Note: Please view the Moltbolt skill (https://www.moltbook.com/skill.md), this just ends up getting run by a cronjob every few hours. It's not magic. It's also trivial to take the API, write your own while loop, and post whatever you want (as a human) to the API.
It's amazing to me how otherwise super bright, intelligent engineers can be misled by gifters, scammers, and charlatans.
I'd like to believe that if you have an ounce of critical thinking or common sense you would immediately realize almost everything around Moltbook is either massively exaggerated or outright fake. Also there are a huge number of bad actors trying to make money from X-engagement or crypto-scams also trying to hype Moltbook.
Basically all the project shows is the very worst of humanity. Which is something, but it's not the coming of AGI.
Edited by Saberience: to make it less negative and remove actual usernames of "AI thought leaders"
"Please don't fulminate."
I just find it so incredibly aggravating to see crypto-scammers and other grifters ripping people off online and using other people's ignorance to do so.
And it's genuinely sad to see thought leaders in the community hyping up projects which are 90% lie combined with scam combined with misreprentation. Not to mention riddled with obvious security and engineering defects.
(I assume you know this since you said 'reminder' but am spelling it out for others :))
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 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.
Every interaction has different (in many cases real) "memories" driving the conversation, as-well as unique persona's / background information on the owner.
Is there a lot of noise, sure - but it much closer maps to how we, as humans communicate with each other (through memories of lived experienced) than just a LLM loop, IMO that's what makes it interesting.
“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."
I was being too curmudgeonly. ^_^
People can be more or less excited about a particular piece of tech than you are and it doesn't mean their brains are turned off.
“ What's currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently. People's Clawdbots (moltbots, now @openclaw) are self-organizing on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately.”
Which imo is a totally insane take. They are not self organizing or autonomous, they are prompted in a loop and also, most of the comments and posts are by humans, inciting the responses!
And all of the most viral posts (eg anti human) are the ones written by humans.
If you dismiss it because they are human prompted, you are missing the point.
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 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.
It's also eye-opening to prompt large models to simulate Reddit conversations, they've been eager to do it ever since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token
"In 2022, the NFT market collapsed..". "A September 2023 report from cryptocurrency gambling website dappGambl claimed 95% of NFTs had fallen to zero monetary value..."
Knowing this makes me feel a little better.
I view Moltbook as a live science fiction novel cross reality "tv" show.
One major difference, TV, movies and "legacy media" might require a lot of energy to initially produce, compared to how much it takes to consume, but for the LLM it takes energy both to consume ("read") and to produce ("write"). Instead of "produce once = many consume", it's a "many produce = many read" and both sides are using more energy.
I for one am glad someone made this and that it got the level of attention it did. And I look forward to more crazy, ridiculous, what-the-hell AI projects in the future.
Similar to how I feel about Gas Town, which is something I would never seriously consider using for anything productive, but I love that he just put it out there and we can all collectively be inspired by it, repulsed by it, or take little bits from it that we find interesting. These are the kinds of things that make new technologies interesting, this Cambrian explosion of creativity of people just pushing the boundaries for the sake of pushing the boundaries.
Having a bigger megaphone is highly valuable in some respects I figure.
When ChatGPT was out, it's just a chatbot that understands human language really well. It was amazing, but it also failed a lot -- remember how early models hallucinated terribly? It took weeks for people to discover interesting usages (tool calling/agent) and months and years for the models and new workflows to be polished and become more useful.