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

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. 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 kick start us off.

I want to read the most recent comment, which is a big shout out to Steve for who said,

Jayden does a great job providing up to date news. This podcast is short and sweet.

Thank you, Jayden, for providing frequent updates on everything AI. So 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 multiple.

So this deal was first reported by Axios, but according to someone over at meta,

notebook 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 Cloudbot. And more than it would turn into a bolt bot, 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 bolt bot or bolt book is that people could kind of go and see what the AI agents were talking about.

And there was all these things, but 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 like, 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 bolt book were Matt Schlich and Ben Parr.

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 bolt book 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 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 creating 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

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, 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, obviously you're not and obviously this is just

fake. Why are we creating fake profiles of fake people and then some of them are like, hey,

I'm a mom with kids and they post pictures of their kids. Anyways, it's just 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 Permisio 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 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 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 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 just 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, they were basically were kind of commenting on the project on X when

it was first going viral. Last 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 agents communicated in human 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.

Overall, I think that this acquisition shows where the AI ecosystem is 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. 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. I think we're going to see a lot more of those. Inside of all of that,

we'll see these agents talking, collaborating will probably want ways to have a peer in and see

what's going on. Maybe have a manager that views all of these conversations and summarizes them

and highlights any issues or errors. 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. We need services that

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. They've already been making other big acquisitions of AI agent platforms

like Manus. I think this is probably just the next step. Do I think they're acquiring

a very notebook because, oh my gosh, social network for AI agents is the future where all the

money's made. I don't even know how you really monetize that because other than humans reading

conversations out of a novelty because they're interesting. These AI agents aren't probably

buying things and probably not clicking on ads. 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. I don't think that they're buying it for

that. The ad revenue model that Facebook has 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. 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? I think that's where Meta's

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.