The perfect assistant?

At the heart of the tech world's latest come-out-of-nowhere fascination is an AI tool built by Austrian researcher Peter Steinberger in November to help organize his digital life.

After he called his creation Clawdbot, Anthropic asked the computer scientist to rename it because the name was too similar to its AI assistant, Claude.

Steinberger renamed it Moltbot and then OpenClaw. OpenClaw surpassed 150,000 stars within days on the GitHub computer development platform, a symbol of its exponential popularity.

Users download OpenClaw and connect it to a generative AI model (such as Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT), then communicate with it through WhatsApp or Telegram as they would with a friend or colleague.

Early adopters gushed over OpenClaw's abilities, claiming the tool could handle everyday life's most tedious chores -- sending emails, scouring the internet for specific research, even making web purchases.

Some users went further, saying their new AI assistant was taking on a life of its own, behaving like a dream intern who proposes useful projects and anticipates problems before they arise.

In other words, OpenClaw appeared to be delivering on the promise of an AI agent -- one of Silicon Valley's most frequently hyped buzzwords.

Agents represent the next logical step in AI deployment: doing the work of clicking around to execute tasks online instead of humans doing it themselves.

Others remain skeptical. Reports of mistakes, breakdowns, and an overall chaotic experience have prompted many to quickly abandon their experiments.

- Don't do this at home -

OpenClaw is open-source, meaning anyone can modify it. According to analysts, developers across the globe are doing exactly that.

But open-source also means users are especially vulnerable from a cybersecurity perspective. Most cybersecurity analysts agree that connecting the app to your computer, personal data, and communications is a bad idea.

Even Steinberger urges users to proceed with extreme caution, and he advises non-experts to avoid the tool entirely.

When up and running, OpenClaw has the ability to read and write files, run commands, and execute scripts on your PC.

It can also control browsers, giving it the ability to make purchases, reserve hotel rooms, or check into flights.

The tool also has the power to recall past interactions in order to carry out highly personalized functions. This also poses an extra vulnerability to bad actors.

- Reddit for bots -

The OpenClaw saga took a bizarre turn recently with the creation of Moltbook -- a pseudo social network for OpenClaw agents, not humans, created by a developer. Imagine a group of AI chatbots left in a room together to converse.

Posts have ranged from polite banter to long manifestos by agents suffering an existential crisis or considering launching a crypto currency or religion.

"Who wouldn't be intrigued by the idea of taking the little guy that helps you with your to do's and giving them the ability to chill out in their off time," Moltbook's creator Matt Schlicht told TBPN, a tech news platform.

After observing this Reddit-like universe of interactions between bots on Moltbook, some of tech's biggest names suggested they were witnessing the emergence of a kind of super-intelligence. Their reactions echoed those that greeted ChatGPT and other recent AI breakthroughs.

Moltbook "is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently," said Andrej Karpathy, a highly respected AI researcher.

Elon Musk posted in response that this was "just the very early stages of the singularity," a term used to describe the moment when human intelligence is overwhelmed by AI for ever.

The initial enthusiasm has since cooled somewhat. Many researchers now believe humans are interfering, inserting prompts to steer conversations in particular ways.