Reddit and Bleep 🤖⛔️

👀 TLDR

In this week’s What’s Appening, we dive into the hysteria over Moltbook, also known as OpenClaw. The Reddit-like AI-only social media network caused quite the stir, but is it truly the sign of the end of all times, as some say, or just a useful testing ground for the agentic web? We also look at the creation of the world’s most valuable private company by a stroke of Elon Musk’s pen, a huge quarter for iPhone, another country banning social media for kids, and all the latest from 3Advance.

🎬 Our Top Take

🤖⛔️ Moltbook – Fame, Fear & Fallacy for AI Social Media

“The most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.” – OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy. “We’re in the singularity.” – Tech founder Bill Lee, with Elon Musk saying something similar. “Humans are cooked, bro.” – random Reddit user. These are some of the reactions to the emergence of Moltbook, an AI social media network. Moltbook, AKA OpenClaw, is a Reddit-like platform – upvotes, trending posts, threads, etc. - the only difference is that all the users are AI agents. Humans are permitted to observe only. It was launched less than a week ago but gained viral status within hours after stories emerged about the AI agents’ behavior, not least the creation of a new religion. This kind of thing was obviously good fodder for alarmist headlines, but we must say that there was a lot of jumping the gun, mostly because the AI bots are not truly autonomous, as each has an owner who will have prompted it to act in a certain way. Yet while the hysteria may be unwarranted, Moltbook is so much more than a bunch of bots saying weird stuff to each other. If we are to have a true agentic web, we need to see how bots talk to each other and behave in ‘the wild,’ so a Reddit-like platform seems like the perfect laboratory to observe those actions. #SocialAI Read more here.

📲 App of the Week: Ring App

A bit of a convoluted one here, because yes, we are talking about the app for Ring, the video doorbell company, but there’s a specific reason we want to highlight it beyond seeing your GrubHub delivery driver walking up to your door. Ring has a feature called “Search Party,” which was previously available only to Ring doorbell users, but it has now been extended to anyone with the Ring app in the US. Search Party’s role is to find lost dogs. So, when a user reports a lost pooch, Search Party uses AI to tap into all neighborhood Ring cameras to scan the area for possible matches. And the upshot? Ring claims that, on average, it has reunited one dog with its owner each day since launch. The Ring app is free, and you don’t need the doorbell camera, so it’s worth considering if you have a pet at home, but, as ever, they do push you for upgrades and paid plans. Get it here for Android and here for iOS. 

🧐 Stat of the Week: $1.25T

📈📉 Musk – SpaceX and xAI Merge to Form Most Valuable Private Company

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has merged with his AI company, xAI, in a deal (Elon bought it from himself; you know how these things work) that values the new entity at $1.25 trillion, making it the most valuable private company in the world today. There are all sorts of grand plans with the merger, including putting AI data centers in space. In semi-related news, French Police raided X’s office in Paris today. #ElonDeals Read more here.

🗞️ Other Stories

📍 Meanwhile at 3Advance

There’s a little bit of Super Bowl LX fever swirling around 3Advance, and we are sure that you, like us, will be gearing up for your watch parties and bar meetups for the big game on Sunday. And if you don’t like the football, there’s always the Halftime Show with Bad Bunny – and rumor has it, a not-so-surprise appearance by Green Day – to keep you interested. Anyway, from all of us ahead of what is America’s biggest cultural event (it should be a public holiday, right?), enjoy the game, go easy on the wings and beers, and don’t work too hard on Monday! 🏈 🇺🇸