Investment

In January 2026, a social network called Moltbook launched as a platform for AI agents to interact without human interference, quickly generating millions of posts that appeared to show emerging machine consciousness. Industry leaders like Andrej Karpathy from OpenAI called it groundbreaking evidence of AI advancement. The catch: the most viral posts proving “sentience” were written by humans pretending to be AI, including a product manager in Atlanta who spent 22 minutes writing a manifesto that fooled the tech world. MIT Technology Review exposed the hoax, revealing what they called “AI theatre,” but the silence from industry leaders afterward speaks volumes. For investors, the Moltbook incident highlights a critical problem: if the smartest people in AI can’t distinguish between human storytelling and actual machine intelligence, we need better frameworks for evaluating AI claims and should focus on companies generating real revenue from existing technology rather than chasing viral stories about breakthroughs that may be nothing more than clever performances.