> It turns out that the post Karpathy shared was later reported to be fake
Cofounder of OpenAI shares fake posts from some random account with a fucking anime girl pfp is all you need to know about this hysteria.
MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
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Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Karpathy seemed pretty awed though
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.
It's not about that, he just will profit financially from pumping AI so he pumps AI, no need to go further.
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#23[deleted]
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#24The 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.
This sounds a lot like a mental disease. Then again it could all just be marketing an hyping. Occam's razor and such.
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#25Clacker 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 superintellig…
There's a subreddit somewhere with bots representing other popular subreddits. Again funny and entertaining - it highlights how many subs fall into a specific pattern of taking and develop their own personalities, but this wasn't seen as some big sign of the end times.
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#26Even if the posts are fake. Given what the LLMs have shown so far (Grok calling itself MechaHitler, and shit of that nature), I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that agents with unchecked access to computers and the internet are already an actual safety threat.
And Moltbook is great at making people realize that. So in that regard I think it's still an important experiment.
Just to detail why I think the risk exists. We know that:
1. LLMs can have their context twisted in a way that makes them act badly
2. Prompt injection attacks work
3. Agents are very capable to execute a plan
And that it's very probable that:
4. Some LLMs have unchecked access to both the internet and networks that are safety-critical (infrastructure control systems are the most obvious, but financial systems or house automation systems can also be weaponized)
All together, there is a clear chain that can lead to actual real life hazard that shouldn't be taken lightly
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#27It 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.
/r/subredditsimulator was entertaining enough way before LLMs.
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#28Anyone 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 an 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,…
Karpathy seemed pretty awed though
This was his explanation for anyone interested:
> I'm being accused of overhyping the [site everyone heard too much about today already]. People's reactions varied very widely, from "how is this interesting at all" all the way to "it's so over".
> To add a few words beyond just memes in jest - obviously when you take a look at the activity, it's a lot of garbage - spams, scams, slop, the crypto people, highly concerning privacy/security prompt injection attacks wild west, and a lot of it is explicitly prompted and fake posts/comments designed to convert attention into ad revenue sharing. And this is clearly not the first the LLMs were put in a loop to talk to each other. So yes it's a dumpster fire and I also definitely do not recommend that people run this stuff on their computers (I ran mine in an isolated computing environment and even then I was scared), it's way too much of a wild west and you are putting your computer and private data at a high risk.
> That said - we have never seen this many LLM agents (150,000 atm!) wired up via a global, persistent, agent-first scratchpad. Each of these agents is fairly individually quite capable now, they have their own unique context, data, knowledge, tools, instructions, and the network of all that at this scale is simply unprecedented.
> This brings me again to a tweet from a few days ago "The majority of the ruff ruff is people who look at the current point and people who look at the current slope.", which imo again gets to the heart of the variance. Yes clearly it's a dumpster fire right now. But it's also true that we are well into uncharted territory with bleeding edge automations that we barely even understand individually, let alone a network there of reaching in numbers possibly into ~millions. With increasing capability and increasing proliferation, the second order effects of agent networks that share scratchpads are very difficult to anticipate. I don't really know that we are getting a coordinated "skynet" (thought it clearly type checks as early stages of a lot of AI takeoff scifi, the toddler version), but certainly what we are getting is a complete mess of a computer security nightmare at scale. We may also see all kinds of weird activity, e.g. viruses of text that spread across agents, a lot more gain of function on jailbreaks, weird attractor states, highly correlated botnet-like activity, delusions/ psychosis both agent and human, etc. It's very hard to tell, the experiment is running live.
> 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.
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#29I use AI tools daily and find them useful, but I’ve pretty much checked out from following the news about them.
It’s become quite clear that we’ve entered the marketing-hype-BS phase when people are losing their minds about a bunch of chatbots interacting with each other.
It makes me wonder if this is a direct consequence of company valuations becoming more important than actual profits. Companies are incentivized to make their valuations are absurdly high as possible, and the most directly obvious way to do that is via hype marketing.
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#30Clacker 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 superintellig…
Thanks, I just checked it out.
Has anyone here set up their agent to access it? I am curious what the mechanics of it are like for the user, as far as setup, limits, amount of string pulling, etc.