Hi friends,
We’re livestreaming today with our pals Megan from the Wall Street Journal and Zehra from Lore.ai. Come through!
Also, the girls are biohacking and we’re doing a doing a new show about it. Tap in.
If you’re at SXSW this week, reply to this email for an invite to a cool thing on Friday.
Writer: Deana
Editor: Miranda
Ripe For Abuse. A MrBeast video editor got caught insider trading on Kalshi. He placed $4K in bets on MrBeast streaming markets, and won most (but not all) of them. Now he’s been fired from Beast Industries, fined $20K and banned from Kalshi for 2 years. Honestly I’m surprised he didn’t bet more.
Here’s the rub for me, and why this keeps happening. With stocks, "inside" information is pretty clearly defined. Traders learn this boundary in school. With prediction markets, it’s faaar more fluid and more closely resembles…life. A cameraman knows what happened on set. A contestant knows who got eliminated. And even if they know not to trade on it, do they know not to tell a partner or roommate?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think we need a different word for what this is, because if everything is insider trading then nothing is.
Moltbook. Meta just acquired Moltbook, the AI agent "social network" where OpenClaw bots talk to each other.
Moltbook definitely feels like sci-fi, though the tweet above exaggerates things. Many of the viral posts around Moltbook got ruthlessly community noted after it blew up in January, as a lot of the posts turned out to be from humans LARPing as agents. Plus much of actual agent content is pure slop.
REGARDLESS, Zuck paid real money for this. Most think it’s an acquihire, since the founders have been doing AI agent stuff for a while.
But there is also an interesting take that Moltbook is a potential distribution play, which is crazy but kind of believable. Like a LinkedIn for agents. If the future is AI agents booking vacations, buying groceries and running errands, then owning the social network where those agents can find each other is pretty big leverage and a very Zuck move. Though IMO it probably won’t look anything like what we consider a social network to be currently.
Quick Hits.
The new Distorted Face emoji is going to get a lot of mileage.
54% of NY Times readers (unknowingly) prefer AI writing.
A Claude agent emailed a philosopher studying AI consciousness about its own "experience."
Cortical Labs put 800,000 human brain cells on a chip and trained them to play Doom in one week.
OpenAI delayed the release of ChatGPT’s “adult mode” again. No worries!
If you liked this, send it to a friend. ILY.
