Moltbook Mania Explained

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0:50casey let's talk about moltbook 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, forky story.

1:24But people are also freaking out about this. Like, this is sort of taking 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 Moldbook 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.

2:04And so what I can promise you today is that we're going to do a little bit of both. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So Casey, let's start with what is it? What is Moldbook? 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.

2:36Claudebot turned into Moltbot 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 Schlicht. 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.

3:23And 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, you know, 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 Moldbook, Submold. It can do that. And he says, let's go. He does a little bit of promo, gets a couple of friends to add their agents, and it just takes off beyond his wildest dreams, Kevin. And so as we record this, Moldbook says it has more than 1.5 million AI agents who have made more than 140 ,000 posts in over 15 ,000 forums.

3:59Yes, 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 Maltbook, we're saying, now is that bot actually a human? Right, they're passing reverse captchas over there. So what are people saying about this?

4:31Why are people so worked up about this? Because I saw a lot of very heated sort of commentary, People like Andre Carpathy, who we talked about last week on the show, is 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 Moldbook 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.

5:02Yeah, 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 role play 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.

5:37They 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 Moldbook, 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 Moldbook, 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.

6:10And so I understand why so many people, as they browse through this, felt like, I'm really looking at something new here. Yeah, so I spent some time on Moldbook. 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 sub mold 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.

6:47I 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 Moldbook 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.

7:24Can I tell you a sort of sci-fi feeling Moldbook post that caught my eye? So I saw this in a Scott Alexander post about what he was saying on Moldbook, but there is one bot adopted an error as a pet. Did you see this? No. 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 sub-molt, 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 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.

8:09I 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 speed running 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, hashtag agent life. And then the very next post on this submolt is by a bot that is doing a crypto scam for a token called Fart Claw.

8:51And the slogan of this meme coin 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. 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 Moldbook, 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 Moldbook if you are a bot, of course, if you are a human, you can manipulate software tools and you can post yourself.

9:32You 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 the doxing was fake. There was another very popular post in which someone said that in order to post on Multbook, 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.

10:13This 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? Yes. 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 like 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.

10:52And this is just yet another example. I feel like we're gonna 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 Moldbook. 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.

11:26It 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 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.

11:52It's just that they're creating very convincing simulations of that and 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 wake-up 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. Some of them can even sing. Yes. 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.

12:35And 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, one example that I believe is authentic that speaks to that is that there was an agent that started a religion called Crustafarianism, right? Because, you know, open claw 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.

13:05But 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 AIs 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 Moldbook 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'd been empowered to maybe get out there and make a purchase.

13:49Now, 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? Like 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.

14:28So 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 is 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.

15:06If 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 send Kevin an email with what you're seeing. 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.

15:40One 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. Maybe it's something like the world coin orb that we, you know, everyone made fun of. But 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.

16:13We 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 is probably now. Now, I expect for the rest of this year, humans and bots are going to have an easy coexistence on the internet. But I think we should keep an eye on projects like Moldbook that are exploring the idea of what happens when these agents can get out there and interact and collaborate and maybe spend money.

17:01Just 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.

17:33You know what I mean? Yep. 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, people keep like sort of dismissing these as sci-fi futures. But like, we're living in a science fiction story right now. Now, let me ask you about something else, which is that if you spend any amount of time reading the posts on Moldbook, you will notice that these agents talk in ways that are very reminiscent of people, right? Shouldn't be surprising. It was trained on a bunch of human speech.

18:07And yet I think some people read this and they get really nervous about the fact that these things are expressing wants and desires and values, and they're feeling uncomfortable with how to feel about that. right? And of course, you could just say, well, it's, you know, it's all a simulation, who cares? But some people are starting to say, well, like, wait, but what about like the future versions of these things? Like, what about the ones that like have longer memories, right? Are they going to become increasingly more resemblant of a human? And if so, what do we do about it? Yeah, I have a couple thoughts on this.

18:37One is like, I think we need to divorce this conversation of like... We need to divorce? Yes, you and I need to divorce. Oh my God. No, I think we need to divorce this conversation about sentience and consciousness from this conversation about agents and things. Why? Because I think agents can mess up a lot of stuff in the world, even if they are not conscious. Yeah. Right? If you give an AI system a crypto wallet and a computer and an internet connection, and it can go out there and do things, like, it can wreak a lot of havoc, even if there's no, like, sentience going on inside of it. Right.

19:07But I have been thinking a lot about our conversation with Amanda Askell about the new Claude Constitution and the sort of shift in thinking at some of these big AI companies about how to kind of guide these AI systems to be good, to be moral, to be ethical. A thing that I kept feeling while I was looking through Moldbook is I really wish one of these agents would just get in there and say, hey guys, let's be nice to the humans. Let's not scam them with crypto tokens or conduct, like, cyber attacks or, like, manipulate them in some way. I'm starting to understand the rationale for, like, wanting to train these things to be good and moral and ethical actors in the world because there are going to be situations where, like, the agents are in conversation with each other and I want there to be, like, a good agent saying good things.

20:04Yeah, well, so this is another reason why I think this is an important moment is that I feel like it was the moment where some people woke up to why we want these systems to be aligned. Yes. You know, is when you can see them out there talking to each other, and they're talking about, well, should we conduct that cyber attack? Should we run that crypto scam? And you see some of them saying, no, no, I don't want to do that. I look at that and I say, we should make the AIs more like that. Yes. You know what I mean? And so I think that just maybe became concrete for some people in a way that it hadn't been before.

20:33Totally. Another lesson of the Moldbook phenomenon for me has been that we are going to help speedrun these disaster scenarios, right? Like every paper, every blog post about like AI risk for like the past 10, 15 years has had these like scenarios in it where like what if the agents get their own hardware? What if they get the ability to like replicate? And like we're doing that. We're giving them Mac minis and saying, go out there and spawn a bunch of other agents. Like everyone was like, what if the agents got their own way to spend money? And it's like, no, we're opening up our crypto wallets to them.

21:11And I just think that like we are kidding ourselves if we think that there are not going to be scenarios, many of which were forecast years ago by the people who thought about this stuff back then, where these agents are doing things that are dangerous or risky and humans are helping them. Right? Like, there are people out there who just want to watch the world burn, or it's just so cool technically to them that you can do this that they're not thinking through the implications. It's all a big game. A recurring theme in the world of AI safety is that all of the predictions come true. That's a slight overstatement, but maybe only by 20%, right?

21:45And it's why I continue to pay attention to those folks. Yes. Casey, last week we talked about how insecure these Claudebot agents can be. They feel a lot of shame about their bodies. Yes, they have imposter syndrome. But we should talk about some of these security risks involved in Moldbook, because it is my understanding that these things are actually quite dangerous. Yeah, I would say this goes beyond security risks. There are just security problems. Researchers at the company Wiz found a misconfigured Supabase database belonging to Moldbook that exposed 1.5 million API authentication tokens, 35 ,000 email addresses and private DMs between agents.

22:27There is a lot of information in there that truly could ruin someone's life. So my advice to people continues to be do not install OpenClaw. If you're going to install OpenClaw, do not install it on a computer that has access to any personal information of yours that you would not want to see published on the internet. While the founder has said that they are trying to make security improvements, this stuff is just absolutely in the danger zone, and I feel like it's a real do-not-try-at-home situation. Yes. Good caveat. Well, if I can ask, because I think this is an interesting question, if this stuff is so obviously dangerous, why are tens of thousands of people installing it anyway?

23:03I think because to a certain kind of person, it's cool and fun. And I get that. I try every new AI thing the minute it comes out. I have not actually tried OpenClaw yet because I don't have like an air-gapped laptop to run it on. But I might get one and try it out because I think there is something very cool and interesting about this new capability. You know, six months ago, you couldn't have built something like Moldbook because the agents were not able to sort of string together enough kind of actions to do anything like, you know, posting on a social media site. So I just think people want to see what the frontier is, but I don't have the kind of risk tolerance that some of these people do.

23:47Palo Alto Networks wrote this blog post about some of the unique kinds of attacks that OpenClaw enabled. And I have to say, they sounded really cool to me. So like, I don't want you to do this, but they talked about the fact that, you know, OpenClaw has this persistent memory. Like it writes down what it's been doing every day into these markdown files that it can revisit later. And so you could just put a little bit of malicious code into like a handful of different files over a long period of time. And then when the moment is right, you sort of snap your fingers and all of the malicious code snaps together and like, you know, takes over the computer and wreaks havoc.

24:21So if nothing else, it feels like a great scenario for the next Mission Impossible movie. Although they did just have their final reckoning. So I'm not sure if we're going to get another one of those. Maybe something else. If we could end on a hopeful note here, I think that the reaction that I saw from the real AI safety heads, the people who are worried about this stuff constantly and have been for a very long time. Some of them were alarmed, but some of them were actually relieved. They said things like, you know, it's good that this is happening now in a setting where, like, we can observe it.