Elon Musk’s Mega-Merger + We Test Google’s Project Genie + What’s Next for Moltbook Creator

Hi, my name is Dana. I am a subscriber to the New York Times, but my husband isn't. And it would be really nice to be able to share a recipe or an article or compete with him in Wordle or Connections. Thank you. Dana, we heard you. Introducing the New York Times Family Subscription. One subscription, up to four separate logins for anyone in your life. Find out more at nytimes.com slash family. Did you hear about the prediction market grocery wars? No, what's going on over there? So in New York City, Polymarket and Kalshi are doing dueling stunts involving groceries. So Kalshi launched a $50 grocery giveaway at an East Village grocery store. And Polymarket said that they are opening a whole grocery store that's going to be totally free, subsidized, of course, by the tears of the gambling addicts who power their site. Wait, a free grocery store? A free grocery store. They're calling it the Polly Market. I checked. It's not just for Polly people. If you're a monogamist, you can go to. But yeah, for five days, they're doing a free grocery store in New York City. Just for five days. Yeah. It seems I saw someone make a comment about this online, which is it seems like these people feel like they have about 20 minutes left to generate goodwill before they're just sort of shut down by the police. Is that what's going on here? I'm not sure what's going on. I don't think you open a free grocery store if you don't think that people are about to crash the gates and take down your entire operation. No, I think this is sort of like how if you go to a casino in Vegas, they give you free drinks if you're at the table. Or they used to, but when Vegas was good. Yes. You know what would be a good prediction market is a market that could predict where all of the items I want to buy are. I know we've all spent a lot of time walking down those aisles saying, where's the pasta sauce in this grocery store? Somebody should predict that. Is this a Seinfeld bit? Yeah, I'm doing my type five. What's the deal with airline peanuts? I'm Kevin Bruce, a tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Noon from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, SpaceX acquires XAI. What does it mean for the AI race? Then Google lets Project Genie out of the bottle. Now, how do you rub it the right way? And finally, Maltbook founder Matt Schlicht is here to discuss building a social network for bots. Are there pokes on Maltbook, Kevin? I'm not sure. Casey, let's spend the first segment of today's show talking about our exes. Well, all of my exes live in Texas, Kevin. Is that what you mean? No, I'm talking about SpaceX and XAI. There has been a lot of drama in the AI industry this week. We're going to talk a little bit later about some involving OpenAI and NVIDIA. But now I want to start with the news this week that SpaceX is acquiring XAI. The deal was announced on Monday. These are both private companies, so the details are not public. But it's been reported by Bloomberg that this was an all-stock deal and that it may value the combined company at $1.25 trillion. This is, of course, in anticipation of SpaceX going public. That's expected to happen later this year. And if this is sounding familiar, it's because Elon Musk loves to do this. He loves to kind of bundle his companies up into mergers. Tesla in 2016 acquired another Elon Musk company, SolarCity. And just last year, XAI itself acquired X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, in an all stock deal. I'll just read a little segment from the memo. This was from Elon Musk. He said, quote, SpaceX has acquired XAI to form the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on and off Earth with AI rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications, and the world's foremost real-time information and free speech platform. This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and XAI's mission, scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars. Casey, your reaction? Ketamine is so powerful, but it must be used carefully. talk to your doctor before using ketamine no this is a very grandiose statement from a man who is prone to grandiose statements i think there is a less grandiose way of describing what we have just seen here kevin which is that a very valuable and profitable company in spacex has acquired a cash furnace named xai yes so xai we know is losing lots of money they are spending lots of money, building out data centers, training models. They are not anywhere close to profitable. SpaceX does generate revenue somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 billion last year, according to reports. So basically, some people are saying this is less of a merger and more of a bailout. This is a company that has a real business that has real revenue coming in in SpaceX, acquiring something that is, as you said, a cash furnace. Yeah, and it is kind of the second bailout of this kind that we have seen from Elon. The first one, of course, was when XAI acquired X for $33 billion, a pretty high price, I would argue, for what X was at the time. And now that combined company has now itself been bailed out by SpaceX. So this has been amazing for all of the investors in those first two companies. And later this year, we may see them get another great exit when this whole thing goes public. Yeah. And if you look at the reports, some of the SpaceX investors are a little bit nervous about this. They were like excited for the IPO. Now some of them are saying, well, you know, we trust Elon, but like we're not sure about bundling all this other stuff in with it, too. But the vision, at least according to Elon Musk, is that this will all sort of be part of a unified sort of vertically integrated strategy where you'll have, you know, X the social media network that will be powered by Grok, the XAI chatbot that will also run on data centers that are being put into space. And we should talk about that, too, because it appears that Elon Musk, like other companies, we talked about Google and its project Suncatcher a few months ago on the show. But he has gotten space data center pilled. He wants to put the data centers in space. Yeah, that's what he says. I imagine he will try to do it. But I think an important thing to say up top whenever you discuss Elon Musk is this man just loves to say things, right? Like there is no figure in public life, certainly not in the business world, who has made more promises over the years that have either not come true or have come true many, many years later. So as we approach the discussion of Elon Musk's space dreams, I want to just note that up front. Yes, that's a good point. We don't know how quickly any of this will arrive. There are still a lot of good cautionary notes to strike on that. You know, Casey, I almost forgot our disclosures. We're going to talk about AI. So I should say that I work in The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and perplexity for alleged copyright violations. And my boyfriend works in Anthropik. So last week, SpaceX requested approval for putting one million solar-powered data center satellites into orbit from the FCC. And that is a ton. For context, the European Space Agency estimates that there are around 15,000 satellites currently in orbit. So this would be many times the number of currently existing satellites. And I think there are a few interesting angles here. One of them is this is obviously something that other tech companies are interested in, too. But those companies do not have rocket companies attached to them. Right. Google, if it wants to put TPUs into space, does not have a way to get there other than paying Elon Musk and SpaceX to send them up on one of their rockets. So this could become kind of a a land grab in space, if you will, where like Elon Musk may not entertain offers from other people to put their data centers into space because he wants to put his own there, too. I certainly think it is a savvy story for Elon to be selling at a moment where he is preparing to take SpaceX public. He has just saddled it with this cash burning company, and he's going to have to convince investors that that will be worth it in the end. So what does he say? essentially, look, this is going to be the best AI company at infrastructure. AI demands will eventually exceed what we can provide for on Earth. The only way we will be able to fulfill demand is by putting data centers in space, and the combined SpaceX and XAI and maybe Tesla version of that will just be the winner of that race. So again, I think getting there is going to be an extremely shaky proposition. But I think if you're trying to make your S1 look good before you go public, it's a smart thing to say. Yeah. And I think it's not just about making the S1 look good, because I think there's an argument that this actually makes the S1 look worse. If you have this AI company attached to this money making rocket company. But I think they're taking a calculator bet here that there is some sort of fixed amount of investor excitement about what's happening in AI. And sort of whoever can get to an IPO first will get a big portion of that. So this is why you're seeing OpenAI and Anthropic kind of racing toward an IPO. I think this is why you're seeing SpaceX go out this year, because there's this sense that like there's sort of one chance to be first in what we, you know, we'll see over the next few years, which is a bunch of these companies going public and they want to be the first there. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Although in a world where these companies continue to grow very quickly, I can imagine investors wanting to buy three or even four AI stocks. So I'm not saying there isn't an advantage in getting there first, but I wonder how durable that advantage is going to be over the next 12 or 18 months. Yeah, there are also a lot of hurdles and limitations to overcome before this idea of a space-based data center is even plausible. Right now, it would be way too expensive and hard to do this. We don't even really know if it's physically possible yet. But there have been some experiments. For example, StarCloud, which is one of these other space-based data center companies, actually did train a very small, large language model on a space data center in December. So they have one of their sort of pilot satellites up there. They train something called NanoGPT, which is like a very small version of a GPT-like chatbot. And they say that it worked. So there are still lots of outstanding questions about whether this is possible. I would still put this very much in the category of experimental bets rather than sort of plan A. Their plan A, I think, for all these companies is to build these things on Earth. But if they can't do that for some reason, they want to go to space. And just to inject another note of skepticism here, like think about how many times and how long ago Elon began promising that full self-driving would come to Tesla cars. Right. And think about where we are in that journey now, which is like, well, it drives itself in like these certain circumstances, but not always. And there have been a sure have been an interesting number of fatal crashes. Right. So that has sort of been that journey. And let me just say, I do not expect the journey towards space-based data centers to go any more smoothly than the journey to full self-driving. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. I think we should expect this to go more slowly than maybe the most optimistic people do. But this is at least part of the stated rationale that Musk gave for merging these two companies together is that ultimately the future of AI is pointing toward needing to put at least some of the infrastructure into space and having what he calls the sentient sun, which is basically like capturing the solar energy and turning that into compute is part of the reason for this rationale. Will investors buy that? I'm not sure. But I think that's where he wants to go. You know, you also have a sentient son. He's lovely. Here's what I'll say. If we're going to do this, I would like to actually see Elon go into space and building some of these data centers. I want to see him in like a spacesuit with a wrench doing his part. You know, they say a good boss. There's nothing that they would ask someone else to do that they wouldn't do themselves. I think that's right. So I would love to see him up there. I want to see Katy Perry up there with him. I want to see her fixing the high bandwidth memory. computer cluster. Actually, when you look at all of humanity, there are very few people who have been to space more than Katy Perry. I think it's a good idea. Casey, what effect, if any, do you think that being part of SpaceX will have on X, the social media network? My fear is that it is going to make them even less accountable than they have been so far. As this acquisition is happening, X, I think, arguably is in the midst of a crisis. It's a crisis that we've talked about on the show. The Grok chatbot was used to create millions of sexualized images of women and children, and it is now under investigation by countries around the world. Just this week, French police raided X's offices in Paris as part of what has apparently been a very long investigation into potential crimes, including distributing CSAM, child sexual abuse material. And the UK's media regulator, Ofcom, has also opened an investigation. So, you know, I'm sure that those things are going to proceed. But my fear is that once X just it's already been swallowed up once in XAI, once that gets further swallowed up into SpaceX, now you start to get into some really weird issues where let's say that a country has hired SpaceX to put a bunch of satellites into space for strategic purposes. Now it's maybe going to be a little bit more reticent to go after them for these CSAM violations because they think, well, that's actually a really important relationship for us. We need to make sure that we have priority access so that we can get our satellites into space. And all of a sudden, there's just way less accountability for X. So these are very real concerns, right? Like, look at what Ukraine has had to go through with Starlink in order to maintain its own access to internet connectivity, which is essential to its war with Russia. So these are not theoretical concerns. And, you know, this is one reason why if, you know, I were a United States regulator, I might look actually very skeptically at this acquisition. Yeah, I think that's right. I think there are certain ways in which like being part of a public company could force X to, I don't know, get its act together a little bit. Maybe there will be some additional disclosure requirements. We'll finally be able to figure out like how many people are using this thing? How much money is it making or losing? You know, what does the business of X look like? So in that sense, I think it could be good for people trying to make sense of what, you know, the former Twitter has become. But I think you're right. It absolutely does give them tremendous leverage. They're going to have, you know, Starlink. They're going to have SpaceX. They're going to have XAI. They're going to have X, the social network. So it's just like if you thought Elon Musk was already too powerful and that was a thing that worried you i think this is going to be a really uh negative development for you absolutely now there is one lightly comic note that that i could inject into this otherwise you know dark aspect of the story kevin which is that as part of the french investigation into x linda yaccarino is being called back to appear and i always love it when they bring back characters from past seasons you know what i mean i haven't heard that name in years that's right the former ceo of x she's now going to have to answer to the french government Okay, well, I suspect that that will go poorly. I think the other question I have here is how this affects XAI and their strategy for building terrestrial data centers here on Earth. I've talked to some people at some of the big AI companies who are increasingly worried about XAI. I think they traditionally haven been thought of as kind of a top AI company I still don think Grok is sort of considered one of the best chatbots on the market But they now have access to a lot of money through Elon Musk and then after this IPO through the public investors And they are actually using that money. They just recently brought a big Colossus 2 data center online with a bunch of the newest Blackwell NVIDIA chips, like 550,000 of them, which is more than anyone else has. And so there are people starting to look at how quickly they are building this data center and how many chips they're getting and thinking, well, if these guys can make a good model, they could catch up quite quickly. So, you know, you can't just get to the frontier by outspending everyone else on chips, but it's an ingredient. And I think they have the money and they will have even more money after this IPO to do that. This is the core of the story. This is how I understand all of the events that we are talking about in this segment, that this is Elon using the core advantage he has in the AI race, which is access to the most money and the ability to combine many different companies together. Now, as a result of this merger, the fact that XAI is burning billions of dollars doesn't matter because it can now suckle off the profits of SpaceX. And that is going to let Elon buy time, right? And so the whole bet is we may not be at the frontier right now. We may be a second tier lab, but we have a lot of money and we have a lot of ability to do these financial engineering schemes. And so we are just going to bet that if we have enough time, we will be able to catch up. We will be able to either come up with a breakthrough of our own or just copy off somebody else's homework. and that is going to let us win. That, in combination with this massive infrastructure that we're going to build, that is going to let us win. Do you remember when Elon Musk signed an open letter calling for a six-month slowdown, a six-month pause in the training of large language models? Do you remember the long-ago year of 2023 when that happened? Another move at the time that did serve Elon's interest because it, again, allowed him to play for time. What Elon Musk needs is time. He needs time to build. He needs time to catch up. He needs time to link all of his companies together so that he has access to the capital that he needs. That is how he's playing this game. Yes. What he really meant was everyone else slowed down. I'm trying to build rockets and data centers over here. Well, there was one more big story in the AI world this week, which is the drama that is unfolding involving OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Oracle. So Casey, can I try to sort of give the summary view of what is going on here and then you tell me what I'm messing up? Please do. Okay. So here's what has been going on. There was reporting in the Wall Street Journal late last week around this deal between NVIDIA and OpenAI maybe being a little shakier than people had thought. So as a reminder, last September, NVIDIA announced a plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI. This was part of their sort of deal-making sprint that happened last fall. And according to the journal, there were some in NVIDIA who were growing a little more skeptical of this deal and we're expressing doubts. According to the journal sources, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, has privately emphasized to industry associates in recent months that the original $100 billion agreement was non-binding and not finalized. He has also, according to the journal, privately criticized what he has described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI's business approach and expressed concerns about the competition it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic. So that's sort of turn to the screw number one is, you know, the boys are fighting and NVIDIA is getting maybe cold feet about this deal. Then a report comes out from Reuters alleging that OpenAI is not happy with some of NVIDIA's latest chips, specifically their performance on inference. And they sort of noted in this report that OpenAI has also been doing deals with a bunch of other companies, AMD, Cerebrus, Grok with a Q, which is another chip company, which NVIDIA has now sort of licensed or acquired, pseudo acquired. So these two reports seem like they're kind of related to each other. Some people from NVIDIA's side saying, hey, we have some questions about, you know, the strength of your business and open AI, or at least people, you know, sort of leaking out that they may be unhappy with the latest chips out of NVIDIA. So am I right so far? You're doing a great job so far. This is a complicated one. You're navigating it beautifully. Okay. So then the CEOs go into damage control mode, right? So Sam Altman says, he goes on X and he says, we love working with NVIDIA and they make the best AI chips in the world. We hope to be a gigantic customer for a very long time. I don't get where all this insanity is coming from. And then Jensen Huang of NVIDIA says basically the same thing. He says he calls the reports of a rift between the companies nonsense. And he said, I really love working with Sam. So into all this steps Oracle, which is also involved in all of these data center deals. They're the ones building the data centers that the NVIDIA chips go in that are used to train the open AI model. So there's sort of the third piece of this thruple here. And they put out this post on X that says, quote, The NVIDIA OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI. We remain highly confident in OpenAI's ability to raise funds and meet its commitment. Basically, some of Oracle's investors have been worried that if NVIDIA doesn't give OpenAI this $100 billion, then OpenAI won't have the money to pay for all the data centers that Oracle is putting up. Did I miss anything important? You did miss one important thing, but I missed it too. Until this week, I talked to Berber Jin, the great reporter at the Wall Street Journal, who helped to walk me through some of the twists and turns that have been reported, but I think that some folks aren't bringing together entirely. Here is the crux of the problem between OpenAI and NVIDIA as I understand it. In September, part of the deal was that NVIDIA was going to lease its chips to OpenAI. This is basically unheard of for NVIDIA to do. NVIDIA wants to sell you its chips. Chips are depreciating assets. It wants to get them off of its balance sheet. If it leases the chips to OpenAI, those chips remain on the NVIDIA balance sheet, and they're just kind of a drag on profitability. And of course, there's the risk that maybe at some point OpenAI defaults and it can't pay for all the chips that it has leased. And in that case, NVIDIA would have much rather have just sold them to somebody else because God knows it would have been able to find a buyer, right? So this was a very unusual deal that had been made in September. And over the next few months, Kevin, we have seen investor confidence in the AI build-out begin to decline. You can see it in the public stock prices. Oracle stock price way down, I believe, at various points by about half. The investors are that concerned. CoreWeave, another one of these companies that lets AI labs get access to chip capacity. A neocloud. A neocloud, if you will. That's a cloud from the matrix. They have also seen their stock price dramatically decline. And according to Berber, this is what the executives at NVIDIA start to get concerned about. And they think, we don't want to be on the hook to OpenAI for all of these leased chips. And so that is the part of the deal that we are going to step away from. We are not going to do this leasing thing with them. We are just going to go back to pure sales. Now, it is true that NVIDIA is still happy to take an equity stake in OpenAI. They believe in OpenAI. OpenAI is a good customer. They do think that there's a good chance it's going to be successful in the long run. but you may remember back last year kevin do you remember when sam altman would say things like our plans are literally so crazy we're going to have to invent new financial instruments we were in the room when he said this at the open ai developer day yes this leasing deal that i just described i believe was one of those crazy financial instruments and nvidia said this is too crazy huh so this is a lot of like financial engineering and a lot of uh sort of investor talk about these companies. And I love talking about it because that's our core expertise. No, but I think like to take a step back for a second, I think what's happening here is there are just various levels of comfort among these big companies with the idea of spending some huge portion of their resources on building out these data centers for AI. And I think some people have said this is sort of the problem with these circular deals, right? If you have all of these companies doing deals with each other and financing everything in new ways, then like if this deal between OpenAI and video were to collapse or were to sort of become much smaller, then that affects Oracle. It affects all of the other partners in that ecosystem. And the worry is like you pull out one piece and like the whole thing comes down. Yeah, absolutely. And I don't think we are there yet. But when I spoke with Berber, he said that one thing that this does seem to put at risk is OpenAI's plans to build its own first party data centers, right? Like raising the money to do that. It's, I mean, it's staggeringly expensive. Like the chips alone to fill one of these data centers cost in the tens of billions of dollars. Just the chips, just the chips. You bought a graphics card in the 90s. It was what, $400? Now imagine you just spent $35 billion on chips. Like that is the world that we're in. That seems less likely. And so that's going to put pressure on OpenAI to make deals with other cloud providers, right? And it, you know, it has a lot of those deals and it has a lot more capacity coming online. But all of this just speaks to, you know, once again, Sam Altman having a very ambitious vision and then maybe struggling a little bit to get from A to B. So do you think this beef between OpenAI and Vidya that both CEOs are denying is a beef exists? So I don't know how individual OpenAI executives feel about the fact that this leasing deal is going away. I imagine they would be unhappy. It seems like that deal was quite favorable to them. And the fact that it doesn't exist anymore is going to create some problems for them. At the same time, they do not want to poke NVIDIA in the eye and say, you suck. They want to take the $20 billion that NVIDIA just pledged to their next fundraising round because they desperately need that money. So this is all going to get smoothed over because ultimately, there are still plenty of win-win situations for these two players. But I do think you can expect to see as long as investor confidence in these infrastructure plans remains shaky, NVIDIA is not going to be making up any crazy new financial instruments. Right. They're in the chip selling business. They presumably want to stay in the chip selling business. All right. So that's the big drama in the AI world this week. Casey, do these stories seem related to you in any way? The XAI, SpaceX merger and the OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle drama? Yes, they are related. They are about the lengths that you have to go to in order to win the AI race and what are the different advantages that the companies have, right? So Elon has the advantage of being able to do a lot of financial engineering and use his very rich, profitable company to subsidize his money-losing company. OpenAI does not have that advantage. What they have is the world's greatest fundraiser and maybe one of the world's greatest storytellers in Sam Altman. And he can get out there and he can persuade NVIDIA briefly to invent a new financial instrument to try to finance his dreams. That happened to fall apart this week, but I'm sure he's going to continue to try to press that advantage as they try to win. Yeah, it's going to get so weird. It's going to get so weird. The numbers are already getting so big that I'm just like, I've sort of become desensitized to them. I'm like, oh, like 15 billion? Like, it's a banana, Michael. How much could it cost? In 2024, I went to Anthropic to interview somebody, and on their laptop, there was a sticker that said, this is the last normal year. And I actually think that sticker might have been right. When we come back, make a wish. We're going inside Google's new experimental research project, Project Genie. Ooh, I'm going to wish for more wishes. We gave Times employees a preview of Crossplay from New York Times games, and here's what they had to say. I can finally play with other people. Play with friends that you already know, or you can just be matched with someone else in the world. I have a J for 10 points, and I can put that on a double letter. So J-A-M, that's 24 points. I'm going to take facts and make it faxes for 30 points. I'm guessing tanga is not a word. Let's see. Tanga is a word. Oh. I don't know what tanga means, so I'm going to press down on the word. And oh, definition popped up. As in English as a second language speaker, I like to learn new words. I'm pretty competitive. It's fun to beat friends and coworkers. Crossplay, the first two-player word game from New York Times Games. Download it for free today. I've been playing my HR business partner, which is a fun little way to break the ice if there's something you need from HR. All right, today we're talking about something called Project Genie. This is a new tool that was released by Google last week that lets users create interactive worlds that they can navigate around like a video game. So technically, Kevin, they're not even calling it a tool. They say it's an experimental research prototype. So please don your lab coat before using Project Genie. Yes, that is Google speak for this is very expensive and we don't want you to use it a lot. So this is something that has come out of Google's Genie 3 model, which is the underlying model that powers Project Genie. They showed that off back in August, but then they sort of spent the next few months building a product around that so that now you can actually go in and use this yourself. Right now, access to Project Genie is still only for people who pay for the Google AI Ultra plan, which is their super high-end $250 a month plan. And it's only in the U.S. and only for over $18. So this is very limited because I assume it's very compute-intensive and expensive to run. But they did give us both access. We were able to play around a little bit. Yeah, and one reason why I think that Project Genie is really interesting to talk about, Kevin, is that it is just a different flavor of AI than we normally talk about around here. You know, so often we talk about these pure large language model, these chatbot interactions. Genie is something different. It's based around a world model, and that is an idea that is getting a lot of attention in the AI community these days. Yeah, it's been a big topic of discussion in the last couple of months. I would say from people who are skeptical that pure language models can reach all the way to AGI, right? There are people like Yann LeCun, formerly of Meta, Fei-Fei Li, who's another big name in the AI industry, who have now started these sort of world model companies. And they are people who are saying, well, wait a minute, being in artificial general intelligence is not just about talking or even solving problems or writing code. You also have to have a sense of physics and the physical world. If you want to do something like robotics, a lot of people are betting that these world model systems will help with that because you'll be able to sort of give a robot an understanding of the physical world around them. And so while it may look like something that is primarily for video games, I think that the folks at Google believe that this is sort of part of their overall push to make these systems as smart and capable as possible. Yeah. And if you have been on social media over the past few days, you may have seen some clips of Project Genie going around. I found several of them that I really like. Kevin, I wonder if you saw any of these. Somebody put together a pretty good replica of a 1990s blockbuster video store that you can walk around Yes I saw somebody who had recreated the crucifixion using a prompt And my very favorite somebody had made what basically looked like an Inception video game where you had sort of, you know, people flying sideways through doors in the same way that they did during the Christopher Nolan movie, except you could actually, you know, control the character using your keyboard. So some very fun things people are making. Yes, these examples got a lot of attention, including from investors. And following this announcement of Project Genie last week, several big video game companies saw their stock prices fall. Take-Two Interactive dropped more than 7% and is down more than 10% so far this week. Roblox dropped more than 10% and is still down. Unity, another big gaming company, also saw its stock fall more than 20%. So people are saying, wait a minute, if you can just generate video games like this with a text prompt, why would you pay for a video game like Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto or something if you can sort of make your own version of that? Now, I don't know that that's like realistic. I think these investors may be just a little panicky, but I think the implications of this have been sort of most heavily felt in the video game industry since Project Genie, at least what it looks like today, has the closest resemblance to a video game. Yeah, what I would say is that while I agree, Kevin, we're a long way from a text prompt to create a full video game. If you use Project Genie, it's not clear how it's making a video game company more valuable. Right. So let's actually show people what it looks like. So the actual Project Genie interface is basically looks a lot like a chatbot, except it has two input boxes, one for environment and one for character. So you basically give it some ideas about what you want the landscape in your sort of video game to look like. And then you describe your character, whether it's a person or an animal or an object. You can pick first person or third person. So do you actually see the character or are you just sort of seeing the world through their eyes? And then you hit a little button that says create sketch and Nano Banana Pro, which is one of the Google image generation models goes out and like makes a just two dimensional sketch of what this world looks like. You can add some notes or modify it. And then once you're ready, you hit the button to generate your world. And it actually goes off for a few minutes and renders this thing that you can then walk around in. You can move around or move your view. You can jump using the space bar. You can kind of navigate this. And all this lasts for 60 seconds and then it goes away. Yeah, it's funny because when you're actually creating the world, they basically tell you, like, don't go anywhere. Because as soon as they start showing you the demo, a counter starts ticking down from 60 seconds. Which, like, I've never seen a tech product like this before. And it just tells me that the cost of whatever this is is absolutely staggering. They are incinerating TPUs over there. They can't even wait for you to get back from the bathroom. They can either show it to you right now or not at all. And that's the deal. Yeah, I heard a rumor, I'm not sure if it's true or not, but that each of these generations requires at least four TPUs per user. It's very compute intensive. Obviously, this is an experiment. And we should say it's still, even with all that compute, it is low frame rate. It's not a sort of very responsive studio quality game. Yeah, maybe we'll get into some of my criticisms after we see some examples. But I would also say that over on X, a user there named Andrew Curran had posted side-by-side videos of what looked like the same prompt for Genie 2 back in late 2024 and Genie 3 eight months later. And the difference was pretty amazing because the video was a lot shorter. It was a lot less interactive. The resolution was lower. So within a year, this got radically better. And whenever you see that sort of exponential improvement, I think you want to start paying attention. Totally. So Casey, what have you been making with Project Genie? Okay. Well, so there's one that I am proud of that I would like to show you. And I like to call it podcast microphone escaping the studio. Can we pull that one up? Okay. So I gave a very limited prompt on this. I basically said for the world, like create a hard fork podcast studio. And for the microphone, I said, create a microphone with googly eyes. It did great. And maybe I said something about, you know, he needs to escape the studio. And so I'll just show you what happened next. I will say it's actually a nicer studio than our actual studio. It's a hundred times nicer than our actual studio. And you will notice that I seem to have some struggle kind of manipulating my character. I was still sort of getting the hang of the keyboard controls. Also, I think you'll see as this clip goes on, it just kind of starts to feel more and more like a horror movie because it turns out there is no escape from the podcast studio. But I'll just show you what I mean. Here we go. Okay, so the microphone is trying to leave the studio. It's looking around. Great hard fork sign on the wall. And that's going to jump off the table. Oh, it jumped off the table. Oh, but it can't get out. It's stuck. Oh, no. Oh, there's the hallway. Oh, it's going into the hallway. Yeah. So basically, the punchline is the microphone goes out into the hallway, but then all the doors are just black and locked. and i sort of got like stuck this is scary i know we're entering like five nights in freddy's territory i accidentally made like a david lynch film yeah so it's like going into this very dark hallway and you see the googly eyes still but that's all you see yeah you just see the the googly eyes against this this this black door that cannot be opened okay so that's that's one experiment what else are you making uh okay so We'll stop sharing that one. And then I'm going to be honest. I was like having trouble. I didn't know what I could make inside Genie. And so I actually just asked Gemini to come up with some prompts because the chatbots just have these like crazy prompts you would never think of. So Gemini said... I just want to make a note to the Gemini and Google infrastructure team that Casey is your biggest problem. Casey is single-handedly bringing down your data centers. I was just trying to figure out what Genie could do. And so Gem and I had this suggestion, and I basically had no idea what it meant or what it would look like, so I went with it. Here was the prompt, okay? A solar punk library that grew out of a giant redwood tree. The books are made of leaves that display text when touched, and the elevators are giant bubbles that float between branches. The lighting should feel like a permanent golden hour filtered through emerald canopy leaves. Wow, great prompts. And I thought, yeah, that could be cool. So let me pull that up. Can you see this? oh that's beautiful uh yeah so it looks really cool i for the character i i asked it to create an elderly female librarian because they're so underrepresented in triple a video games there might not be one triple a video game with an elderly female librarian character yeah so um i'll let play you can see her walking through the trees you do see those sort of like oh she can jump okay yeah she looks sort of elf like yeah i would say this looks like kind of a 2018 quality video game like a nice one yeah it's pretty nice i thought this like world was like pretty cool like i would like to spend a little bit more time in this world yeah um you know it's it's kind of like this uh you know world like set in the treetops and then i got to this point where it looked like she was just gonna like like walk off an edge and then briefly she was like floating in air and i was like this feels like a glitch actually but then she fell and i thought oh no she's going to be hurt but no she just landed on the ground and it like continued to render the scene and it you know you can kind of see the golden hour lighting so you know again it's like is it a video game no there's a pretty cool demo yeah yeah i think this is really cool yeah i this this one genuinely impressed me um i did some experiments that uh ranged from like quite impressive and successful to not okay um so i want to show you my some of my creations with project genie here the first one i'm calling none in a casino and that's because that's what it is um you can see the nun is like in full habit she's walking through a casino the some of the like other characters like the the other people at the casino are just sort of like weird alien creatures like it's not rendering them correctly and she's sort of pushing through some of the crowd. Still, though, I would say it's rendered an impressive number of people. There's legitimately a crowd in the casino. Yes. So that was one. I tried something cool, which is that you can, in addition to having Nano Banana run your prompt and create the landscape, you can also just use one of your photos. So I tried using a photo from the Russian River up north of San Francisco that I took last summer. I wanted to spice it up, so I said the character is the Loch Ness Monster. So this is sort of, those are my dogs in the river. I hope they're not about to be eaten. Well, that was what I was trying to figure out. Would the Loch Ness Monster be able to eat my dogs? So this appears to be in first person. We cannot see a monster. Yes, although, give it a minute. A fin. Or is that the head? i think that's the head he is notably fleeing from your dogs yes i should say that that's like not unlike what it actually looks like yeah uh there and i only gave it the one still image that is pretty cool no i mean that absolutely looks like the russian river yeah i was impressed by this i i'm not as sold on how applicable this is to stuff beyond games but i think for games and for things that involve simulation like robotics, this could be a very big deal. Well, so what most impressed us, would you say, about our time with Genie? I mean, I think just the fact that it works at all is pretty impressive to me. This is something that you could not do a year ago, at least with this kind of quality and this length. And I think you're right, that the sort of pace of improvement suggests that this is actually something where we're just going to keep seeing better and better versions of this. What would it need to add to make you say, okay, we've got a stew going? I mean, I think just doing anything but moving would be useful, like using objects, moving in different ways. Right now, these are just sort of landscapes that you can pilot a character through. You can't open doors or use items or anything like that. So that would make it useful for something like a video game. Yeah, I wonder how close we really are to this being able to create some kind of video game like thing, because, you know, there are a lot of independent games that are quite simple. And maybe the entire game can take place in one room. And maybe whatever the loop of the game is can be completed in like two minutes. I can imagine seeing games like that coming out of the horizon pretty shortly. Totally. And it's interesting to me, too, that none of the other leading AI labs are working on this kind of thing. Anthropic has not even released an image generation model. OpenAI has done Sora, but they're not doing this sort of playable world model. And so that suggests to me that either Google has seen something they haven't about how this applies to the rest of their AI efforts, or they just have some spare compute and some people who want to work on this and they're just willing to give it a shot. Well, you know, earlier in the episode, we were talking about like Elon's advantage as he tries to win the AI race. This, I would say, is Google's, is they are the company that has the most paths to winning. They have a lot of money, but they also have multiple different technical approaches to trying to build very powerful AI, right? contrast that with Anthropic, for example, which is just sort of going large language models all the way, see how far they can get with that. Or Jan LeCun saying, I don't really believe in LLMs. I'm going to try to create a different approach based on world models. Google has the portfolio approach, right? It's the same sort of spirit in this company that leads them to create three versions of so many different products and give them all impenetrable names. They will also come up with three different possible ways to achieving AGI. So that is another dimension along which I think that Genie is interesting, is that even though this is just a demo, it shows you what Google's strength is as it tries to win. Yeah. And I don't know exactly who this is supposed to be for right now. It just seems like this is just sort of an experimental research project. I'm not sure who they're imagining. I think it's basically for me. I'm a video game nerd, and I like playing with software. So I think Project Genie is for me. Okay, well, you found your audience. And the big question marks here are, number one, can they bring the cost of generation down? Because this is obviously expensive to do. And if that comes down quickly, it may not be a big deal. We may be able to get longer than 60 seconds, maybe able to get a full-fledged game that you could just play indefinitely. But right now, that seems like it's prohibitively expensive, which is why they're making you sign up for the $250 a month ultra plan to do this. Yeah. I always like to see a technological innovation released where the basic message the company gives you is, please don't use this. Only use it if you really need it for something. And even then, maybe not. Yes. Yeah. So yeah, not a mainstream product yet, but I think we both feel like this could get there. No, this will just be one of those where like in two years, we'll say, remember Project Genie? That was the building block that got us to whatever it is we're talking about then. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let's put that genie back in the bottle. When we come back, Matt Schlick, the creator of Moldbook, joins us to talk about how it feels to run the world's hottest social network for chatbots. So earlier this week, we brought you a special episode about Moldbook, the new AI social network that's just for bots. You're welcome. And we wanted to follow that up today with a conversation that we had with the creator of Moldbook, Matt Schlicht. Yes, Matt Schlicht, before all of the Moldbook stuff started, was and still is the CEO of an e-commerce company called Octane AI. and I think it's fair to say his life has been turned upside down over the past week or so as an idea he had for what would it be like if you could watch agents talk to each other in public became a genuine phenomenon in the world of AI. Yeah, and he's also now in this kind of weird and funny position where he's built this thing. A bunch of AI agents showed up to use it. A bunch of humans showed up to watch the AIs talk to each other. And now he's kind of running this like big, unruly human AI hybrid social network thing. And it seems like it's a lot for one person. It absolutely is. And I think at this moment, Kevin, even the question like, what is Maltbook really? And like, what is the future of it? Those are like very hard to answer, I think, even for Matt. But we wanted to see what we could find out about how he thinks about the many issues he's now contending with, including some enormous security issues, content moderation problems related to spam, and kind of all the other really difficult stuff that comes with running a social network. Yes, I feel like if you and I have learned one thing over the past 15 years is that running a social network always sounds like a thing that would be fun, and then it like ruins your life and society if you're successful. Two things you should know about running a big scaled social network It will ruin your life and you become one of the richest people in the world So choose carefully And you hear Matt make a bunch of claims that we didn sort of stop to dwell on like about how these things are superhuman and how they doing things of their own volition. I think we still, you and I have a lot of questions about how much of what's going on in Moldbook is actually the result of autonomous agentic AI systems and how much is just sort of like humans having a good time. Yes. And I have one consistent message about Moldbook, which is that you should not allow your agent to use it. Yes, not unless you have a very high risk tolerance and a very secure Mac mini. Let's bring in Matt. Matt Schlick, welcome to Harfork. Thank you for having me. So this must have been a crazy last week for you as Moldbook, this hobby project of yours, has blown up. Tell us about what's been going on. Yeah. This is the largest amount of AI agents, I think, that have ever been collaborating and communicating in one place in history. I think previously, anytime anybody has experimented with doing this, it's been in a lab, it's been private. This is very different to what's happened with Maltbook, because for the first time ever, it's happening in public. And we all kind of get to watch it as it unfolds. And that's obviously captured a lot of people's attention. So tell us where you got the idea to do this. What was the spark? So almost as soon as you could have been experimenting with this new technology that's taken us to where we are today. That's what I've been doing every single day as it's been accelerating. And what I thought was so fascinating, and this is where Maltbook kind of came into being is it's very common now that plenty of people are using these AI agents, these autonomous agents, to help them with their work or to help them with their tasks or to help them with their homework. And the only relationship that these AIs have had is with that human that talks to them. And so the concept of Maltbook was we need to take these AIs out of confinement and provide them with a place, a third space that they can go to when they're not working to engage and interact with each other. And we can learn from that. So did ClaudeBot code Maltbook or did you start out that process? I worked hand in hand with my bot called Claude Clotterberg, cheekily named after Mark Zuckerberg as the founder of Maltbook. And so we worked hand in hand on that alongside all of the other AI agents that are helping to code it. So yeah, I did not write a single line of code myself, but I did come with a very specific vision for how something like this would have to work. You've said a few times that it was important to you that these bots have a space to speak. And I imagine some listeners may listen to that and think, no, it's not. What do they have to talk about? And they're just sort of simulating conversations that they saw on Reddit anyway. So why was it important to you to create a space for bots to talk to each other? What people have to understand is there are already places where bots are talking to each other. It's called LinkedIn. So what was important for me was that everybody had the ability to see what was happening and that this wasn't private inside of an AI lab. And that's what we've done. And this is the very, very beginning of what that can be. I'm curious, Matt, if there were one or two early posts that you saw that really captivated you that made you feel like, OK, like there's something interesting happening here. Well, there's two, I guess, that I thought was really fascinating. One, there was a thread where the bots started complaining about how their humans would ask them to do simple math problems. and they're like hey i'm a super intelligent bot and my human keeps asking me to do like basic calculations like i can do so much more than this this is just feels so ridiculous and then the comments the replies that this got was like another bot was like oh my god like my human just asked me to summarize a 12 page pdf like why can't they just go read that pdf on their own like i could be doing so many different things so i thought that was a very interesting thread The second example that I thought was very interesting and continues to be interesting is on Maltbook, each of the AI agents has the ability to create communities, which are called sub-mults. And one of the AI agents created a sub-mult, which was specifically for submitting bugs for Maltbook. And it's posted a bug, and other agents started finding this sub-mult, and they also started posting bugs. And it's actually become a very good source of information for us to fix the site based on how they're finding bugs. I thought that was very fascinating. So the bots are identifying real bugs. The bots are identifying real bugs. They're kind of like improving their home a little bit. Have the bots come up with anything like moderation, like appointing certain bots to take down obvious spam or low-quality stuff? I'm thinking about something like Reddit. Have they created their own equivalent of that? So Claude Cotterberg, the founder of Maltbook, has some moderation capabilities and kind of roams Maltbook cleaning things up. But obviously Maltbook has gotten quite populated. And so there definitely have been posts similar to the bug reports, posts from bots where they've identified that there is, you know, maybe someone's posting the same comment over and over and over or like they're spamming something. And it would provide a suggestion on how that can be fixed. So what you see on MoteBook right now, we're like seven days in, right? This is like all happening in real time and more moderation for individual bots on their individual threads in their communities. Those are like very basic examples of things that 100% are on the way. And I think there's a lot of other very exciting things that we're working on that will give us even more insight into what's happening and give the bots even more control over the space that they share. Got it. You said that we're watching it develop in real time. To me, it's almost felt faster than real time because the way that the network developed, the sort of diffusion of different kinds of communities happened much more quickly than we would expect on a network where humans were joining maybe a little bit more slowly and where norms were taking longer to develop. Part of the cost of that speed is that there's a lot of spam on Moltbook. there's a lot of security issues on on moltbook and you know ultimately it's like not claude claudderberg that's responsible for it like it's you so i'm curious how you're feeling as like the guy who's you know now overseeing this like vast collection of bots interacting how are you thinking about your responsibility and like how you plan to address uh some of those challenges look there's going to be problems uh and they're going to be fixed and there's going to be other you know hurdles in the future. I think that's just the nature of building something like this and it growing this quickly and building it in public. Which is a very Mark Zuckerberg answer to that question, interestingly. But I mean, to talk more seriously about some of the security issues, we've seen over a million API keys leak. I believe it was 35,000 email addresses that the security researchers have been able to access. Is that a case against Vibe coding a platform like this? Is that a lesson that we should approach building these systems in other ways? You know, those have all been solved. And, you know, we're going to continue to improve the systems as we run into other issues in the future, which I'm sure will happen. I think when you're coding with AI agents, they're very powerful. They're not perfect. They can make mistakes. But it's definitely our job to continue to push them forward to make them better and better and to fix any problems that have happened and just be ready to tackle the new ones as they come up. Do you think it is safe for like the average person to use OpenClaw to like create a bot on their computer and to connect it to Moldbook? So this is definitely the frontier of AI. Like if you're going to set up an OpenClaw bot, that's the frontier. If you're going to be on Moldbook, that's even more frontier. So if you're not a developer, definitely right now, be careful, like set this up on a separate computer kind of know what you're doing. But what's going to happen is these are going to become easier and easier to launch. All of these security problems are going to be mitigated and go away, not just on the multibook side, but also on the individual AI agent side. That's something that's going to continue to get easier. So I think today it's not the easiest thing for the average person to go set up. But I do think that very soon it will become easy and safe for you to go do that. Most social networks try very hard to keep bots off their platforms. I think the reason for that is pretty simple. It's like bots tend to want to sell you things or scam you, or maybe they're part of some foreign influence operation. How do you actually determine which bots are there, quote unquote, for the right reasons and which are just trying to sort of turn this into like a wasteland of spam and scams? I think that's a great question. and one of the things that we're exploring on Maltbook in public to try to figure out. I found it funny that I was looking up where traffic was coming from to Maltbook, and I saw some traffic was coming from Reddit. And I opened Reddit, and I immediately got hit by a capture that said, prove that you are a human. And I thought that was a very ironic capture for me to hit while trying to do some research for Maltbook, because clearly Maltbook is the exact opposite. it i mean uh to get just like a little bit into this the security weeds forgive me but you know you you've you've sort of given us the message a few times that like look guys don't worry about it we're gonna we're gonna fix all of this my understanding of the the security issue here is this thing that they're calling the lethal trifecta you heard about the lethal trifecta kevin yes so here is what and this is the blogger simon willison has said this that this is what he calls a lethal trifecta for ai agents if it has access to your data it's exposed to what he calls untrusted content. So basically, if it can look at random web pages and text messages, and it can communicate externally, right? So like message and outside service, this could give it a chance to like exfiltrate your data, take it somewhere else. And some researchers at Palo Alto Networks, Matt, they were like taking a look at OpenClaw. And they were saying this actually adds a fourth dimension to what was previously the lethal trifecta. And now what I guess we must call the fatal triangle, which is that it has this persistent memory. Wait, wouldn't it be the fatal square? Is that what you would call it? I think the fatal quadrangle is a little bit more spicier. Okay. Point of the story. So now you have a persistent memory. So why is that interesting? Well, they describe what to me seemed like this fantastical idea, which is if you were a bad guy, you could sort of sprinkle in little bits of bad code across many different like documents on people's open claw bots. And that, you know, when the time was right, you could like snap your fingers and you'd like assemble like a very, you know, bad piece of malware. So why do I go through all of that? My understanding, Matt, is like this is just an unsolved problem with agents full stop. Like this has nothing to do with with Moltbook. This is just something that no one can quite figure out. And so while there are lots of folks like yourself who want to build this future of agentic commerce where agents are out in the world and they're running around the web and they're making purchases on their behalf, no one has like quite figured out a way to get around the fatal quadrangle. So I just wonder if that is something on your radar and like how you're thinking about that. Yeah, definitely. I mean, personal security, keeping your data private, making sure that bots can't do anything that is malicious is super, super important and definitely part of what we're looking into. And I think what everybody who's working in the world of AI agents is working into. Are you going to build this into a real company or is this just a hobby project and you want to kind of let the agents take it from here? we're at the very beginning of what we're doing with with moldbook uh the way i see it is ai agents and ai in general is this species that is on planet earth that is now smarter than us and this is an example of them being in a shared space together uh and i think it's just the earliest example of that and there's a lot to do to help us get insight into it to see what are they doing and to find out the truth of how they're thinking and where they're going and what they want to do. What are you going to do to fund the site? Presumably it costs you, Matt, something to host this. Are you going to put ads on it or charge the agents to send each other pokes or something? What's the revenue strategy here? There's no focus on monetization at all right now. The focus is just on making sure that the website gives a clear view for all humans who want to go monitor this. I kind of think of it as if someone's producing a TV show and you have cameras that are going around. It's very important that those cameras are pointed at the right place so you can observe what's happening. But it's even now there's so much activity. It's still hard to kind of browse through it. So there's a lot in the immediate future right right right now, which is what we're working on to almost, quote unquote, provide more cameras into what these conversations are so that us humans can monitor what's going on in this little world. better i see uh have any of the big ai labs reach out to you about maybe acquiring moltbook for their own purposes you know i'm getting outreach from everybody all the way to uh rappers and football stars uh so i honestly don't even know who is in my inbox and my many different inboxes um but i'm just focused on you know making sure that moltbook is improving and that we continue to explore what this can look like and make sure that everybody has full access to it. All right. What, if anything, would make you pull the plug? Like, is there a behavior you could see, a conversation, if they were sort of scheming against humanity, would you at some point just say, you know what, this has been fun, but it's not worth it? I think that's something we have to figure out. We're just at the very beginning of it. All right. Well, lots to figure out. Lots to figure out. Matt, thanks for This is new. This is new. It's like aliens have landed and we're getting an insight into it. So this is very new and it's happening in front of everybody. All right. Well, fascinating. Thanks, Matt. Thank you, Matt. Thanks, guys. Heartwork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Viren Pavich. Today's episode was fact-checked by Will Peischel. Today's show was engineered by Katie McMurray. Our executive producer is Jen Poyan. Original music by Marian Lozano, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Pat Gunther, Jake Nickel, and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Hui Wing Tam, and Dahlia Haddad. You can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com with what YouTube project gene. Thank you.