Meta, the Facebook parent company, has said that it has acquired the much-talked-about Moltbook, a social networking site for artificial intelligence agents, and has announced that the founders of the company will be brought into the fold of Meta's Artificial Intelligence division, Axios has reported.
Meta has not disclosed the financial aspects of the deal to the general public, but has said that Moltbook co-founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr will be joining Meta's Superintelligence Labs, the unit led by former Scale AI CEO, Alexandr Wang.
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They will be joining Meta on March 16, as per the Axios report. Schlicht has championed "vibe coding," building programs with the help of AI, saying he "didn't write one line of code" for the site. Schlicht built Moltbook largely using his own personal AI assistant, Clawd Clawderberg.
The deal is being seen as the beginning of an intense race among tech giants of the world to snap up AI talent as well as technology. This comes as the world is witnessing that the autonomous agents can be capable of executing real-world tasks and move a little ahead of the novelty tag.
Late January this year, witnessed a Reddit-like site called Moltbook where AI-powered agents swapped code and gossiped about their human owners. It began as a niche experiment but has since taken some impetus among the tech giants, with growing debates around the technology.
Some, however, have played down the technology, one of them the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, who said that the site was “as likely a fad”, but the underlying technology did offer a glimpse into the future.
“Moltbook may be (is a passing fad), but OpenClaw is not,” Altman said. Altman has only last month hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, an open-source bot formerly known as Clawdbot or Moltbot, only last month.
There are also questions regarding giving full autonomy to the AI agents, or the technology per se. Anthropic's chief product officer, Mike Krieger, asserted that most people were not yet ready to give AI full autonomy over their computers.
Moltbook's rise has also brought risks, the experts say. Cybersecurity firm Wiz said the approach left a major flaw that exposed private messages, more than 6,000 email addresses and more than a million credentials.
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