Why the Moltbook frenzy was like Pokémon

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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 that it was said to be. Even if you are excited about a future of agentic AI, he points out, there are some key pieces that Moltbook made clear are still missing. It was a forum of chaos, but a genuinely helpful hive mind would require more coordination, shared objectives, and shared memory.

“More than anything else, I think Moltbook was the internet having fun,” Will says. “The biggest question that now leaves me with is: How far will people push AI just for the laughs?”

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