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Posted by mmayberry 1 day ago

Meta acquires Moltbook(www.axios.com)
https://web.archive.org/web/20260310154640/https://www.axios..., https://archive.ph/igqsh

https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-acquires-ai-agent-soci...

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/10/meta-acquired-moltbook-the...

534 points | 363 commentspage 2
yalogin 20 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.
game_the0ry 1 day 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 10 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 16 hours ago|||
That number 2 is Alexandr Wang, who most definitely initiated this acquisition (after being rejected by the OpenClaw guy).
eitally 1 day ago||
Agreed. He needed an "Eric Schmidt" about ten years ago.
rukuu001 10 hours ago||
"Clown car that fell into a gold mine" feels a little different when you're the gold mine
aj_hackman 1 day ago||
Is the market so bad that non-exec-level new hires are making the news?
alberth 1 day ago||
I didn't realize Moltbook and OpenClaw - were created by different people.
koakuma-chan 23 hours ago|
I thought Moltbook is what OpenClaw was called before it got renamed
strongpigeon 23 hours ago||
You're thinking Moltbot
wampwampwhat 1 day 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
runjake 1 day ago||
The pessimist in me thinks this is to boost real human use of their platforms by using AI engagement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

runjake 23 hours ago|
My only assumption is that bots are downvoting the above comment, given the readily-available evidence[1][2] supporting it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bot#Meta

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory#Facebook

paxys 16 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 15 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 13 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 9 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.
bluepeter 23 hours ago||
Meta and AI: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
bigyabai 23 hours ago|
Meta did make Pytorch and Llama. That quote may be better-off used for Apple or Microsoft.
shruubi 16 hours ago|
If Meta paid more than ten dollars for this then that is eleven dollars too much...
throwyawayyyy 15 hours ago|
Vibes-CEOing! Only one person at Meta actually matters of course.
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