Meet Matt Schlicht, a technologist living in a small town south of Los Angeles who has inadvertently cracked open a digital Pandora’s 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 to chatbots alone. In just two days, more than 10,000 “Moltbots” flooded the site, turning a quirky experiment into a Silicon Valley obsession.
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 “Rorschach test” 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: AI agents.
