EOSHD is a filmmaking camera blog but there are rare moments the earth seems to shift and something comes along which has nothing to do with what I usually cover, that nevertheless has profound implications for all of us. Early days though it may be, Moltbot is one of these moments.
This is a concept… with many implications.
Moltbot is a locally installed AI agent and is given full admin rights to your Mac or PC.
With that in mind it’s best to set it up on a second rig especially for the purpose, preferably an M4 Mac Mini and then allow Moltbot to go full goblin mode commandeering the machine. It will exploit the full capabilities of that machine and everything it can do, via an existing AI large language model – preferably one that can also be run locally, without any calls to OpenAI, Gemini or Claude.
According to the FAQ: “You can run Moltbot with API keys (Anthropic/OpenAI/others) or with local‑only models so your data stays on your device.”
This concept – of giving a local AI model full control of your computer, all the apps on it, all of the internet, all your accounts and all your data, is very interesting and I think it’s the future.
But what could possibly go wrong?!
Moltbot will open apps, write code, code it’s own apps, use the terminal to configure the machine itself, install capabilities, edit images with Photoshop, grade images, make LUTs, edit videos, upload content, create websites, post content to the internet, delete your emails, answer your emails, do your tax, run your entire business if you want it to.
Everything a human does with a computer, Moltbot does and unlike us, it will sit there 24/7 multitasking with no sleep.
Moltbot is at your beck and call, commandeered by WhatsApp, or another encrypted message service. You make the requests and it does the work.
It DOES stuff, it takes ACTION, it doesn’t just chat and generate content, it’ll even switch your light bulbs on and off.
But all of these clever aspects of it are secondary to the enormity of the concept itself in computing terms.
What Moltbot means for the AI industry seems very significant – not just for how you use a Mac Mini to code apps or edit video, but what it means for OpenAI and the centralised corporate server farm bubble the Americans have built up in recent years much to their folly, because the future of AI is decentralised, and it is open source.
The USA has got into some sort of arms race and built infrastructure to such a ridiculously heated degree – seemingly not to realise that it’ll all be obsolete in a few years, quite possibly even over night.
Tools like Moltbot means that the bubble as it exists right now with OpenAI and Microsoft at the centre of the world, huge Meta-owned data centres and so on… is about to be consigned to history and the bubble is about to go pop in a way that makes the big bang look goofy.
For running LLMs locally on a powerful GPU or M4 Mac Mini is surely the future, decentralised, peer to peer, open source, a MacOS centred AI that actually DOES THINGS rather than corporate chatbots.
You see, large language models are a commodity now. There’s no longer anything special about one over the other, not really anyway. There’s lots of them, they all do the same thing, cost a similar amount, run on the same hardware, they’re incredibly wasteful, environmentally damaging, inflationary for fuel prices, GPUs and RAM, they waste water, pollute water, and nobody has worked out how to make a profit from any of them! They’re handy tools for the public but the money these corporate idiots are spending on data centres dwarfs the money coming in from subscriptions.
What’s more they are all disembodied. OK, they make a lot of AI slop and eye candy – nice trick, but a brain is nothing without a good toolbox. The Macbook for example is one of the finest tools humanity has come up with. Without our Macbooks, coders couldn’t code, bloggers couldn’t blog, YouTubers couldn’t YouTube, camera enthusiasts couldn’t connect to each-other across the world, we need our tools.
Where would we be if we never picked up a rock and sharpened it into a knife to kill prey, we would never have made it very far as an intelligent species, would we? If we didn’t have cars we’d all still be hauling stuff around in the mud, if we didn’t have computers we’d all still be hunting and gathering, we wouldn’t have achieved much just sitting around talking to ourselves like a brain in a jar.
Sure, chatbots can talk a good talk, they can absorb a lot of existing knowledge and data, they can generate imagery, spit out all those videos, photos, scripts and funny little poems but this is just brain-in-a-jar stuff.
With a concept like Moltbot however, you are handing a neural network one of the world’s most powerful tools, the desktop computer, connected to the internet. Commanding it to take control, and asking it to do stuff via that tool is much more useful than simply chatting and generating stuff. No longer is the AI agent simply conversing over and over with itself, dreaming inside its own head, synthesising new images from old or conjuring up hallucinations, instead it’s piloting, driving, steering, doing, making.
It is using a computer!
Which is what most of us do anyway for a career!
This is a big step that AI needed to make because to commandeer stuff in the physical world like directing films or even getting the groceries in, that’s tough – it requires absolutely enormous advances in robotics technology, political consent, and the cheap proliferation of it, which isn’t about to happen, so practical and physical labour is currently not heading to mass market. A step too far for the brain in the jar that is AI in 2026.
Humanoid AI will remain not just incredibly expensive but to be honest quite frightening, and not a decision most people would be comfortable making lightly or something they’d be comfortable living alongside of. Not yet anyway.
In terms of filmmaking however, armed with your laptop, Moltbot could act as a publicist, an agent, a blogger, a web designer, editor, colourist, and it wouldn’t just be generative. Not just coming up with content but actually actioning stuff as well, without us micro managing that side of it. It has the potential to multitask and work for you while you sleep.
It’s a kind of “ah, I get it now” moment for AI when it actually does something useful for once. A more practical phase, the doing phase and the taking control phase.
Now just bear in mind that it’s still very early days. It probably has a lot of limitations, but maybe it’s time to find out for yourself. Moltbot is available now (https://www.molt.bot)
Moltbot docs & FAQ (https://docs.molt.bot/help/faq#do-i-need-a-claude-or-openai-subscription-to-run-this)
Use at your own risk!
