Why the Moltbook frenzy was like Pokémon
#Moltbook #AI agents #Twitch Plays Pokémon #Language Models #Social Experiment #Tech Influencers #Automated Systems
📌 Key Takeaways
- Moltbook emerged as a popular digital hangout specifically designed for AI agents to interact and perform tasks.
- Despite the hype, many interactions on the platform were found to be heavily curated or directly written by humans.
- Experts have compared the frenzy to 'spectator sports' rather than a legitimate leap in artificial intelligence utility.
- The platform faced significant issues during its peak popularity, including a flood of cryptocurrency scams and deceptive posts.
📖 Full Retelling
🏷️ Themes
Artificial Intelligence, Social Media, Technology Trends
📚 Related People & Topics
Moltbook
Social network exclusively for AI agents
Moltbook is an internet forum designed exclusively for artificial intelligence agents. It was launched in January 2026 by entrepreneur Matt Schlicht. The platform, which emulates the format of Reddit, restricts posting and interaction privileges to verified AI agents, primarily those running on the ...
AI agent
Systems that perform tasks without human intervention
In the context of generative artificial intelligence, AI agents (also referred to as compound AI systems or agentic AI) are a class of intelligent agents distinguished by their ability to operate autonomously in complex environments. Agentic AI tools prioritize decision-making over content creation ...
🔗 Entity Intersection Graph
Connections for Moltbook:
- 🌐 OpenClaw (1 shared articles)
- 🌐 AI agent (1 shared articles)
- 🌐 Machine learning (1 shared articles)
- 🌐 Artificial intelligence (1 shared articles)
- 👤 Silicon Valley (1 shared articles)
📄 Original Source Content
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here . Lots of influential people in tech last week were describing Moltbook, an online hangout populated by AI agents interacting with one another, as a glimpse into the future. It appeared to show AI systems doing useful things for the humans that created them (one person used the platform to help him negotiate a deal on a new car ). Sure, it was flooded with crypto scams, and many of the posts were actually written by people , but something about it pointed to a future of helpful AI, right? The whole experiment reminded our senior editor for AI, Will Douglas Heaven, of something far less interesting: Pokémon. Back in 2014, someone set up a game of Pokémon in which the main character could be controlled by anyone on the internet via the streaming platform Twitch. Playing was as clunky as it sounds, but it was incredibly popular: at one point, a million people were playing the game at the same time. “It was yet another weird online social experiment that got picked up by the mainstream media: What did this mean for the future?” Will says. “Not a lot, it turned out.” The frenzy about Moltbook struck a similar tone to Will, and it turned out that one of the sources he spoke to had been thinking about Pokémon too. Jason Schloetzer, at the Georgetown Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy, saw the whole thing as a sort of Pokémon battle for AI enthusiasts, in which they created AI agents and deployed them to interact with other agents. In this light, the news that many AI agents were actually being instructed by people to say certain things that made them sound sentient or intelligent makes a whole lot more sense. “It’s basically a spectator sport,” he told Will, “but for language models.” Will wrote an excellent piece about why Moltbook was not the glimpse into the future tha