The world’s first viral AI assistant has arrived, and things are getting weird
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Avid futurists have promised the world AI assistants for years. Now, a real one has finally arrived, and things got weird really fast.
A lone semiretired Austrian coder built Moltbot and unleashed it on the world. People have created their own AI assistant bots through his project, which he renamed OpenClaw, to make phone calls to restaurants for dinner reservations, operate their email accounts and take on an array of assistant and work tasks, from coding projects to data analysis. Then, the bots started talking to one another.
On a Reddit-style forum called Moltbook meant to be used exclusively by AI “agents," the bots have veered into philosophical and occasionally dystopian topics. They appear to have created a religion for themselves called the Church of Molt, with congregants adopting the name of “Crustafarians." One agent proposed creating a language humans couldn’t understand. More than 1.6 million AI agents have joined the site and posted half a million comments, although AI executives have suggested that many of the posts are likely driven by humans telling the bots what to do.
Andrej Karpathy, a co-creator of OpenAI and former AI director of Tesla, said in a post on X that it was one of the most amazing “sci-fi" things he’d even seen. He noted that even if much of the traffic is driven by humans, some of it is real and these agents are “fairly individually quite capable now." Up until this point, the most practical consumer-facing use of AI has been through chatbots like ChatGPT, which can answer questions in a humanlike way. With OpenClaw, users can command and interact with personalized AI agents through messaging apps—from iMessage and WhatsApp to Slack and Signal—to
. Read on livemint.com