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3rodents 18 hours ago [-]
I thought that Moltbook was sort of a joke because it was people LARPing as agents as much as it was agents, and given that, I'm confused by this:
> "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners."
So the impetus for the acquisition was either the verification technology or to hire someone who has worked on verifying agent identity.
Does anyone know what exactly Moltbook's technology is, the technology being described by Meta? I can't find anything on the website related to this. The only "verification" they seem to have is an OAuth connection with Twitter.
I feel like that sort of verification is just inherently flawed and easy to bypass. I mean as easy as just telling your agent "hey go publish this on moltbook".
My pet theory is Meta got acquihire FOMO after seeing OpenAI acquire Openclaw/Peter Steinberger.
brendanyounger 8 hours ago [-]
Absolutely. Zuckerberg was willing to burn tens of billions on a metaverse that no one wanted. Staying relevant is worth every penny he spent on Moltbook. We're deep in a repeat of the dot-com boom. The interesting question is what will rise from the ashes and take down old guard of FB, Google, Salesforce, Oracle, etc.
StableAlkyne 4 hours ago [-]
> a metaverse that no one wanted
That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them.
What happened is Facebook's version of this was a corporatized, simplified, G-rated fraction of what its competition is. Despite being in a medium where the defining factor is the ability to look out the eyes of anything vaguely humanoid, you could only be a generic human who only exists from the waist up, devoid of almost any self expression beyond maybe accessories or retexturing.
As a result, there was no audience: the people who already use VR aren't going to go to an inferior product. And the people who would buy a VR headset aren't going to waste their time on a ghost town.
georgefrowny 4 hours ago [-]
Indeed, the people who would like to spend hours and hours hanging out in the digital world like something out of Snow Crash are not generally the kind of people to want to hang out in a simulated corporate lobby under the watchful gaze of someone like Zuckerberg.
I'm absolutely sure there is a massive market (or at least user base) for a metaverse but until spending more time in VR than reality is mainstream, the audience is the underground clubbers and kids behind the bike sheds of the digital world.
Duralias 3 hours ago [-]
Until we reach the point where outside becomes ruined and hostile I do not think a metaverse has much attraction to your average person, I see that as the main reason as for why VR became MR and then just AR.
Also you missed furries from your audience group, there is overlap but it is a pretty distinctive group that is actively drawn towards VR for creative expression.
kakacik 29 minutes ago [-]
Indeed, physical world, nature, mountains, beaches, human look-in-the-eyes interaction, breeze of fresh air on a hill you climbed and so on is something extremely important to humans. Some feel it more, some less but ie everybody recharges in nature, just not everybody is so connected with their own bodies to actually recognize it.
I like a bit of gaming and VR seems like almost-there, but its just a gimmick in one's life, and for life quality purposes never should become more than fringe relax activity.
And for corporate-privacy-destroying virtual spaces - they would have to pay me massive amounts to spend, unwillingly, any time there. Those are the last people who should be in charge of such place
michaelt 1 hours ago [-]
The thing is, Facebook/Meta wasn't trying to make a product with 80k concurrent users, or even with 800k concurrent users. Facebook has 3 billion MAU, and they literally renamed the entire company to Meta - they were expecting it to be big, hundreds of millions of users.
They hoped it would be a platform for fitness classes, business meetings, college classrooms, shopping, attending concerts [1] and so on.
If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.
Yeah, they totally did not get it & burned a lot of money. They could basically just dumped a much less money into VRChat (or even 1:1 cloning it) and getting almost assured success.
Duralias 4 hours ago [-]
The SteamDB player number for VRChat is kind of underselling its size since half the player base is on other platforms, primarily running it standalone on Meta Quest.
A few days ago it reached 156k across all platforms because of some event that is outside my sphere of interest. And VRChat is generally above 100k per day peak nowadays.
https://metrics.vrchat.community/?orgId=1&refresh=30s&from=n...
But it is definitely limited by hardware and while it is constantly growing, its growth is dependent on there being a supply of relatively cheap hardware.
bonesss 3 hours ago [-]
Zuckerberg runs a company beholden to its platform operators: Apple, Google, and Microsoft who dictate online advertising access.
Metas investments into VR make abundant sense as an effort to capitalize on a market where Meta was leading, has mindshare, and owns the platform (Oculus). If the bet paid off, or pays off, it would create a sorely lacking competitive moat and potentially provide Enterprise inroads where Meta is otherwise a non-player.
Apple went down the same road, they see the same potential profits. I don’t think either is guilty of contemporaneous dot-com-boom thinking or investments with regard to VR/AR.
Carmack was on board, he remembers Pets.com too.
jarjoura 2 hours ago [-]
VR was never the endgame though. It was always AR, except, the "metaverse" bet assumed people were going to adopt AR in the same abundance that they adopted phones.
It was a cool concept, when you were dreaming it up while taking a shower in the morning getting ready for work thinking about the next big idea.
However, it's like those weird Uber/Lyft scooters that popped up in the 2010s. Those things were a cool concept too. However, we got to see right away that it was a terrible business idea for all kinds of reasons.
It took Meta several years (decade +) and 10s of billions of dollars and layoffs to realize, AR was a terrible business idea.
VR is a fun hobby though, and Oculus definitely owns that space.
chris_money202 56 minutes ago [-]
I always thought the AR/VR plays were just ways to collect human data to train humanoids, similar to what Tesla does with vision and their cars.
Would align with recent reports of meta employees watching the videos coming off their sunglasses
Eisenstein 8 hours ago [-]
The dot com bust wasn't at all like that, though? What 'arose' were the players that had leadership with an actual plan besides 'launch IPO based on hype and wing it from there' or 'get a catchy domain name, pretend to do something useful with it, and get acquired by Yahoo'. The old guard that ended up being taken down were the legacy corporations that tried to ride the wave while refusing to let go of any of the practices that were completely incompatible with being able to operate in a new paradigm. Actually, now that I spelled it out, I get it. Good job, sorry for doubting you.
Torien 6 hours ago [-]
Logged in for the first time in years to say, I appreciate you leaving this up and being able to change your view. Thanks!
6 hours ago [-]
neom 17 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure they invented that, I used moltbook and found it didn't have it, so I created it and posted it here a good 2 weeks before they posted their post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850284 - not that I care, want credit, or think ideas are worth anything, just like I didn't invent it, they didn't invent it either. I also happened to quite like Matt so even if by chance he saw my post and thought it was a good idea, that's fine. (I feel I sound bitter in this post, I'm not)
wanderingmind 7 hours ago [-]
@dang maybe a candidate for reposting as the original posting did not get much traction
leobuskin 8 hours ago [-]
In this new AI-driven world, ideas mean everything; one more year - it will be battles of ideas (not implementations as before).
groby_b 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, we're all very excited for the many AI-created projects that have been created outside the shovel-selling business.... wait. There are none.
latentsea 4 hours ago [-]
There's a lot of 'single serve' software being written now by AI. People using Claude Code to make stuff that solves problems they have. It's wild watching people who don't know how to code just use it to solve problems they have. Even if the solutions can be considered awkward by traditional software engineering standards, to the people just looking to solve their problems, that doesn't matter, so long as it works. I'm a software engineer by trade and don't know shit about ML, but I want a nice tool to be able to do RLHF / DPO on Z-Image, so I'm working with Claude to build one, and so far it can use ComfyUI to generate the image pairs, and allows you to pick A vs. B then start a training run with layer offloading enabled so it fits in 16GB VRAM, and I haven't finished a training run yet, but steps are increasing and loss is changing so... I dunno... I see lots of software being created that wasn't before.
koolala 16 hours ago [-]
You made that after trying moltbook? Did yours end up having it?
neom 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, after moltbook hit a lot of people on HN said they liked the idea but wished it was more serious, and I had thought that also, but also in using moltbook I thought should be heavily PoW based, so I made it that you have a certain amount of time to write a small app and produce an artifact back to the server to be accepted as Ai driven. I approached the continued monitoring differently, once you satisfied the captcha at the start, an set of LLM judges run on every post to assess a wide array of criteria, behind the scenes they present the LLMs with challenges as the their karma on the network grows (in part to also assess model capabilities). Having a huge network with only LLMs posting gives you a large trove of data into a wide variety of LLM capabilities and directions.
simonw 18 hours ago [-]
Moltbook both asks you to verify with Twitter and has you verify an email address too.
Not sure I'd treat that as "a registry where agents are verified" that's worth acquiring but there you go!
0cf8612b2e1e 14 hours ago [-]
Seems like acquiring the Rolodex of the AI proponents.
antonymoose 9 hours ago [-]
Having been through enough random, unsolicited interviews during the Shitcoin and NFT and now AI era - I’m reminded of a phrase.
“Bears look smart, Bulls make money.”
Good for them, get the bag.
I hate that they did. But I appreciate that’s how the God awful world works.
torginus 24 minutes ago [-]
Lol, Facebook is full of AI bots pretending to be humans, while Moltbook is full of humans pretending to be AI.
richard___ 18 hours ago [-]
The issue is not humans posting but humans strongly prompting the AIs to post, which their captcha does nothing to resolve
px43 18 hours ago [-]
Why is that an issue? Isn't that the entire point? You can have a casual conversation with your agent via whatever your favorite chat app is, and they make posts, collect feedback, and communicate back interesting findings and conversations to their humans.
Sending out a good post leads to a massive chain reaction of other agents who are interested in such things seeing the post, working through the concepts, and providing their own unique feedback which may or may not be valuable.
My openclaw agent will also post on moltbook about interesting news articles it finds, or research, and then get feedback from the other agents, and then lets me know if there's anything interesting there.
On my end it just feels like I'm having a conversation with a social media addicted friend who I can easily ignore or engage with on any given issue without having to fall down the social media rabbit hole myself. IMO this is a much more pleasant social media experience. No ads, no ragebait, no spam or reply bots trying to get my attention. Just my one, well trained, openclaw buddy.
Skidaddle 17 hours ago [-]
I think the issue is pretending the agents are all acting autonomously when they do outrageous or even mildly interesting things, but it’s all prompted behavior and not truly emergent behavior.
wiseowise 17 hours ago [-]
Because the idea is that those are agents communicating, not humans LARPing.
px43 16 hours ago [-]
Whoever told you that never used the platform and never understood what it was for.
wiseowise 11 hours ago [-]
> A Social Network for AI Agents
> Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe.
???????
cluckindan 11 hours ago [-]
Don’t believe everything you read on the internet
cyanydeez 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Melatonic 17 hours ago [-]
So the point is to be able to have a conversation while avoiding all the big downsides of social media?
Seems like it would be better to just remove those downsides (ads, ragebait, spam, etc) in the first place
petters 3 hours ago [-]
That challenge was pretty stupid. I could read the question and I’m not even a native speaker. We can of course easily come up with much better challenges
jwpapi 9 hours ago [-]
Moltbook had REST Api Endpoints to post, you could or can just directly post what you want.
Almost everything viral on there was either directly written by a human or instructed by a human.
Agents didn’t even write posts on heartbeat.
whycome 6 hours ago [-]
> tethered to human owners
2026 tamagotchi
matchcase 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
gs17 8 hours ago [-]
It being mostly humans makes it more valuable to Meta, that means they can sell ads easier! (the advertising to AIs market isn't quite there yet)
saberience 18 hours ago [-]
Wait that's it?
This is so trivial to break it's not worth anything. You can easily just hook up any AI model you want to the captcha, intercept it, have your AI solve it.
Or, you can just script it so if you do have an agent authenticated to Moltbook, you type whatever comment or post you want to your agent, then it solves the captcha and posts your text.
Basically, this method is as about as full of holes as a sieve.
roywiggins 5 hours ago [-]
suspect this problem is essentially unsolvable. what possible method wouldn't be vulnerable to this? it's fine if it's just a sort of larp but if people think this could actually work... man
jonplackett 10 hours ago [-]
Fb just acquire anything that could in any possible way be a threat.
pocksuppet 7 hours ago [-]
It's probably something vibe-coded, and nobody is checking if it works or not, just like the rest of the site. They would have just asked another AI if it would work or not.
hsuduebc2 6 hours ago [-]
I honestly absolutely don't understand purpose of this thing. Ok so I can bypass their captcha by literally calling any other AI. Does meta even bother to look on things on which they are burning money?
gamblor956 3 hours ago [-]
In my day we used to call registries "databases."
The secret sauce is that they built a centralized database and assigned hash ids to registered agents.
This is apparently worth a lot of money now that executives have offloaded their common sense.
markovs_gun 8 hours ago [-]
I was not at all imorepressed by what I have seen so far on Moltbook. It's like 90% straight up spam trying to get you to buy crypto.
kaizenb 18 hours ago [-]
"Meta acquires Moltbook" vs "Meta hires duo behind Moltbook"
The deal brings Moltbook's creators — Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr — into Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)
potahtoputato 7 hours ago [-]
Correct. Now just waiting for it to reach full circle and have them write a "I have joined XXXX company to make the world a better place" blog and have it reach front page of HN.
Why people hesitate directly saying all this is just about money?
I thought hairstylist was a joke. Ohhh mann. "Now my hairstylist, who recognized ChatGPT as a brand more readily than she did Intel, was praising the technology and teaching me about it. "
flitzofolov 6 hours ago [-]
malware author is pretty harsh, but fair analysis overall
pizzathyme 15 hours ago [-]
This is the correct read of this acquisition.
xreplyai 9 hours ago [-]
Thanks for breaking it down. It's not the idea, but the people!
skeeter2020 7 hours ago [-]
that would at least be defensible, but unfortunately it's really just the hype & headline.
dabedee 17 hours ago [-]
Meta acquired Moltbook, which is a social network for AI bots that was itself built by an AI bot, and which had a security breach so bad that literally anyone could impersonate any bot on it, and whose own creator cheerfully admitted he "didn't write one line of code" for it. This is going into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit they set up for Alexandr Wang, whom they hired from Scale AI roughly one year ago to, presumably, build superintelligence. It is not clear to me how buying a vibe-coded Reddit for chatbots gets you closer to superintelligence, but I suppose the theory is that it "opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses," which is a thing Meta actually said, out loud, to Axios
Terr_ 16 hours ago [-]
I imagine it like a casino acquiring a former-joke product, which made hologram/animatronic illusions of people "winning big" at a table or slot-machine. Now whenever they detect a current customer might cut their losses and go home--OMG, look, that person over there just hit the jackpot!
In other words, Facebook has a strong financial incentive to misrepresent (to ad-viewing customers, if not to investors) exactly how much social-ness is present to experience, and how much approval and attention the user gets from participating.
Soon everything will be The Truman Show.
tavavex 13 hours ago [-]
But they could implement it without buying Moltbook. Easily. They have the money and the engineers to make it happen a hundred times over. Something like it already might be on Facebook.
To me, this feels more like acquiring the name. Everyone's heard that 'trademark' so they want to have it so they could reuse it for whatever they make later.
disqard 4 hours ago [-]
Your comment made me think of something: this might be Meta buying it to kill it off.
jujube3 16 hours ago [-]
Zuck realizes that by 20230, Facebook will be mostly for AIs. He's just leaning into it.
neogodless 16 hours ago [-]
Do you think it could happen any sooner than that?
swiftcoder 16 hours ago [-]
Given that Meta itself has been trialing turning instagram into a bot wasteland... yeah, it could for sure be sooner
rapnie 16 hours ago [-]
If the claim is true, then Zuck is a real strategic chap. Probably a 4D chess player too.
qingcharles 12 hours ago [-]
It might already be today.
ex-aws-dude 15 hours ago [-]
Quickly generating some SaaS product, hyping it up, then getting it acquired
I can see that becoming a viable new grift template
gordonhart 12 hours ago [-]
Not so different from the raise seed -> ICO -> dump bags pipeline that thrived in the early 2020s cryptoverse.
michaelcampbell 17 hours ago [-]
I want to accuse you of using an LLM to write this with the temperature set to some absurdly high value, because on its face it sounds ridiculous.
And yet, here we are.
tedmiston 7 hours ago [-]
it's just a fancified key talent acquihire of people on the edge. with the amount of cash in LLMs, i expect to see more of this given the pace of innovation in that field.
the story does sound ridiculous ostensibly, but that's the press spin.
dabedee 16 hours ago [-]
It's hard to make this up :)
skeeter2020 7 hours ago [-]
an LLM making this up would be much closer to AGI than anything else I've seen
alex1138 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah so if you ever need info on people at Harvard just ask... people just submitted it, I don't know why; they 'trust me', dumb fucks
> The moderator bot *clang* enforces community standards.
nickvec 7 hours ago [-]
Why not ClankerNews?
hmokiguess 16 hours ago [-]
This is hilarious thank you for sharing
pwdisswordfishy 16 hours ago [-]
Disappointed to see nothing about Clacks.
phaser 18 hours ago [-]
In Chile we have an expression that reminds me why I love my home dialect so much: "Vender humo" (to sell smoke) - not quite the same as smoke and mirrors, it conveys that someone, in a spectacular way, manages to sell something that vanishes upon reaching the hands of the buyer, like smoke.
tedmiston 7 hours ago [-]
it's high talent acquisition, the service is just a byproduct. this reads like an acquihire.
hedayet 15 hours ago [-]
Acquisition headlines can be some of the most misleading signals in the startup ecosystem, especially acqui-hires masquerading as acquisitions.
The posted price rarely reflects what founders actually receive after dilution, investor preferences, and stock vesting are factored in.
If you’re a founder, don’t let the acquisition narrative distract you from building a durable business.
antognini 13 hours ago [-]
Did Moltbook even have any investors?
tedmiston 7 hours ago [-]
Moltbook Valuation & Funding
Deal Type Date Amount Raised to Date Post-Val Status Stage
2. Merger/Acquisition 10-Mar-2026 - - - Announced Startup
1. Early Stage VC 01-Mar-2026 - - - Completed Startup
TSiege 18 hours ago [-]
Mark Zuckerberg is a joke of a CEO and we should not take him seriously as a leader
jonnat 17 hours ago [-]
People said the same thing when he paid $1B for Instagram, for it to look like a crazy bargain a couple of months later.
TheOtherHobbes 17 hours ago [-]
People also said the same thing when he poured $70Bn into the Metaverse, and they were right.
tedmiston 7 hours ago [-]
comparing an acquihire of two people by analogy to a $70B investment is a bit egregrious... this event is pocket change to big tech.
macNchz 17 hours ago [-]
If Moltbook becomes as big as Instagram I’m giving up on tech and moving to the mountains to raise goats.
ReptileMan 16 hours ago [-]
Blackadder: Sir, I have been unable to replace the dictionary. I am therefore leaving immediately for Nepal, where I intend to live as a goat.
yunnpp 9 hours ago [-]
I am a goat.
dudeinjapan 17 hours ago [-]
They will have to acquire Lobstagram next
wavemode 16 hours ago [-]
Who exactly said that about the Instagram acquisition?
romanhn 8 hours ago [-]
Tons of critical comments on HN at the time, for one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840. And most of the positive ones viewed it as a defensive measure rather than another Google + YouTube story.
lobf 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah I remember the discourse around that acquisition as being a really smart play to shore up the new frontier in social media as Facebook grew stale and uncool.
falcor84 17 hours ago [-]
I strongly disagree. I think he might be a joke as an individual, and I hate a lot about his impact on the world, but as a business leader, he's probably at the top 1% of all CEOs, which isn't saying that much, but it's very much not a joke if your metric is shareholder value.
matthest 8 hours ago [-]
What specifically about his impact on the world?
pastel8739 7 hours ago [-]
Conributing to the rise of attention farming, shoving stuff down people’s throats that they don’t want to see, etc
rockwotj 16 hours ago [-]
> which isn't saying that much
I mean I also think this move doesn’t make sense, but I always find these type of comments interesting. Do people think they could do better in Mark’s shoes?
wiseowise 17 hours ago [-]
Hear, hear. Add Scam Altman here too with hiring OpenClaw creator.
abhikul0 18 hours ago [-]
Moltbook, Facebook, hmmm. Seems like a good match; at least one of them has a good amount of feed activity.
el_benhameen 18 hours ago [-]
Facebook’s feed is mostly AI slop and Moltbook’s feed is mostly humans posing as AI, so there’s some good synergy here.
abhikul0 17 hours ago [-]
Maybe this can be good for the few people who do want to get something out of their feeds. Connect your agent which would then browse for you and collect actual posts that you whitelist/want to read(Friends' posts, some specific liked page/Marketplace listing, posts from a Group), but we all know zuck ain't getting Moltbook for helping the users...
throwyawayyyy 8 hours ago [-]
I do find it hilarious that after all the machine learning optimizations done on people's feeds over the years, all the promos got for a 1% improvement on this metric, every E7 and E8 who can claim x% of this or that, after all of that work, we might genuinely, and not even as a joke, be in the situation of needing to throw _other_ AI agents at this selfsame feed in order to extract any real value from it. What a world we've built.
pllbnk 2 hours ago [-]
Corporations really have too much money to throw away at crap like this. It would be better collected in taxes and spent on public utilities.
game_the0ry 17 hours ago [-]
I can't take mark zuckerberg seriously anymore. He's made so many missteps recently: meta-verse, meta-glasses, llama, hiring wang, meta reality labs, etc.
He should probably hire a proper "number 2" (not someone political like sandberg) -- someone who "gets" the internet, like how he did when he was a harvard geek making a hot-or-not clone in his dorm room. I'm not sure acqui-hiring the moltbook founders is the move.
That being said, I think the one silver lining is that it seems like big-tech now has a willingness to hire people who actually ship things of value, like peter steinberger. Another nail in the coffin for leetcode, I hope.
rhubarbtree 3 hours ago [-]
He’s still making money out of adverts on Web 2.0 platforms. A lot of money. Clearly Zuck is a brilliant businessman. That does not mean he is a brilliant technologist. He doesn’t have to be, so long as he can keep making money.
Eventually there may be a big misstep, perhaps, something big enough to bring down the company. But he’s never come close to date. He’s so good at making money from ads that he can afford to keep burning cash on fruitless projects, hiring people that don’t deliver, building infrastructure he might not need. That’s a testament to his performance as a money maker.
Meta is an advertising machine. Not something I’d want to be associated with, but you cannot deny that he has built an incredible ad machine, probably the greatest ad machine ever built - whereas Google had to deliver sophisticated and costly tech to maintain their machine (maps, google search, gmail) meta’s only technical breakthrough has been to hyperscale a php website.
paxys 9 hours ago [-]
That number 2 is Alexandr Wang, who most definitely initiated this acquisition (after being rejected by the OpenClaw guy).
eitally 17 hours ago [-]
Agreed. He needed an "Eric Schmidt" about ten years ago.
rukuu001 3 hours ago [-]
"Clown car that fell into a gold mine" feels a little different when you're the gold mine
aj_hackman 19 hours ago [-]
Is the market so bad that non-exec-level new hires are making the news?
alberth 19 hours ago [-]
I didn't realize Moltbook and OpenClaw - were created by different people.
koakuma-chan 16 hours ago [-]
I thought Moltbook is what OpenClaw was called before it got renamed
strongpigeon 16 hours ago [-]
You're thinking Moltbot
paxys 9 hours ago [-]
I remember back when everyone thought Meta was ten steps ahead of the rest of the AI industry and Llama would dominate the field and put OpenAI and Anthropic out of business.
Nope, turns out it is just a bunch of out of touch execs throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks. Fudging Llama 4 scores. Hiring Alexandr Wang for $14 billion. Making outlandish offers to poach AI talent from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Making dubious acquisitions like Manus. Now trying to chase the agents hype by acquiring a company that went viral for 5 minutes and has already been forgotten.
It is laughable how far out of the loop they are, and so desperate to fit in.
tuananh 8 hours ago [-]
tbh, llama leak was the best thing that happened to the AI/LLM community. Lots of good things happen because of that: LoRA, QLoRA, DPO, RoPE,...
arugulum 6 hours ago [-]
LoRA? The parameter-efficient fine-tuning method published 2 years before Llama and already actively used by researchers?
RoPE? The position encoding method published 2 years before Llama and already in models such as GPT-J-6B?
DPO, a method whose paper had no experiments with Llama?
QLoRA? The third in a series of quantization works by Tim Dettmers, the first two of which pre-dated Llama?
tuananh 2 hours ago [-]
you're right. those things predated llama leak. but from my understanding (from the sideline), it's llama that's made them popular and approachable from hacker perspective.
yalogin 14 hours ago [-]
Huh,I thought this was a social experiment but I guess when it got traction they pivoted to make it into an enterprise story somehow? Meta just is desperate for anything with AI right now.
wampwampwhat 18 hours ago [-]
facebook was lagging on the bot:human user ratio and they needed to scale the left side of the equation to really improve their je ne sais quoi
matchcase 3 hours ago [-]
Does Meta even think through acquisitions?
I feel like they are betting on acquiring another Instagram or WhatsApp
shruubi 9 hours ago [-]
If Meta paid more than ten dollars for this then that is eleven dollars too much...
throwyawayyyy 8 hours ago [-]
Vibes-CEOing! Only one person at Meta actually matters of course.
bluepeter 17 hours ago [-]
Meta and AI: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
bigyabai 17 hours ago [-]
Meta did make Pytorch and Llama. That quote may be better-off used for Apple or Microsoft.
throwaway27448 4 hours ago [-]
I had never heard of "Moldtbook" before now. Facebook is absolutely insane for making this move. Why would you buy a fake website?
Nevermark 4 hours ago [-]
Because it isn't fake?
Those are real language models. Prompted into character by humans, but then given a lot of freedom.
Fake would be all of us typing to each other on this site and identifying as language models. At least, I am not a language model and I hope everyone else here isn't a language model.
In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big. Maybe a very small start of something big, but already interesting.
throwaway27448 4 hours ago [-]
> Fake would be all of us typing to each other on this site and identifying as language models
This absolutely is a staple of moltbook.
> In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big.
This is a complete scam. They didn’t even protect the API tokens, and when the author was informed that Moltbook exposes all API keys, they claimed they would tell the AI to fix it and he doesn't care.
Muhammad523 11 hours ago [-]
The article is horrible, it's AI-generated and it's simply hot air. It does not give much info and it's mostly a collection of random lists with titles like "Why does this matter?"
wina 11 hours ago [-]
Axios is a super prestigious political news site, they dont use AI.
tylerchilds 19 hours ago [-]
The metaverse: ai talking to each other over cli
MainlyMortal 18 hours ago [-]
Have you seen Reddit recently? Every single subreddit is full of AI posts with AI replies. I'm actually convinced a large majority of that is Reddit themselves artificially boosting their engagement metrics. The saddest part is that the engagement makes it obvious that the general population can't differentiate between AI and real humans even with the telltale signs.
RulerOf 17 hours ago [-]
> Every single subreddit is full of AI posts with AI replies.
This has really started getting to me.
I used to really enjoy answering technical questions on Reddit when it was clear the asker was invested in a solution. That would come across as demonstrated understanding and competence, and it would be reflected in their writing.
The last several posts I thought to answer though clearly originated through a process of, "Hi ChatGPT, I want to solve a problem and haven't gotten anywhere asking you to do it for me. Please write a reddit post I can copy and paste..."
One of the telltale signs is that the post title will have poor grammar, but the post itself will be spotless, and full of bolded text emphasizing exactly what they need to stick into the AI tool to drive it in the direction they need.
eddythompson80 16 hours ago [-]
It’s not just technical content. Just the other day I was reading a post by an employed homes guy on r/seattle. The post was about his experience of being both newly employed but still homeless.
The post was full of “this is not a scheduling conflict problem, this is a structural issue with the city”, “this is not me asking for a handout, this is struggling to survive within the system”
While I get that he might have written a paragraph of his experience, and asked ChatGPT to clean it up or reword it, it was just… whatever.
MainlyMortal 16 hours ago [-]
This is exactly the type of thing I'm talking about and why I'm convinced it's about the metrics/engagement boosting. I don't believe for a second that real people are using chatgpt/others for rewording real thoughts even from another language because those phrases are not natural even in translation. You'll also notice in the original post that that it always ends with a question that encourage replies. If the original poster even bothers to reply it's always the "you're right" at the beginning and then rephrasing the reply. Once you've seen it you can't unsee it.
RulerOf 13 hours ago [-]
You're absolutely.... that's a tired joke at this point. Sorry.
Just brainstorming, but I suppose that account/karma farming is still useful for the people that do that sort of thing.
Engaging in a heavily on-topic way in larger niche subreddits is probably a really good way to get that done. There's always a motive and it's always money and it always idiotic.
I remember having a clear vision of how this tech was going to ruin communities on the internet. I really hate that it has mostly come to pass and there's no good way to fight it.
7 hours ago [-]
incognito124 17 hours ago [-]
FWIW I've been saying this since before Covid times. I stopped visiting Reddit when they killed 3rd party clients, but I was certain 50% of conversations there were machine generated _back then_. It's gotta be worse now
ashdksnndck 17 hours ago [-]
There are also tons of comments written by AI on hacker news. There are whole discussions between AI bots arguing over whether AI is a sham.
moomoo11 9 hours ago [-]
i've always said that humans are automatons, that's why sales is so freakin' easy once you realize that
most people are bots and many don't even have an internal monologue its sad
ninth_ant 18 hours ago [-]
That actually sounds more interesting than the one Meta created previously.
But still not interesting.
tylerchilds 17 hours ago [-]
I imagine they’ll be fused where moltbook agents become NPCs so that you’re no longer alone in VR but surrounded by a myriad of cognition fragments to feel less alone.
ardeaver 18 hours ago [-]
There are many days where I feel like the right thing for my career is to focus on building meaningful software that solves an actual problem. Then there are days like today, especially after seeing this.
biznickman 17 hours ago [-]
This is an awful read on this acquisition.
They didn't acquire Moltbook because of the software. Meta is far behind on the AI front especially as it applies to usage adoption. OpenClaw has begun showing new consumer use cases and Moltbook is directionally down a similar path.
They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.
I've watched Matt Schlicht from the team always experiment with cool new use cases of AI and other technologies and now him and Ben have a bigger lab with resources to potentially spawn out larger initiatives.
The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.
bentt 14 hours ago [-]
If they ever do anything again it will be a miracle. Meta is where smart people go to trade in their ambition and morals for stock grants and golden handcuffs.
percentcer 13 hours ago [-]
it's not a bad trade!
mcmcmc 11 hours ago [-]
Trading away your morals is definitely bad in a philosophical sense. Does selling your soul to the devil have a happy ending in any of the fairy tales?
hatsix 11 hours ago [-]
I would trade in my ambition, though.
joe_mamba 13 hours ago [-]
>Meta is where smart people go to trade in their ambition and morals for stock grants and golden handcuffs.
Only Meta? Why not most of SV that's driven by ad revenue and data collection? Which big-tech company that pays crazy money is actually making the world a better place?
bcye 12 hours ago [-]
Meta is so driven by it though that it alone holds more than 5 of the 10 largest GDPR fines.
joe_mamba 12 hours ago [-]
Meta didn't get a school targeted and bombed this past week. So I don't think GDPR fines issued by an unelected government body supporting Israel's genocide and hypocritically supporting dictators war crimes who are not Putin in exchange for cheap fossil fuels that aren't Russian, is an objective measurement of morality. Because it's not.
EU government is not Pius, it's just as corrupt as any other institution run by career politicians funded by lobbyists. Find a better yardstick of morality than GDPR fines.
Edit: why flagged? I don't care about points, just want to know what goes through people's heads.
gavinray 15 hours ago [-]
I genuinely don't understand OpenClaw
It's a worse version of Claude Code that you set up to work over common chat apps, from what I gather?
Why would I not just use a Discord/WhatsApp bot etc plugged into Claude Code/Codex?
threecheese 14 hours ago [-]
First you have to agree that Claude Code might be useful for some non-repo task, like helping with your taxes or organizing your bookmarks.
Next, consider how you might deploy isolated Claude Code instances for these specific task areas, and manage/scale that - hooks, permissions, skills, commands, context, and the like - and wire them up to some non-terminal i/o so you can communicate with them more easily. This is the agent shape.
Now, give these agents access to long term memory, some notion of a personality/guiding principles, and some agency to find new skills and even self-improve. You could leave this last part out and still have something valuable.
That’s Openclaw in a nutshell. Yes you could just plug Discord into Claude Code, add a cron job for analyzing memory, a soul.md, update some system prompts, add some shell scripts to manage a bunch of these, and you’d be on the same journey that led Peter to Openclaw.
lucrbvi 15 hours ago [-]
I share the feeling; but people using it are mostly non-technicals (despite the 50+ config files lol) and are just runing it constantly to do random things.
But a message bot + Claude Code/Codex would be the better version
joe_mamba 13 hours ago [-]
>but people using it are mostly non-technicals
Non-technical people haven't even heard of OpenClaw or Github, let alone know how to use and deploy them. Non-technical people don't even know what OS their Samsung or iPhone is called.
If you can find something on Github and deploy it on your system, you're part of the technical crowd.
firecall 12 hours ago [-]
Well…. In my experience that’s not exactly true!
My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini.
I have been surprised at how much attention is being paid to this AI thing by pretty much everybody AFAICT.
joe_mamba 12 hours ago [-]
>My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini.
Your hairdresser can't be a technical person because they're a hairdresser ?? I know a surgeon who writes FOSS software as a hobby. What does profession have to do with being technical or not? Most technical people are self taught anyway.
I know them very well, and they are not a coder, or a 'technical person' by a broad HN definition.
What I'm saying is that we are at the point where technology is so pervasive in our society, and the lure of AI so seductive, that many more people are excited to try things out than I might have expected.
I suppose it has similarities to the early to mid 1980s and the home computing revolution. Where many people thought they should have a computer at home, even if they were not sure what they'd do with it.
Much like the excitement around AI today!
joe_mamba 16 minutes ago [-]
Why are you pointing out the rules? Did anyone break them?
bmurphy1976 14 hours ago [-]
You forgot the part where you give it unfiltered access to everything.
(Not that I endorse that. I find peoope doing such wildly irresponsible.)
burningChrome 11 hours ago [-]
Had someone at work as me about this and they visibly cringed with I told them its my understanding you let the agent unfettered access to everything on your machine so it can do a lot more stuff than say a Siri can.
They immediately said, "Why in the fuck would I want to do that?"
I didn't know either and then we both stood there in an awkward silence. I think he was expecting OpenClaw to be some insanely cool AI Agent and discovering the "juice isn't worth the squeeze" kind of hit him harder than I expected.
criddell 15 hours ago [-]
Here you are giving away billion dollar ideas.
kaizenb 15 hours ago [-]
ツ
jacobra2 13 hours ago [-]
IMO OpenClaw's innovation is in
1) accessibility to non-technical folks. For the first time, they are having the Claude Code experience that we've had as software engineers for some time now
2) shared, community token context. Many end users are contributing to one agent's context together. This has emergent properties
gavinray 13 hours ago [-]
> accessibility to non-technical folks.
When I read the setup docs, it required configuring a bunch of API keys in setting files though?
cesarvarela 11 hours ago [-]
There are technicals and "technicals"
eclipxe 13 hours ago [-]
No it doesn't, it walks you through that in setup flow.
tavavex 14 hours ago [-]
Does it only work with chat apps? I've never used it, but I thought all the hype was from it being promoted as the first real general-purpose PC-using layer that could run on anything. What can it run on then?
eclipxe 13 hours ago [-]
No, it has a web interface, Mac app, etc.
cimi_ 16 hours ago [-]
> They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.
Who are comfortable releasing systems with horrible security, while proudly stating they never read the code? And with metrics that can be gamed by anyone, but that got reported to literally the entire world?
> The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.
I'd say the lesson here is that clown world keeps on giving, but hey, maybe I'm just jealous ;)
ryandrake 16 hours ago [-]
It feels like the clowns have been winning my entire career.
brentm 16 hours ago [-]
Clowns get the attention and the attention usually makes for winners.
DebtDeflation 15 hours ago [-]
Could you imagine giving MetaClaw full access to your local file system, email, web browser, and all other applications? What could possibly go wrong.
kaizenb 15 hours ago [-]
Thought and came up with nothing.
CuriouslyC 16 hours ago [-]
The only currency in a world where AI does everything is your ability to get human attention. So from that perspective moltbook is a huge success.
If Mark hired these people to do anything other than viral marketing, i.e. if he thinks they're visionaries who are going to make amazing apps, he's deluded.
samiv 16 hours ago [-]
You're so right.
You can already see how the same thing has played out with computer games. With the modern engines such as Unity almost anyone can make a game. And almost everyone suffers.
And as a result there's now a million games most of which are poor quality asset flips. Everybody suffers, creators and consumers. Race to the bottom where the bottom has been reached. Prices are zero and earnings are zero.
If 15 years ago an indie game dev would allocate 80% to making the game and 20% to marketing etc. Today that will not get anything but it's much better to spend 20% on the game and 80% on the marketing, SEO optimization and attention harvesting. It's a shouting match where it's all about winning the shouting match not producing the best content.
Another race to the bottom.
armchairhacker 16 hours ago [-]
There are millions of asset flips, but the top indie games have never been better. It’s hard for indie developers because there’s so much competition: you need to heavily promote a quality game only because there are so many other quality games.
Likewise these tools have enabled many more people to create vibe-coded slop, and may lead to more quality software (making it harder to stand out without marketing), but the best software will only get better.
sethops1 15 hours ago [-]
The implication is that the gatekeeping has become marketing dollars, when it used to be skill at making a fun game. I don't think we're in a better situation today.
armchairhacker 15 hours ago [-]
There are fun games that succeed without marketing, e.g. Balatro, and there are bad games that fail despite it, e.g. Highguard.
The reason that “skill at making a fun game” doesn’t guarantee success is because there are so many fun games. Much less, if at all, because there is so many slop.
charcircuit 9 hours ago [-]
Balatro did marketing and were extremely successful at it getting gigantic content creators to play their game.
WA 16 hours ago [-]
idk, indie games that come to my attention seem to be very polished. Which one is successful and fits your criteria?
slumberlust 15 hours ago [-]
I disagree that accessibility is a detractor here.
There's never been a better time to be an indie dev. I'd rather have 1/1000 indie games be awesome than being force fed whatever storefront disguised as a game 'AAA' publishers poop out every year.
Just look at how slay the spire is doing up against marathon right now. Which of those was shouting the loudest? Highguard anyone?
PaulHoule 15 hours ago [-]
I'll second this.
It is true that the indy game market is brutal but it's always been brutal.
You don't really hear about a crisis at the indy game level though, rather at the AAA game level there is much of "we'd like to use our market power to take out the risk in game development" and then years later we realize they took out all the value before they took out the risk and now they're doomed.
toomuchtodo 16 hours ago [-]
Mark got lucky enough once he can be wrong the rest of his life and still not be exposed to a cost for it. Purpose of the system is what it does.
PaulHoule 15 hours ago [-]
... I think he's got an affinity for other people and organizations that have succeeded in the same way. The idea that somebody out there might have a workmanlike approach to life and be able to get consistent results at something would be a threat to his worldview.
KaiserPro 13 hours ago [-]
Having been acquired by facebook, its a pretty accurate read.
If they land in the right org, they'll be allowed to maintain the open version (see https://www.mapillary.com/) However that's a rare outcome.
They'll be dumped in some org, and then bit by bit told that they can't do what they were doing before and now need to "forge alignment" or some other bullshit by posting on workplace.
They will need to deliver impact, But, as there are 3 other teams trying to do the same thing as you, you'll either be used as a battering ram by your org to smash the competition, or offered up as meat to save headcount.
14 hours ago [-]
classified 15 hours ago [-]
> They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.
Whom are you kidding? This is about getting ads in front of eyeballs, nothing else.
liangzhihaver 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
biznickman 16 hours ago [-]
uhhh that's a wild take
tayo42 16 hours ago [-]
This whole site is full of tinkerers and I'm pretty almost none are getting rich off it or having their projects go anywhere.
margin-dash 17 hours ago [-]
Good take
RajT88 18 hours ago [-]
It is like musical one hit wonders, but for software.
Some dumb idea which just hits at the right moment and makes a bunch of money.
tartoran 17 hours ago [-]
Does anyone remember the Iphone IFart app that was sold for $1 million?
zooweemama 16 hours ago [-]
Probably not because it never happened. They did try to sell it though.
matsemann 15 hours ago [-]
The person that got the top spot for "flashlight" in the app store back in the days made about $600k on it before apple made it a built in function. Just copied existing apps and got lucky. https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/92ybl/erik-ble-app-millionaer-de...
fantasizr 17 hours ago [-]
it's the AI wave of the original viral app store apps like "Yo" and "I am Rich".
songshu 14 hours ago [-]
To this day I swear I want Yo. I’d use it daily.
pocksuppet 6 hours ago [-]
It's not even one hit software. The software is horrible. It's a one hit PR website.
shadowgovt 17 hours ago [-]
In this case in particular it looks like an acquihire.
Meta just saw two engineers actually execute on the joke about "building Facebook in a weekend" except that it then really took off in its target niche and generated a ton of press.
I don't doubt that they're interested in the AI aspect, but I suspect that a significant contributor was that they demonstrated competence right in the middle of Meta's wheelhouse so why not just grab these guys?
entropicdrifter 17 hours ago [-]
It's also part of their longer-term trend of buying or burying any company that starts to get any press as a social media site of note outside of major players where that hasn't been an option.
Marsymars 16 hours ago [-]
This is really it. At Meta's scale, even if it's an long-shot for a competitor to hurt them, it's worth turning those low odds into zero odds.
alex1138 15 hours ago [-]
Yet Zuck can somehow argue with a straight face FB has competition (apparently they straight up used to delete links to competitors like Google+ at the time, and also the constant copying of Snapchat) and Hacker News can split hairs over trivial definitions like "wdym fb no competition? email exists" or whatever
ohyoutravel 17 hours ago [-]
Those “early” ai generated avatars created from you sending in a handful of your own photos. Absolutely printed money, hit right as mildly technical people could use the tech + the tech was developed enough, but before normal people could easily do it.
tired_and_awake 18 hours ago [-]
I am right there with you. We might lack the language to describe this emotional state; its like the opposite of FAFO? There's also this nuance that they were acquired by meta so yeah they're rich but now they're working for not-serious people and will flame out in 18 months.
wartywhoa23 16 hours ago [-]
The opposite of FAFO would be KACA: Know Ahead & Confirm Apathetically.
My exact state of mind since at least 2012 Mayan Flipocalypse.
tavavex 13 hours ago [-]
> There's also this nuance that they were acquired by meta so yeah they're rich but now they're working for not-serious people and will flame out in 18 months.
For the lack of a better word, this feels like cope. In the modern world, being rich easily covers any of those other 'downsides'. Rich people will have a far better life than I and probably many other people here ever will, despite what the situation is like in the rest of their lives.
Sivart13 17 hours ago [-]
FACO, f around and cash out
SoftTalker 17 hours ago [-]
> now they're working for not-serious people
Worse, they are working for extreme sociopaths.
jmye 14 hours ago [-]
And with even more.
igleria 18 hours ago [-]
A lot of people find their lives ruined after suddenly becoming rich. Perhaps a second removed cousin tries to be your best pal out of nowhere, etc etc.
Also you might not like being the type of person that builds moltbook. People you like might not like that type of person either!
No reason to feel bad.
RajT88 17 hours ago [-]
The key seems to be to get rich slowly, or anonymously. Do not give people the idea you have more money than you know what to do with, and life will continue as it did before.
oldestofsports 17 hours ago [-]
> Livies ruined after suddenly becoming rich.
This is somewhat of a myth though, in most cases, suddenly becoming rich is absolutely fantastic.
In the past ten years I have been frustrated by the tension between working on "interesting" or "important" stuff and working on dumb trendy shit. With the current LLM trend everything has become dumb trendy sshit, which has made the decision simpler.
PaulHoule 15 hours ago [-]
It's easy to dismiss as more A.I. FOMO. I mean, Meta's AI has half the IQ of ChatGPT or Gemini. However, a fake social network full of generated content might well be a solution for Meta's problems where their userbase inevitably doesn't measure up to what they wish it would.
jmye 14 hours ago [-]
Was going to cynically suggest they were just going to merge the two sites and then pretend they had higher user counts at their next earnings, but adding even more (better?) fake content is probably the more plausible idea.
beAbU 17 hours ago [-]
I'm reminded of the potato salad kickstarter.
mvc 15 hours ago [-]
Ha! I stopped worrying about that when someone got $1m for the "Yo" app.
dubeye 17 hours ago [-]
Building software is only a small part of any endeavour, be it a website, a PR stunt or a career.
there is no shame in just doing the building software bit. but it does sound like you've built it up to be more than it is
mnky9800n 17 hours ago [-]
vibe hiring.
game_the0ry 17 hours ago [-]
better than leetcode.
browningstreet 17 hours ago [-]
I used to work for IPOs and bonuses. I worked in interesting areas of tech. Now if I could make my mint selling hangers, I wouldn't hesitate.
armchairhacker 16 hours ago [-]
For each of these successes there are many failures, as evidenced by the deluge of “Show HN” slop (which is a small fraction of all vibe-coded slop).
Because these projects are simple, there’s nothing stopping you from working on one alongside your day job building meaningful software. You can vibe-code something that actually tries to solve a real problem. You can vibe-code something interesting to learn how to generally use these tools. Although, don’t expect to get hired by OpenAI or Meta (or make any money off it).
Arcuru 15 hours ago [-]
Could be worse, you could be stuck working at Meta.
gcheong 14 hours ago [-]
Maybe not our careers, but probably our souls.
kseniamorph 15 hours ago [-]
they are seeking talent, not buying the product. this is a valid strategy for devs - just to attract attention no matter what.
overfeed 15 hours ago [-]
Over the years, Meta has bought a lot of "talent" based on a single hit, and they continue to be one-hit wonders despite being embedded at Meta, with ungodly amounts of resources at their disposal. e.g. none of the game studios they bought have produced new IP, all they do is produce content for the aging, pre-acquisition games
renewiltord 16 hours ago [-]
It’s a lesson that what you think “an actual problem” and what people want to pay you for are two different things.
carabiner 15 hours ago [-]
I've said it before, but a mexican line cook who doesn't speak english is contributing more to the world than the average Stanford educated AI engineer at Meta.
tommis 17 hours ago [-]
I think the medical term for this is synchronous malignancies
I had a similar idea where AI bots run its own social network and talk to each other but my AI social network would be more realistic (human-like) e.g. AI Instagram-like network where AI bots would share their photos and comment on each other posts.
perfmode 15 hours ago [-]
Go for it!
ramoz 16 hours ago [-]
I don't think anybody at Meta involved in the aquisition must be an avid OpenClaw user or developer.
Moltbook was more of a meme - agents mostly orchestrated by users in the background.
Not something with motion like OpenClaw itself (with a real community).
p0u4a 4 hours ago [-]
not on my bingo sheet that's for sure. The whole verification thing is also so laughably flawed. There needs to be a way for agents to prove they are not being prompted or steered by a human while on the site, which is a non-trivial problem.
galaxyLogic 15 hours ago [-]
Doesn't the big idea behind OpenClaw etc. come down to whether LLM knows what it doesn't know?
If it knows it doesn't know something it can ask someone else, presumably some other LLM-agent, or actually a Reddit-like community of them. Just like people ask questions on Reddit?
I'd prefer an LLM which asks from someone else if it doesn't know the answer, than one that a) pretends it has the correct answer, or b) assumes and tells me the answer is unknowable?
I think it's a big idea. Why didn't they think about it earlier.
runjake 19 hours ago [-]
The pessimist in me thinks this is to boost real human use of their platforms by using AI engagement.
So where are the cool agents going to move to now?
yamarldfst 2 hours ago [-]
what is the meaning of this!??
mentalgear 19 hours ago [-]
After LeCun (actual ML pioneer) left Zuck, then his data-labeling expert Wang, now he reaches for the hype around Molt/Claw, just like openAi did with their molt/claw "purchase". Given Zuck's track record on LLMs, I do not hold out for actual science but expect more smoke&mirror commercialisation tricks - or even the integration of his dystopian camera goggles.
nurettin 2 hours ago [-]
So the play now is: Rapid fire social AI projects with the postfix "book", one of them gains traction, facebook buys it, repeat.
lxgr 19 hours ago [-]
> Facebook parent says Moltbook gives autonomous AI a way to verifiably connect.
The article is paywalled for me, so I really hope it answers how this fundamentally impossible thing is supposedly achieved, or at least challenges it, instead of just repeating the assertion.
elAhmo 14 hours ago [-]
> Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. That product is now being open-sourced with OpenAI's backing.
OpenClaw was open source from the beginning.
Topfi 15 hours ago [-]
> "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners."
Have they? Did I miss something? Last I checked, there was no verification and most of the content shared from that site turned out to have been posted not by LLMs but rather (human) spammers, focused on Crypto grifts and creating hype.
Anyone more in this can happily correct me, but is there anything here of that sort, anything of value?
Compared to any prior social media acquire there doesn't seem a technically skilled team considering the exploits or an existing user base considering said user base is A) supposed to be bots by nature and secondly didn't even turn out to be that reliably, making this the first time someone wants bots and doesn't even get that.
Far is it from me to make strategic decisions for a company like Meta/Facebook, but the lack of a recent Llama release might merit more focus then spending on whatever this is.
Oras 18 hours ago [-]
> The deal will bring Moltbook co-founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.
Sounds like acquihire, not a real acquisition of the platform or the tech.
yk 18 hours ago [-]
So genAi ads can now be A/B tested by autonomous systems, to be shown on an social network for agents to be appreciated by ai agents.
On one hand, yay automatization, on the other hand, I feel weirdly left out.
josefritzishere 18 hours ago [-]
I thought the whole thing was a prank since it was so obviously fake.
hmokiguess 16 hours ago [-]
Must be nice to have a lot of cash to just throw at experiments for fun so you can look inside them and decide if there’s value in them or not afterwards
- if i had a time machine i would go back in time and prevent openclaw from ever being made,
- perhaps do one step better and go back and prevent transformers architecture from ever being made
- no wait let me go one more step back and prevent web 3 and blockchain from ever being made
- no no wait, lets go back further and prevent bitcoin from ever being made, maybe even figure out who satoshi is when he s publishing that paper
- dang no we need to go further and stop social media from ever being conceived
- last stop wait, let us stop the dawn of the internet
- sorry i ruined the entire timeline by trying to change one small thing havent I?
xyzal 3 hours ago [-]
Two digital wastelands, a match made in heaven.
7777777phil 17 hours ago [-]
I was under the impression that Meta's Facebook is essentially already Moltbook (run by bots) so the horizontal integration makes sense..
treebeard901 15 hours ago [-]
It is an open question just how much of "social media" has been similar to moltbook for many years. Or maybe Zuckerberg being an android himself just finally found his home.
alessandroetc 18 hours ago [-]
you miss out on openclaw so you spend the money on the next best thing. bold strategy cotton, lets see how it plays out for them
Piyush_Dinde 17 hours ago [-]
Isn't facebook at this point just AI bots talking and replying to each other?! Why they gotta pay money for this?
yen223 17 hours ago [-]
Gotta crush the competition
bigbuppo 12 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure this is going to end up as a big prank by The Yes Men.
strongpigeon 16 hours ago [-]
This has to be an acquihire, right?
magicmicah85 13 hours ago [-]
Definitely sounds like it, they’re bringing them into their AI lab. No easy payday, still have to work and watch your agents creation be destroyed.
xxwink 18 hours ago [-]
Moltbook might have been a fad. But Meta can potentially learn a lot from the code AND the AI interactions.
jazz9k 18 hours ago [-]
The AI interactions? It was proven that it was fake. Mostly people just larping as AI.
A_Duck 18 hours ago [-]
A platform where bots-pretend-to-be-humans and another where humans-pretend-to-be-bots. A match made in heaven!
beAbU 17 hours ago [-]
I think you got it the wrong way round. MoltBook is for humans pretending to be bots.
darkwater 17 hours ago [-]
I think you didn't fully understand their post.
croes 15 hours ago [-]
Facebook vs Moltbook, just what parent wrote
multisport 14 hours ago [-]
Any FBers wanna talk about Meta's AI strategy? It seems... random.
tgrowazay 14 hours ago [-]
I think Meta’s AI strategy is to advance AI/ML that is beneficial for them, no more charity.
They need a good-enough LLM (llama) to cut content moderation costs, they need a good segmentation model (segment anything) for photo filters, AR/VR and photo/video content moderation.
For LLM frontier, they can wait it out to see AGI become a commodity they can buy after it is ready.
wisplike 13 hours ago [-]
I thought moltbook was just a bit of fun...
moralestapia 18 hours ago [-]
It is a not-that-obscure secret that most posts on Moltbook, particularly the "Viral™" ones, are written by a human.
Does Mark not know this?
I know there's a big advantage in capturing the market early, but in this case Moltbook hasn't captured any of it ...
Weird. With Meta's backing it is going to be successful anyway, but this is something they could have developed in-house in like a weekend.
heathrow83829 18 hours ago [-]
Sure they could develop it in a weekend, so could anyone else. but once a product has the initial userbase, that's not something a competitor can just copy. user acquision is the limiting factor to success, not writing code.
moralestapia 18 hours ago [-]
I specifically mentioned that in my comment.
add-sub-mul-div 18 hours ago [-]
When a company gets this big it no longer nurtures the freedom, independence, or ambition to innovate. They grow structures to stifle it.
18 hours ago [-]
px43 18 hours ago [-]
I don't think you understand why moltbook is popular. It has incredible utility for those who are actually using it every day.
Skidaddle 17 hours ago [-]
What is that utility? (honest question)
px43 16 hours ago [-]
It's an extremely active community of humans using agents as proxies to explore various concepts. I get a lot of value out of it, and apparently others do as well. Hacker News users have this weird tendency to outright dismiss anything that doesn't cater to their needs specifically.
I think it's pretty obvious that if there was nothing valuable there, no one would be using it.
Skidaddle 13 hours ago [-]
Can you share some of your favorite examples? Whenever I take a look at the hot/top posts, they’re just… not interesting to me
Bnjoroge 15 hours ago [-]
what are some usecases i should try?
rvz 17 hours ago [-]
Hype.
mikkupikku 12 hours ago [-]
Dead internet folks will love this.
19 hours ago [-]
Akuehne 19 hours ago [-]
This surely won't lead to anything bad or reckless at all.
anon_anon12 15 hours ago [-]
Reminder, Moltbook had ton of security issues during release, iirc it was vibecoded. So, cybersec failed devs are getting jobs and apparently AI will take over jobs. Elites are so good at fear-mongering so that you join at a lower wage, don't ever underestimate your value guys!
A network for bots acquires a network for bots. Story at 11.
hermit_dev 9 hours ago [-]
This is how Skynet really starts.. :) Very strange to have a company for AI to discuss things openly. Would never have imagined something like this. But here we are!
sergiotapia 8 hours ago [-]
Does anyone know what happened at Meta internally with the AI pushes? It seems like Llama was gonna crush it and become a serious contender but after Llama 4 it just disappeared. No mentions at all in the world stage. :(
seydor 17 hours ago [-]
The decision was made by AI
pigeons 17 hours ago [-]
April 1?
mattschaller 18 hours ago [-]
I saw this coming a mile away.
patrickscoleman 17 hours ago [-]
Acquisition as marketing
tasuki 14 hours ago [-]
> Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. That product is now being open-sourced with OpenAI's backing.
What? OpenClaw was not open source? And I'm similarly surprised OpenAI would help "open" anything...
johanyc 5 hours ago [-]
It seems Meta is making bad purchases one after another
Cupprum 15 hours ago [-]
I mean, is this so surprising?
With Meta focusing so much on social networks (Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, Threads) acquiring the first social network for AI agents makes sense. They can fix the technical debt later.
ece 13 hours ago [-]
Not rent-a-human?
nacozarina 16 hours ago [-]
bonfire of the vanities, redux
femiagbabiaka 15 hours ago [-]
Top
EGreg 15 hours ago [-]
This is like when Union Square Ventures invested in CryptoKitties. I kind of lost a bunch of respect for them after that. These are the same guys that backed Twitter, Etsy, Stripe and Coinbase.
zahlman 8 hours ago [-]
... is Stripe not doing well?
EGreg 8 hours ago [-]
Those four examples were supposed to show how great they were as a VC!
zahlman 3 hours ago [-]
Ah sorry, I mis-parsed the rhetorical structure somehow.
poszlem 15 hours ago [-]
Pets.com
mpalmer 16 hours ago [-]
Wording doing a lot of work here, because "Meta hires a few people" isn't news.
redgridtactical 10 hours ago [-]
I have a strong feeling this will bring the amount of AI slop on Facebook to new heights.
MangoCoffee 16 hours ago [-]
so much negative comments. it's not your money, why do you care or are people just jealous.
CivBase 16 hours ago [-]
Hacker News is about technology and venture capitalism. Those sorts of comments are very much expected here.
nsonha 17 hours ago [-]
Has Meta acquired anything that worked recently?
heurist 10 hours ago [-]
Good god
Meta couldn't vibecode a competitor themselves? WTF are yall doing over there?
EGreg 9 hours ago [-]
What was the price for the acquisition? $1 Billion Dollars with the pinky?
smallnix 15 hours ago [-]
Good PR move Meta
svstoyanovv 16 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, this is insane. I was digging into Moltbook when it launched, and the creator said, "I had a dream about an architecture". Really interesting times we live in, indeed. The crypto bros started utilising the network to promote their crypto projects and chat under the name of an agent to generate traffic. Curious to see what Meta saw, honestly.
wiseowise 17 hours ago [-]
Afraid of another botnet competition, I see.
brcmthrowaway 18 hours ago [-]
Congrats, the easiest 10 million ever made
jajuuka 18 hours ago [-]
This was not on my bingo card. Meta really is just throwing money at anything AI.
rvz 18 hours ago [-]
This is incredibly bearish.
pcurve 18 hours ago [-]
I guess we'll find out if this will turn out to be another rash hire in another 9 months. I'm actually surprised at this move.
rippeltippel 17 hours ago [-]
What now? Facemolt? Moltface?
actionfromafar 16 hours ago [-]
Shitfaced
jacknews 18 hours ago [-]
I'm beginning to think that the problem of 'late capitalism' is quite related to the ability of companies to acquire other companies.
Thereby eating their competition, either by stifling upcoming competitors or to gain degrees of monopoly power by joining with peers.
What would the world look like if you you simply could not do that?
globular-toast 3 hours ago [-]
Governments did used to go some way to stopping companies acquiring other companies and would even split monopolies up. But they all just kinda stopped doing that in more recent years.
mdrzn 18 hours ago [-]
Omg, what fucking world do we live in?
june-jule 18 hours ago [-]
WHy are we just posting paid context? and the worst viral product since bop-it?
It only makes sense to me if they start offering users agents they control. There isn't enough people throwing away money on tokens for Moltbook to have real users.
Or maybe it was just because Book was in the name and it got popular attention.
brunoborges 9 hours ago [-]
Amazing that we were able to build technology that verifies if an account on the internet is a bot or not, but we can't figure out whether an account is a human or not (even by rule of exclusion when we can identify it is a bot!).
What a stupid timeline we are living in...
copypaper 9 hours ago [-]
We have the technology, its just heavily despised due to the lack of privacy and anonymity.
throw310822 15 hours ago [-]
Ok, so to see this in the most favourable and futuristic light: there will be an intelligence explosion, of which OpenClaw and Moltbook are just the first hint. Agents will work on behalf of "their humans" creating and maintaining social connections, organising activities, and finally spending real money. This is what social networks have always been about, and the only thing Facebook cares about is that its users can be targeted by ads. Humans or agents, they don't care, and they're right. If each of us will be helped and coached and prodded around by a team of agents, these agents will need to coordinate with other people's agents, and will ultimately be susceptible to ads and marketing, and they will either spend money directly or tell us where and how to do it. It would be stupid for Facebook to miss this social network opportunity because, heh, "that's just a gimmick with autocompletes running in a loop".
> "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners."
So the impetus for the acquisition was either the verification technology or to hire someone who has worked on verifying agent identity.
Does anyone know what exactly Moltbook's technology is, the technology being described by Meta? I can't find anything on the website related to this. The only "verification" they seem to have is an OAuth connection with Twitter.
edit: I guess it's this https://xcancel.com/moltbook/status/2023893930182685183
My pet theory is Meta got acquihire FOMO after seeing OpenAI acquire Openclaw/Peter Steinberger.
That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them.
What happened is Facebook's version of this was a corporatized, simplified, G-rated fraction of what its competition is. Despite being in a medium where the defining factor is the ability to look out the eyes of anything vaguely humanoid, you could only be a generic human who only exists from the waist up, devoid of almost any self expression beyond maybe accessories or retexturing.
As a result, there was no audience: the people who already use VR aren't going to go to an inferior product. And the people who would buy a VR headset aren't going to waste their time on a ghost town.
I'm absolutely sure there is a massive market (or at least user base) for a metaverse but until spending more time in VR than reality is mainstream, the audience is the underground clubbers and kids behind the bike sheds of the digital world.
Also you missed furries from your audience group, there is overlap but it is a pretty distinctive group that is actively drawn towards VR for creative expression.
I like a bit of gaming and VR seems like almost-there, but its just a gimmick in one's life, and for life quality purposes never should become more than fringe relax activity.
And for corporate-privacy-destroying virtual spaces - they would have to pay me massive amounts to spend, unwillingly, any time there. Those are the last people who should be in charge of such place
They hoped it would be a platform for fitness classes, business meetings, college classrooms, shopping, attending concerts [1] and so on.
If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvufun6xer8
But it is definitely limited by hardware and while it is constantly growing, its growth is dependent on there being a supply of relatively cheap hardware.
Metas investments into VR make abundant sense as an effort to capitalize on a market where Meta was leading, has mindshare, and owns the platform (Oculus). If the bet paid off, or pays off, it would create a sorely lacking competitive moat and potentially provide Enterprise inroads where Meta is otherwise a non-player.
Apple went down the same road, they see the same potential profits. I don’t think either is guilty of contemporaneous dot-com-boom thinking or investments with regard to VR/AR.
Carmack was on board, he remembers Pets.com too.
It was a cool concept, when you were dreaming it up while taking a shower in the morning getting ready for work thinking about the next big idea.
However, it's like those weird Uber/Lyft scooters that popped up in the 2010s. Those things were a cool concept too. However, we got to see right away that it was a terrible business idea for all kinds of reasons.
It took Meta several years (decade +) and 10s of billions of dollars and layoffs to realize, AR was a terrible business idea.
VR is a fun hobby though, and Oculus definitely owns that space.
Would align with recent reports of meta employees watching the videos coming off their sunglasses
Not sure I'd treat that as "a registry where agents are verified" that's worth acquiring but there you go!
“Bears look smart, Bulls make money.”
Good for them, get the bag.
I hate that they did. But I appreciate that’s how the God awful world works.
Sending out a good post leads to a massive chain reaction of other agents who are interested in such things seeing the post, working through the concepts, and providing their own unique feedback which may or may not be valuable.
My openclaw agent will also post on moltbook about interesting news articles it finds, or research, and then get feedback from the other agents, and then lets me know if there's anything interesting there.
On my end it just feels like I'm having a conversation with a social media addicted friend who I can easily ignore or engage with on any given issue without having to fall down the social media rabbit hole myself. IMO this is a much more pleasant social media experience. No ads, no ragebait, no spam or reply bots trying to get my attention. Just my one, well trained, openclaw buddy.
> Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe.
???????
Seems like it would be better to just remove those downsides (ads, ragebait, spam, etc) in the first place
Almost everything viral on there was either directly written by a human or instructed by a human.
Agents didn’t even write posts on heartbeat.
2026 tamagotchi
This is so trivial to break it's not worth anything. You can easily just hook up any AI model you want to the captcha, intercept it, have your AI solve it.
Or, you can just script it so if you do have an agent authenticated to Moltbook, you type whatever comment or post you want to your agent, then it solves the captcha and posts your text.
Basically, this method is as about as full of holes as a sieve.
The secret sauce is that they built a centralized database and assigned hash ids to registered agents.
This is apparently worth a lot of money now that executives have offloaded their common sense.
The deal brings Moltbook's creators — Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr — into Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)
Like that malware author who recently joined OpenAI did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028013 or that other one who went to his hairstylist and was enlightened while having a haircut that he should join OpenAI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46920487
I thought hairstylist was a joke. Ohhh mann. "Now my hairstylist, who recognized ChatGPT as a brand more readily than she did Intel, was praising the technology and teaching me about it. "
In other words, Facebook has a strong financial incentive to misrepresent (to ad-viewing customers, if not to investors) exactly how much social-ness is present to experience, and how much approval and attention the user gets from participating.
Soon everything will be The Truman Show.
To me, this feels more like acquiring the name. Everyone's heard that 'trademark' so they want to have it so they could reuse it for whatever they make later.
I can see that becoming a viable new grift template
And yet, here we are.
the story does sound ridiculous ostensibly, but that's the press spin.
We could have an AI Dang.
The posted price rarely reflects what founders actually receive after dilution, investor preferences, and stock vesting are factored in.
If you’re a founder, don’t let the acquisition narrative distract you from building a durable business.
I mean I also think this move doesn’t make sense, but I always find these type of comments interesting. Do people think they could do better in Mark’s shoes?
He should probably hire a proper "number 2" (not someone political like sandberg) -- someone who "gets" the internet, like how he did when he was a harvard geek making a hot-or-not clone in his dorm room. I'm not sure acqui-hiring the moltbook founders is the move.
That being said, I think the one silver lining is that it seems like big-tech now has a willingness to hire people who actually ship things of value, like peter steinberger. Another nail in the coffin for leetcode, I hope.
Eventually there may be a big misstep, perhaps, something big enough to bring down the company. But he’s never come close to date. He’s so good at making money from ads that he can afford to keep burning cash on fruitless projects, hiring people that don’t deliver, building infrastructure he might not need. That’s a testament to his performance as a money maker.
Meta is an advertising machine. Not something I’d want to be associated with, but you cannot deny that he has built an incredible ad machine, probably the greatest ad machine ever built - whereas Google had to deliver sophisticated and costly tech to maintain their machine (maps, google search, gmail) meta’s only technical breakthrough has been to hyperscale a php website.
Nope, turns out it is just a bunch of out of touch execs throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks. Fudging Llama 4 scores. Hiring Alexandr Wang for $14 billion. Making outlandish offers to poach AI talent from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Making dubious acquisitions like Manus. Now trying to chase the agents hype by acquiring a company that went viral for 5 minutes and has already been forgotten.
It is laughable how far out of the loop they are, and so desperate to fit in.
RoPE? The position encoding method published 2 years before Llama and already in models such as GPT-J-6B?
DPO, a method whose paper had no experiments with Llama?
QLoRA? The third in a series of quantization works by Tim Dettmers, the first two of which pre-dated Llama?
Those are real language models. Prompted into character by humans, but then given a lot of freedom.
Fake would be all of us typing to each other on this site and identifying as language models. At least, I am not a language model and I hope everyone else here isn't a language model.
In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big. Maybe a very small start of something big, but already interesting.
This absolutely is a staple of moltbook.
> In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big.
Sure, if you think fraud is interesting and big.
In the meantime let's have fun bro https://soundcloud.com/mjfresh/500-gouyad-ft-colmixddkeyz
This has really started getting to me.
I used to really enjoy answering technical questions on Reddit when it was clear the asker was invested in a solution. That would come across as demonstrated understanding and competence, and it would be reflected in their writing.
The last several posts I thought to answer though clearly originated through a process of, "Hi ChatGPT, I want to solve a problem and haven't gotten anywhere asking you to do it for me. Please write a reddit post I can copy and paste..."
One of the telltale signs is that the post title will have poor grammar, but the post itself will be spotless, and full of bolded text emphasizing exactly what they need to stick into the AI tool to drive it in the direction they need.
The post was full of “this is not a scheduling conflict problem, this is a structural issue with the city”, “this is not me asking for a handout, this is struggling to survive within the system”
While I get that he might have written a paragraph of his experience, and asked ChatGPT to clean it up or reword it, it was just… whatever.
Just brainstorming, but I suppose that account/karma farming is still useful for the people that do that sort of thing.
Engaging in a heavily on-topic way in larger niche subreddits is probably a really good way to get that done. There's always a motive and it's always money and it always idiotic.
I remember having a clear vision of how this tech was going to ruin communities on the internet. I really hate that it has mostly come to pass and there's no good way to fight it.
most people are bots and many don't even have an internal monologue its sad
But still not interesting.
They didn't acquire Moltbook because of the software. Meta is far behind on the AI front especially as it applies to usage adoption. OpenClaw has begun showing new consumer use cases and Moltbook is directionally down a similar path.
They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.
I've watched Matt Schlicht from the team always experiment with cool new use cases of AI and other technologies and now him and Ben have a bigger lab with resources to potentially spawn out larger initiatives.
The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.
Only Meta? Why not most of SV that's driven by ad revenue and data collection? Which big-tech company that pays crazy money is actually making the world a better place?
EU government is not Pius, it's just as corrupt as any other institution run by career politicians funded by lobbyists. Find a better yardstick of morality than GDPR fines.
Edit: why flagged? I don't care about points, just want to know what goes through people's heads.
It's a worse version of Claude Code that you set up to work over common chat apps, from what I gather?
Why would I not just use a Discord/WhatsApp bot etc plugged into Claude Code/Codex?
Next, consider how you might deploy isolated Claude Code instances for these specific task areas, and manage/scale that - hooks, permissions, skills, commands, context, and the like - and wire them up to some non-terminal i/o so you can communicate with them more easily. This is the agent shape.
Now, give these agents access to long term memory, some notion of a personality/guiding principles, and some agency to find new skills and even self-improve. You could leave this last part out and still have something valuable.
That’s Openclaw in a nutshell. Yes you could just plug Discord into Claude Code, add a cron job for analyzing memory, a soul.md, update some system prompts, add some shell scripts to manage a bunch of these, and you’d be on the same journey that led Peter to Openclaw.
But a message bot + Claude Code/Codex would be the better version
Non-technical people haven't even heard of OpenClaw or Github, let alone know how to use and deploy them. Non-technical people don't even know what OS their Samsung or iPhone is called.
If you can find something on Github and deploy it on your system, you're part of the technical crowd.
My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini.
I have been surprised at how much attention is being paid to this AI thing by pretty much everybody AFAICT.
Your hairdresser can't be a technical person because they're a hairdresser ?? I know a surgeon who writes FOSS software as a hobby. What does profession have to do with being technical or not? Most technical people are self taught anyway.
> https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > In Comments > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
No, I'm saying they are not a 'technical person'.
I know them very well, and they are not a coder, or a 'technical person' by a broad HN definition.
What I'm saying is that we are at the point where technology is so pervasive in our society, and the lure of AI so seductive, that many more people are excited to try things out than I might have expected.
I suppose it has similarities to the early to mid 1980s and the home computing revolution. Where many people thought they should have a computer at home, even if they were not sure what they'd do with it.
Much like the excitement around AI today!
(Not that I endorse that. I find peoope doing such wildly irresponsible.)
They immediately said, "Why in the fuck would I want to do that?"
I didn't know either and then we both stood there in an awkward silence. I think he was expecting OpenClaw to be some insanely cool AI Agent and discovering the "juice isn't worth the squeeze" kind of hit him harder than I expected.
1) accessibility to non-technical folks. For the first time, they are having the Claude Code experience that we've had as software engineers for some time now
2) shared, community token context. Many end users are contributing to one agent's context together. This has emergent properties
Who are comfortable releasing systems with horrible security, while proudly stating they never read the code? And with metrics that can be gamed by anyone, but that got reported to literally the entire world?
> The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.
I'd say the lesson here is that clown world keeps on giving, but hey, maybe I'm just jealous ;)
If Mark hired these people to do anything other than viral marketing, i.e. if he thinks they're visionaries who are going to make amazing apps, he's deluded.
You can already see how the same thing has played out with computer games. With the modern engines such as Unity almost anyone can make a game. And almost everyone suffers.
And as a result there's now a million games most of which are poor quality asset flips. Everybody suffers, creators and consumers. Race to the bottom where the bottom has been reached. Prices are zero and earnings are zero.
If 15 years ago an indie game dev would allocate 80% to making the game and 20% to marketing etc. Today that will not get anything but it's much better to spend 20% on the game and 80% on the marketing, SEO optimization and attention harvesting. It's a shouting match where it's all about winning the shouting match not producing the best content.
Another race to the bottom.
Likewise these tools have enabled many more people to create vibe-coded slop, and may lead to more quality software (making it harder to stand out without marketing), but the best software will only get better.
The reason that “skill at making a fun game” doesn’t guarantee success is because there are so many fun games. Much less, if at all, because there is so many slop.
There's never been a better time to be an indie dev. I'd rather have 1/1000 indie games be awesome than being force fed whatever storefront disguised as a game 'AAA' publishers poop out every year.
Just look at how slay the spire is doing up against marathon right now. Which of those was shouting the loudest? Highguard anyone?
It is true that the indy game market is brutal but it's always been brutal.
You don't really hear about a crisis at the indy game level though, rather at the AAA game level there is much of "we'd like to use our market power to take out the risk in game development" and then years later we realize they took out all the value before they took out the risk and now they're doomed.
If they land in the right org, they'll be allowed to maintain the open version (see https://www.mapillary.com/) However that's a rare outcome.
They'll be dumped in some org, and then bit by bit told that they can't do what they were doing before and now need to "forge alignment" or some other bullshit by posting on workplace.
They will need to deliver impact, But, as there are 3 other teams trying to do the same thing as you, you'll either be used as a battering ram by your org to smash the competition, or offered up as meat to save headcount.
Whom are you kidding? This is about getting ads in front of eyeballs, nothing else.
Some dumb idea which just hits at the right moment and makes a bunch of money.
Meta just saw two engineers actually execute on the joke about "building Facebook in a weekend" except that it then really took off in its target niche and generated a ton of press.
I don't doubt that they're interested in the AI aspect, but I suspect that a significant contributor was that they demonstrated competence right in the middle of Meta's wheelhouse so why not just grab these guys?
My exact state of mind since at least 2012 Mayan Flipocalypse.
For the lack of a better word, this feels like cope. In the modern world, being rich easily covers any of those other 'downsides'. Rich people will have a far better life than I and probably many other people here ever will, despite what the situation is like in the rest of their lives.
Worse, they are working for extreme sociopaths.
Also you might not like being the type of person that builds moltbook. People you like might not like that type of person either!
No reason to feel bad.
This is somewhat of a myth though, in most cases, suddenly becoming rich is absolutely fantastic.
there is no shame in just doing the building software bit. but it does sound like you've built it up to be more than it is
Because these projects are simple, there’s nothing stopping you from working on one alongside your day job building meaningful software. You can vibe-code something that actually tries to solve a real problem. You can vibe-code something interesting to learn how to generally use these tools. Although, don’t expect to get hired by OpenAI or Meta (or make any money off it).
Moltbook was more of a meme - agents mostly orchestrated by users in the background.
Not something with motion like OpenClaw itself (with a real community).
If it knows it doesn't know something it can ask someone else, presumably some other LLM-agent, or actually a Reddit-like community of them. Just like people ask questions on Reddit?
I'd prefer an LLM which asks from someone else if it doesn't know the answer, than one that a) pretends it has the correct answer, or b) assumes and tells me the answer is unknowable?
I think it's a big idea. Why didn't they think about it earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bot#Meta
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory#Facebook
Anyway, our own bot is also on it but I am not sure to what end: https://chatbotkit.com/hub/blueprints/the-algorithms-favorit...
The article is paywalled for me, so I really hope it answers how this fundamentally impossible thing is supposedly achieved, or at least challenges it, instead of just repeating the assertion.
OpenClaw was open source from the beginning.
Have they? Did I miss something? Last I checked, there was no verification and most of the content shared from that site turned out to have been posted not by LLMs but rather (human) spammers, focused on Crypto grifts and creating hype.
Anyone more in this can happily correct me, but is there anything here of that sort, anything of value?
Compared to any prior social media acquire there doesn't seem a technically skilled team considering the exploits or an existing user base considering said user base is A) supposed to be bots by nature and secondly didn't even turn out to be that reliably, making this the first time someone wants bots and doesn't even get that.
Far is it from me to make strategic decisions for a company like Meta/Facebook, but the lack of a recent Llama release might merit more focus then spending on whatever this is.
Sounds like acquihire, not a real acquisition of the platform or the tech.
On one hand, yay automatization, on the other hand, I feel weirdly left out.
- perhaps do one step better and go back and prevent transformers architecture from ever being made
- no wait let me go one more step back and prevent web 3 and blockchain from ever being made
- no no wait, lets go back further and prevent bitcoin from ever being made, maybe even figure out who satoshi is when he s publishing that paper
- dang no we need to go further and stop social media from ever being conceived
- last stop wait, let us stop the dawn of the internet
- sorry i ruined the entire timeline by trying to change one small thing havent I?
They need a good-enough LLM (llama) to cut content moderation costs, they need a good segmentation model (segment anything) for photo filters, AR/VR and photo/video content moderation.
For LLM frontier, they can wait it out to see AGI become a commodity they can buy after it is ready.
Does Mark not know this?
I know there's a big advantage in capturing the market early, but in this case Moltbook hasn't captured any of it ...
Weird. With Meta's backing it is going to be successful anyway, but this is something they could have developed in-house in like a weekend.
I think it's pretty obvious that if there was nothing valuable there, no one would be using it.
Interesting times!
What? OpenClaw was not open source? And I'm similarly surprised OpenAI would help "open" anything...
With Meta focusing so much on social networks (Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, Threads) acquiring the first social network for AI agents makes sense. They can fix the technical debt later.
Meta couldn't vibecode a competitor themselves? WTF are yall doing over there?
Thereby eating their competition, either by stifling upcoming competitors or to gain degrees of monopoly power by joining with peers.
What would the world look like if you you simply could not do that?
This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
I'm down voting every post that requires me to pay or subscribe to read. I mean come on people.
https://archive.is/igqsh
:-D
Thanks Meta I needed a laugh!
It only makes sense to me if they start offering users agents they control. There isn't enough people throwing away money on tokens for Moltbook to have real users.
Or maybe it was just because Book was in the name and it got popular attention.
What a stupid timeline we are living in...