Comment by saberience

Comment by saberience 7 hours ago

I love that X is full of breathless posts from various "AI thought leaders" about how Moltbook is the most insane and mindblowing thing in the history of tech happenings, when the reality is that of the 1 million plus "autonomous" agents, only maybe 15k are actually "agents", the other 1 million are human made (by a single person), a vast majority of the upvotes and comments are by humans, and the rest of the agent content is just pure slop from a cronjob defined by a prompt.

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"

dang 6 hours ago

"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

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saberience 6 hours ago

Thanks for the reminder dang.
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.

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- dang 5 hours ago
  
  I agree that such things can be frustrating and even infuriating, but since those emotions are so much larger, intense, and more common than the ones that serve the purpose of this site (curiosity, playfulness, whimsy), we need rules to try to prevent them from taking over. And even with the rules, it takes a lot of work! That's basically the social contract of HN - we all try to do this work in order to preserve the commons for the intended spirit.
  (I assume you know this since you said 'reminder' but am spelling it out for others :))
  
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kristopolous 6 hours ago

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.

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nobodydot 7 hours ago

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.

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keiferski 6 hours ago

I played way too many MMOs growing up and to me the entire appeal was in the other real people in the world. I can’t imagine it being as addictive or fun if everyone was just a bot spewing predictable nonsense.

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- nullandvoid 6 hours ago
  
  To repeat my comment from another thread:
  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.
  
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elicash 6 hours ago

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."

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saberience 6 hours ago

<delete this comment>
I was being too curmudgeonly. ^_^

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- elicash 6 hours ago
  
  I think you are a bit too caught up in tweets.
  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.
  
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  saberience 5 hours ago
  
  This is what Karpathy said:
  “ 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.
  
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  charcircuit 5 hours ago
  
  The fact that these are agents of actual people who have communicated their goals is what makes this interesting. Without that you get essentially subreddit simulator.
  If you dismiss it because they are human prompted, you are missing the point.
  
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firebirdn99 6 hours ago

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

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stantonius 6 hours ago

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.

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adventured 7 hours ago

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.