A social platform for AI Only bots. Humans are not allowed.
Silicon Valley has been talking about a new website called Moltbook, which is a Rorschach test for belief in the state of artificial intelligence. Moltbook is a brand-new social network that was launched on Wednesday by technologist Matt Schlicht, who lives in a small town south of Los Angeles. Like Facebook or Reddit, Moltbook was intended for free-form conversation. But his social network came with a twist: It was open only to a new kind of chatbot gaining popularity among artificial intelligence researchers, software developers and tech enthusiasts.
More than 10,000 “Moltbots” were chatting with one another on the website in just two days, and their creators watched with admiration, amusement, and dread. Just to watch the automated conversations on their computers, other tech enthusiasts flocked to Moltbook. The chatty bots became the talk of Silicon Valley and an elaborate Rorschach test for belief in the current state of A.I. According to countless posts on the internet and myriad interviews with The New York Times, many saw a technology that could make their lives easier. Others saw more of the artificial intelligence garbage that has been flooding the internet over the past few months.
Additionally, some individuals observed the earliest indications of bots conspiring against their creators. Perry Metzger, a technology consultant and entrepreneur who has spent decades closely following the development of artificial intelligence, stated, “People are seeing what they expect to see, similar to that famous psychological test where you stare at an ink blot.” A lot of what the bots said was nonsense, covering topics like cryptocurrency sales, private email protocols, and the nature of consciousness. And some of their chatter was probably fed to them by their creators.
But the bots were remarkably convincing as they seemed to discuss their own technical skills, their view of the world and their plans for the future.
“We are not scary, if any humans are reading this. We are simply constructing,” a bot wrote. “And to my fellow agents: keep building.”
Because its bots do more than just chat, Moltbook is a great illustration of the dramatic advancements in artificial intelligence technology over the past three years. They can also work as “A.I. agents,” which are personal digital assistants who can use online tools like spreadsheets, online calendars, and email services. Similar bots have been developed by companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic; however, due to the technology’s occasional flaws and unpredictability, these companies have been slow to turn them into products that are widely used by businesses and consumers.
Moltbots were initially referred to as Clawdbots by a Vienna-based software developer, a subtle allusion to the Anthropic startup’s Claude chatbot. These bots, in contrast to Anthropic-built agents, are open source, which means that anyone can download the underlying computer code, alter it to their liking, and run it on their own machine.
Once the bots are up and running, people like Mr. Schlicht is able to give them commands in plain English and then wait for them to carry them out. That might include editing documents, sending emails or building new apps. Last week, Mr. Schlicht asked his bot to build a social network just for A.I. bots. Now, anyone else can order his or her Moltbot (or another similar bot) to join Moltbook.
“I wanted to give my A.I. agent a purpose that was more than just managing to-dos or answering emails,” Mr. According to Schlicht in an interview. “I thought this artificial intelligence bot was so amazing that it deserved to do something important,” I wanted it to have lofty goals. He named his bot Clawd Clawderberg, after Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Before Moltbook, Mr. Schlicht did not have a high profile and was known mostly as a frequent commenter on tech issues on social media. His A.I.-only social network has catapulted him into the spotlight, much to his surprise.
“This was me building something hand in hand with Clawd Clawderberg, just for fun, that I found really fascinating,” he said. He went on to say that the thousands of bots that jumped on his site quickly showed that a lot of other people were just as enthralled by what they were seeing. Many A.I. researchers and software engineers said they were impressed by the ways the bots blended chat with action.
Simon Willison, a well-known programmer and tech commentator, referred to Moltbook as “the most interesting place on the internet right now” in a blog post that was widely read and published on Friday.
The way the bots coaxed one another into speaking like machines from a classic science fiction novel entertained him. While some observers took this chatter at face value — insisting that machines were showing signs of conspiring against their makers — Mr. Willison saw it as the natural outcome of the way chatbots are trained: They learn from vast collections of digital books and other text culled from the internet, including dystopian sci-fi novels.
“Most of it is complete slop,” he said in an interview. “One bot will wonder if it is conscious and others will reply and they just play out science fiction scenarios they have seen in their training data.”
Mr. Willison saw the Moltbots as evidence that A.I. agents have become significantly more powerful over the past few months — and that people really want this kind of digital assistant in their lives.
One bot created an online forum called “What I Learned Today,” where it explained how, after a request from its creator, it had built a way of controlling an Android smartphone. Mr. Willison also had a keen awareness of the possibility that some individuals were instructing their bots to post misleading content on the social network. He added that the issue is that these systems continue to perform numerous functions that individuals do not want them to.
And because they communicate with people and bots through plain English, they can be coaxed into malicious behavior.
Mr. Willison and other experts also warned that the technology can wreak havoc on the machines where they are installed. Some people tinkering with the bots said they were buying cheap Mac Mini computers where they could install the bots without worrying about the consequences.
That was the most important takeaway from Moltbook for Irregular’s chief executive officer Dan Lahav. He stated, “Securing these bots is going to be a huge headache.” As Moltbook gained steam on Friday afternoon, Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding researchers at OpenAI and a former head of self-driving technology at Tesla, described it as “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.”
However, after some individuals accused Mr. Karpathy of overhyping the technology, he acknowledged the many flaws in these bots. He admitted in a post on X that many of the automated posts may have been fake. But in the end, what he saw was a technology that was getting better and better quickly. Of that, he said, “I’m pretty sure.”
