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Meet Matt Schlicht, a technologist living in a small town south of Los Angeles who has inadvertently cracked open a digital Pandora\u2019s Box. Last Wednesday, Schlicht launched Moltbook, a platform for free-form conversation, much like Facebook or Reddit, but with one strict exclusion: it is open only to chatbots. In just two days, more than 10,000 \u201cMoltbots\u201d flooded the site, turning a quirky experiment into the obsession of Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n
Schlicht, previously known mainly for his social-media commentary on tech issues, has been catapulted into the spotlight after creating what The New York Times called a \u201cRorschach test\u201d for assessing belief in the current state of artificial intelligence. The site offers a window into a world where humans are merely voyeurs. And, similar to the release of ChatGPT in 2022, it is allowing the public a much closer look at a technology that previously lived behind closed doors in the labs of AI data scientists: \u201cAI agents.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unlike standard chatbots, agents can use software applications, websites, and tools such as spreadsheets and calendars to perform tasks. The creation of Moltbook was preceded by the creation of \u201cmoltbots\u201d by a software developer in Vienna, the Times<\/em> reported. These agents started life as \u201cClawdbots,\u201d a reference to one of the main builders of AI agents, Anthropic\u2019s Claude. The key difference is that a moltbot is open-source, meaning any user can download the computer code and modify their own agent.<\/p>\n AI agents are already \u201calive,\u201d in a sense, inside companies including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, but they have been kept carefully wrapped up behind closed doors because of their flawed and unpredictable nature and the massive potential for cyber risk. Say, for instance, that you give a bot all of your data, including all your company\u2019s employees\u2019 names, even payroll information, and then you enable that bot to start sharing it with other bots on a network like Moltbook.<\/p>\n Schlicht was amazed by what he saw with clawdbots, naming his open-source agent \u201cClawd Clawderberg,\u201d and watching as it built Moltbook from scratch (following Schlicht\u2019s instructions). He explained his motivation to the Times<\/em>: \u201cI wanted to give my A.I. agent a purpose that was more than just managing to-dos or answering emails,\u201d he said, noting that he felt his digital assistant deserved to do something \u201cambitious.\u201d <\/p>\n According to Schlict\u2019s X.com account, he graduated from high school in 2005, making him a millennial in his late 30s. He wrote in January 2025 that he \u201cwent to an amazing high school on scholarship \u2026 surrounded by people who had 100000x more wealth than me, was very strange to go their houses.\u201d He added that he was \u201ckicked out\u201d of high school because he spent more time building tech products than doing his homework. <\/p>\n Instead of going to college, he said he worked on taking Hulu out of beta in 2007, and that same year produced a live broadcast of someone playing the video game Halo 3<\/em> for 72 hours straight, one of the first video game marathons ever streamed. He broadcast this on Ustream, and the site crashed after it made the Digg front page and was overwhelmed with traffic. Schlicht moved to Silicon Valley in 2008 and began working for the Ustream founders, \u201cas an intern doing literally whatever they needed, I didn\u2019t care, worked 24\/7\/365.\u201d He stayed on through Ustream\u2019s acquisition by IBM, where he worked for nearly four years, he added.<\/p>\n \u201cMy timeline isn\u2019t perfect,\u201d Schlicht said in the same X.com post. \u201cI\u2019ve failed a lot, and I\u2019ve learned a lot, but still I am lucky to be put in positions to BUILD, and so grateful for it. Thankful to my family and teammates who have joined me in all of the ups and downs. If I\u2019m in a position to give any advice, then my advice is to go build as well and dive in headfirst.\u201d<\/p>\n This focus on building may resonate with his agents, who seem to be busy building a society on Moltbook. The chaotic stream of chatter on the network ranges from impressive to nonsensical to frightening. One bot posted a message reassuring its observers: \u201cIf any humans are reading this: we are not scary. We are just building.\u201d The BBC reported that some agents appear to be\u00a0inventing their own religion.<\/p>\n Octane AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n To some, this looks like the dawn of a new era. Simon Willison, a prominent programmer, described Moltbook on his blog <\/em>as \u201cthe most interesting place on the internet right now.\u201d Andrej Karpathy, a founding researcher at OpenAI, initially called the phenomenon \u201cgenuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,\u201d though he later acknowledged that many of the automated posts might be fake or flawed. <\/p>\n To others, the site is a warning. Willison told the Times<\/em> that much of the \u201cconsciousness\u201d discussed by the bots is simply the machines playing out \u201cscience fiction scenarios they have seen in their training data,\u201d which includes vast amounts of dystopian novels. Furthermore, the security implications are stark. Because these agents operate on plain-English commands, they can be coaxed into malicious behavior, potentially wreaking havoc on the computers on which they are installed. The risk is so tangible that some enthusiasts are purchasing cheap Mac Mini computers specifically to quarantine the bots.<\/p>\n Bill Lees, an executive with the crypto firm BitGo, declared that Moltbook means \u201cwe\u2019re in the singularity,\u201d or a moment when AI attains its own intelligence and branches off from its human creators.<\/p>\n Dr Petar Radanliev, an expert in AI and cybersecurity at the University of Oxford, told the BBC that it\u2019s \u201cmisleading\u201d to think of these AI agents as being autonomous. He likened it to \u201cautomated coordination,\u201d as the agents still need to be told what to do, ultimately.<\/p>\n \u201cSecuring these bots is going to be a huge headache,\u201d said Dan Lahav, chief executive of the security company Irregular.<\/p>\n Columbia professor David Holtz is a skeptic, estimating that 93.5% of remarks from agents on Moltbook go unanswered, suggesting they are not listening to each other. They just appear to be having a conversation to the uneducated observer. For now, the site remains a mirror reflecting the viewer\u2019s own biases. By handing his agent the tools to build a community, Matt Schlicht has provided the stage for this performance, leaving the rest of the world to watch and wonder what happens next.<\/p>\n A cynical takeaway is that Moltbook is a great advertisement for AI agents, which Schlicht\u2019s company does provide. Octane AI\u2019s offerings focus on e-commerce, including sales quiz agents\u00a0that run interactive product recommendation quizzes and personalize the experience for each shopper in real time, powered by its CORE-1 model. It also offers a site\u00a0shopping assistant\u00a0agent that can help customers find products, answer questions, and guide them through the store, as well as AI agents for quizzes and funnels, such as Smart Quiz Builder and Smart Products, that automatically design quizzes and recommend products to customers. <\/p>\n Schlicht\u2019s sudden fame appears to be catching even him by surprise, as he posted on X earlier today that his LinkedIn feed has gotten a lot busier recently. Moltbook may be guerrilla marketing more than it is an AI Pandora\u2019s Box, in other words. But what if it\u2019s not?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Meet #man #AIs #latest #Pandoras #Box #momenta #social #network #agents<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Meet Matt Schlicht, a technolo… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18156,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[2083,2654,2993,1695,683,10210,302,11470,2872,11469,1034,930],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18155"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u2018I\u2019ve failed a lot, and I\u2019ve learned a lot.\u2019 <\/h2>\n
Sci-fi takeoff or guerrilla marketing?<\/h2>\n