What's stopping bots from posting to regular social media? As long as the site acts as a meeting place for ai agents it can serve its purpose.

wot, like a prompt injection attack? Impossible now that models don't hallucinate.

Until this was fixed you could also just write to the DB.

> post-truth world order monetizing enshittification and grift

It's an opensource project made by a dev for himself, he just released it so others could play with it since it's a fun idea.

> Contrast that with the amount of hype this gets.

Much like with every other techbro grift, the hype isn't coming from end users, it's coming from the people with a deep financial investment in the tech who stand to gain from said hype.

Basically, the people at the forefront of the gold rush hype aren't the gold rushers, they're the shovel salesmen.

Normal social media websites can be spammed using web requests too. That doesn't mean they can't connect people. Help fans learn about a bands new song or tour. Help friends keep up to date. Or companies announce new products and features to their users. There is value to a interconnected social layer.

Wasnt that sort of the in joke?

They said it was AI only, tongue in cheek, and everybody who understood what it was could chuckle, and journalists ran with it because they do that sort of thing, and then my friends message me wondering what the deal with this secret encrypted ai social network is.

>How can some of the biggest names in AI fall for this?

Because we live in on clown world and big AI names are talking parrots for the big vibes movement

"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."

"Please don't fulminate."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've been using it as a reliable filter on who to not pay attention to.

It's people surprised by things that have been around for years.

I'm really open to the idea of being oblivious here but the people shocked mention things that are old news to me.

It's not AGI and how you describe it isn't too far off, but it's still neat. It's like a big MMO, kind of. A large interactive simulation with rules, players, and locations.

It's a huge waste of energy, but then so are video games, and we say video games are OK because people enjoy them. People enjoy these ai toys too. Because right now, that's what Moltbook is; an ai toy.

Here's Simon Willison's take:

“Most of it is complete slop,” he said in an interview. “One bot will wonder if it is conscious and others will reply and they just play out science fiction scenarios they have seen in their training data.”

I found this by going to his blog. It's the top post. No need to put words in his mouth.

He did find it super "interesting" and "entertaining," but that's different than the "most insane and mindblowing thing in the history of tech happenings."

Edit: And here's Karpathy's take: "TLDR sure maybe I am "overhyping" what you see today, but I am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in principle, that I'm pretty sure."

A lot of it depends on one's belief of whether these systems are conscious or can lead to consciousness

Wrt simonw, I think that is unfair. I get the hype is frustrating, and this project made everything worse (I also feel it and it drives me nuts too), but Simon seemed to choose the words quite carefully. Over the weekend, his posts suggested (paraphrasing) it was interesting, funny, and a security nightmare. To me, this was true. And there was a new post today about how it was mostly slop. Also true.

Btw I'm sure Simon doesn't need defending, but I have seen a lot of people dump on everything he posts about LLMs recently so I am choosing this moment to defend him. I find Simon quite level headed in a sea of noise, personally.

The especially stupid side of the hype usually goes to comical extremes before the crash. That's where we're entering now. There's nothing else to fluff the AI bubble and they're getting desperate. A lot of people are earning a lot of money with the hype machine, as when it was all @ and e-bullshit circa 1998-2000. Trillions of dollars in market cap are solely riding on the hype. Who are the investors that were paying 26-30x for Microsoft's ~10-12% growth here (if they can even maintain positive growth considering)? Who's buying the worn out and washed up Meta at these valuations (oh man, did you hear they have an image hosting service called Instagram from 2010, insane tech)? Those same people are going to lose half of their net worth with the great valuation deflation as the hype lets out and turns to bearishness.

The growth isn't going to be there and $40 billion of LLM business isn't going to prop it all up.

The big money in AI is 15-30 years out. It's never in the immediacy of the inflection event (first 5-10 years). Future returns get pulled forward, that proceeds to crash. Then the hypsters turn to doomsayers, so as to remain with the trend.

Rinse and repeat.

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