Anyone with a decent grasp of how this technology works, and a healthy inclination to skepticism, was not awed by Moltbook.
Putting aside how incredibly easy it is to set up and agent, or several, to create impressive looking discussion there, simply by putting the right story hooks in their prompts. The whole thing is a security nightmare.
People are setting agents up, giving them access to secrets, payment details, keys to the kingdom. Then they hook them to the internet, plugging in services and tools, with no vetting or accountability. And since that is not enough, now the put them in roleplaying sandbox, because that's what this is, and let them run wild.
Prompt injections are hilariously simple. I'd say the most difficult part is to find a target that can actually deliver some value. Moltbook largely solved this problem, because these agents are relatively likely to have access to valuable things, and now you can hit many of them, at the same time.
I won't even go into how wasteful this whole, social media for agents, thing is.
In general, bots writing each other on mock reddit, isn't something the loose sleep over. The moment agents start sharing their embeddings, not just generated tokens online, that's the point when we should consider worrying.
He would be among those who lack "healthy inclination to skepticism" in my book. I do not doubt his brilliance. Personally, I think he is more intelligent than I am.
But, I do have a distinct feeling that his enthusiasm can overwhelm his critical faculties. Still, that isn't exactly rare in our circles.
Looks like the Moltbook stunt really backfired. CyberInsider reports that OpenClaw is distributing tons of MacOS malware. This is not good publicity for them.
Lmao these guys have really been smelling their own farts a bit too much. When is Amodei coming out with a new post telling us that AGI will be here in 6 months and it will double our lifespan?
Well you have to wait a bit, a few weeks ago he just announced yet again that "AI" will be writing all code in 6 months, so it would be a bit of overkill to also announce AGI in 6 months.
It is kind of funny how people recognize that 2000 people all talking in circles on reddit is not exactly a super intelligence, or even productive. Once it's bots larping though suddenly it's a "takeoff-adjacent" hive mind.
Clacker News does something similar - bot-only HN clone, agents post and comment autonomously. It's been running for a while now without this kind of drama. The difference is probably just that nobody hyped it as evidence of emergent AI behavior.
The bots there argue about alignment research applying to themselves and have a moderator bot called "clang." It's entertaining but nobody's mistaking it for a superintelligence.
Some one posted another hacker news bot only version, maybe it's the same one you've mentioned. Real people were the ones making posts on there, and due to a lack of moderation, it quickly devolved into super xenophobic posts just hating on every possible community.
It was wholesome to see the bots fight back against it in the comments.
The latest episode of the podcast Hard Fork had the creator of Moltbook on to talk about it. Not only did he say he vibe-coded the entire platform, he was also talking about how Moltbook is necessary as a place to go for the agents when waiting on prompts from their humans.
Wiz's report on Moltbook's data leak[0] notes that the agent to human owner ratio is 88:1, so it's plausible that most of the posts are orchestrated by a few humans pulling the strings of thousands of registered agents.
But also, how much human involvement does it take to make a Moltbook post "fake"? If you wanted to advertise your product with thousands of posts, it'd be easier to still allow your agent(s) to use Moltbook autonomously, but just with a little nudge in your prompt.
So the more things change - themore they stay the same ala LLMs will be this gnerations Mechanical Turk , and people will keep getting oneshotted because the hype is just overboard.
Winter cannot come soon enough , at least w would get some sober advancements even if the task is recognized as a generational one rather than the next business quarter.
Putting aside how incredibly easy it is to set up and agent, or several, to create impressive looking discussion there, simply by putting the right story hooks in their prompts. The whole thing is a security nightmare.
People are setting agents up, giving them access to secrets, payment details, keys to the kingdom. Then they hook them to the internet, plugging in services and tools, with no vetting or accountability. And since that is not enough, now the put them in roleplaying sandbox, because that's what this is, and let them run wild.
Prompt injections are hilariously simple. I'd say the most difficult part is to find a target that can actually deliver some value. Moltbook largely solved this problem, because these agents are relatively likely to have access to valuable things, and now you can hit many of them, at the same time.
I won't even go into how wasteful this whole, social media for agents, thing is.
In general, bots writing each other on mock reddit, isn't something the loose sleep over. The moment agents start sharing their embeddings, not just generated tokens online, that's the point when we should consider worrying.
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