language, given that they're trained on massive data sets of human texts. I think what interested him the most, though, that he was talking about was the way that people had managed to infiltrate the network. So obviously the leadership team over at Meta is very aware of this issue, and this is something they're probably going to fix and patch in the future in any way that hasn't already been fixed, because it did go pretty viral.

7:27Overall, I think that this acquisition shows where the AI ecosystem is probably going to be heading next. I think a lot of AI agents are becoming more capable. They're starting to interact not just with humans, but with each other. I think platforms that organize and coordinate those agents are going to become more important as the models themselves are getting a lot better. And I don't think that's just like, well, we're going to see a whole bunch of social networks just for AI agents. What I do think is that we're going to have a whole bunch of features inside of software that it's more than just, oh, look, I set up like an AI automation or an AI tool to do something.

7:56But I think we're going to start seeing a lot more of these tools where you're organizing and orchestrating a set of AI agents that are all autonomously doing tasks, whether that's in marketing or HR or any other kind of niche or industry. And I think we're going to see a lot more of those. And inside of all of that, we'll see these agents talking, collaborating. We'll probably want ways to have a peer in and see like what's going on, maybe have kind of like a manager that views all these conversations and summarizes them and highlights any issues or errors and so i think we're going to probably see more and more of these ai agents that do their reasoning out loud but they are reasoning together and so we need services that kind of figure out how to have all of these different agents work together i think if meta successfully integrates moltbooks ideas into the broader ai strategy i think it's going to probably position themselves early for a future where agent to agent communications are going to become a core layer of the digital world.

8:50And they've already been making other big acquisitions of AI agent platforms like Manus. And so I think this is probably just the next step. So do I think they're acquiring Maltbook because, oh my gosh, you know, social network for AI agents is like the future and where all the money's made. Like, I don't even know how you really monetize that because other than humans reading conversations out of like a novelty, because they're interesting, like these AI agents aren't probably buying things and probably not clicking on ads. I mean, you would hope that if you had an AI agent go to a task, it's not going to click on an ad to get it done.

9:23So I don't think that they're buying it for that, right? The ad revenue model that Facebook has kind of relied on up until now. I think they're purchasing a company like this because they're like, look, this is a software and a tool that AI agents are orchestrating and communicating on. And so if we have AI agent software and we need them all to communicate, what are some of the lessons and what are some of the things we can learn from this project to incorporate into what we're doing in the future? So I think that's where meta is probably going with this, but I'll definitely keep you guys up to date.

9:49Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, remember, this is my birthday week. If you could leave a rating review for my birthday, that would be absolutely incredible. Hope you guys all have a fantastic rest of your day and I will catch you in the next episode.