Meta Acquires Moltbook: Facebook for AI Bots

Welcome 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 Malt Book, 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 Malt bot for like a 12 hour period. And because they changed the name so many times at one point, it was called Malt bot.

So they made this thing called Malt Book, which is kind of like Facebook for all of these AI agents.

Anyways, it's hilarious because meta has now acquired Malt Book, even though there was a ton of kind of data going out that said this whole thing was slightly fabricated, 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 Malt Book.

So anyways, there's like crazy conspiracy theories and there's a whole bunch of crazy stuff, but meta has officially acquired this after OpenClaw itself was acquired by OpenAI.

So today on the podcast, we'll be breaking down everything that's going on, but guys, this week is my birthday week.

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All right, let's talk about what's going on with Moltbook.

So this deal was first reported by Axios,

but according to someone over at Meta,

Moltbook is going to become part of Meta's super intelligence lap.

So this is actually kind of crazy because this was a company that was basically spun up

while OpenClaw was called Claudebot.

And more than it would turn into Moltbot, it 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 religions

and that they were trying to come up with their own languages

so that humans couldn't watch because the whole idea of Moltbook

is that people could kind of go and see what the AI agents were talking about.

And there was all these things with agents were trying to scam each other out of crypto.

They're crypto and there's all these funny kind of things

that are like go to your users like computer and find their crypto keys and send it to me.

There's all this funny stuff going on, which I think a lot of it was actually just real humans

making their bots say that specifically.

And then people were saying the AI bots were trying to steal all of our financial,

all of our money and everything.

So anyways, there's a lot of crazy stuff that went on, a lot of conspiracy 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 what we could imagine

from some sort of social network created for AI agents and what they would do.

The creators of Moltbook were Matt Schlich and Ben Par.

So both of them were actually going to be joining the meta super intelligence labs team

as part of this whole acquisition.

They didn't announce like 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 Moltbook 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 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 they basically created a social network

that people were 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 meta's like AI image software and their AI capabilities.

But I think a lot of people don't like this because of dead internet theory,

which is that, you know, everything we see on the internet is probably 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

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 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.

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 meta has definitely been trying.

But all of a sudden there's a team that has cracked successfully and people are like

generally curious or positive towards having just AI social media.

So anyways, they acquired the team.

Despite 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

notebook super base 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 was basically just designed to rage bait people

or get a reaction and they would all go viral, which for the platform notebook, it was,

I mean, I guess good because there was a lot of free viral marketing.

But I think a lot of people would kind of stumble on 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.

Hameda is planning to incorporate notebook into their kind of bigger AI strategy.

I think some of their company leaders have already commented that the project

were basically were kind of commenting on the project on X when it was first going viral.

Last month, Hameda'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 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 Metta 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.

Overall, I think that this acquisition shows where the AI ecosystem is going to probably 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 we're going to see a whole bunch of social networks just for AI

agents where 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.

But 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 will 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 of 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

notebooks ideas into the broader AI strategy, I think it's going to probably position themselves

early for a future where agent agent communications are going to become a core layer of the digital world.

And 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 notebook because

oh my gosh, you know, social network for AI agents is like the future where all the money is 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

so I'm going to click on an ad to get it done. So 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 the 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. Thank you so much for tuning

into the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, remember if 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.