Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta acquires Moltbook

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 406 posts

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#301

Post by pocksuppet »

3rodents wrote: post #24

I thought that Moltbook was sort of a joke because it was people LARPing as agents as much as it was agents, and given that, I'm confused by this: > "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners." So the impetus for the acquisition was either the ve…

It's probably something vibe-coded, and nobody is checking if it works or not, just like the rest of the site. They would have just asked another AI if it would work or not.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#302

Post by pastel8739 »

matthest wrote: post #277
falcor84 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. I think he might be a joke as an individual, and I hate a lot about his impact on the world, but as a business leader, he's probably at the top 1% of all CEOs, which isn't saying that much, but it's very much not a joke if your metric is shareholder value.

What specifically about his impact on the world?

Conributing to the rise of attention farming, shoving stuff down people’s throats that they don’t want to see, etc

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#303

Post by pocksuppet »

RajT88 wrote: post #48
ardeaver wrote: post #43

There are many days where I feel like the right thing for my career is to focus on building meaningful software that solves an actual problem. Then there are days like today, especially after seeing this.

It is like musical one hit wonders, but for software. Some dumb idea which just hits at the right moment and makes a bunch of money.

It's not even one hit software. The software is horrible. It's a one hit PR website.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#304

Post by whycome »

3rodents wrote: post #24

I thought that Moltbook was sort of a joke because it was people LARPing as agents as much as it was agents, and given that, I'm confused by this: > "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners." So the impetus for the acquisition was either the ve…

> tethered to human owners

2026 tamagotchi

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#305

Post by arugulum »

tuananh wrote: post #283
paxys wrote: post #275

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…

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,...

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?

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#306

Post by hsuduebc2 »

3rodents wrote: post #24

I thought that Moltbook was sort of a joke because it was people LARPing as agents as much as it was agents, and given that, I'm confused by this: > "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners." So the impetus for the acquisition was either the ve…

I honestly absolutely don't understand purpose of this thing. Ok so I can bypass their captcha by literally calling any other AI. Does meta even bother to look on things on which they are burning money?

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#307

Post by flitzofolov »

potahtoputato wrote: post #292
kaizenb wrote: post #49

"Meta acquires Moltbook" vs "Meta hires duo behind Moltbook" The deal brings Moltbook's creators — Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr — into Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)

Correct. Now just waiting for it to reach full circle and have them write a "I have joined XXXX company to make the world a better place" blog and have it reach front page of HN. Like that malware author who recently joined OpenAI did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028013 or that other one who went to his hairstylist and was enlightened while having a haircut that he should join OpenAI https://news.ycombinato…

malware author is pretty harsh, but fair analysis overall

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#308

Post by Torien »

Eisenstein wrote: post #290
brendanyounger wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Zuckerberg was willing to burn tens of billions on a metaverse that no one wanted. Staying relevant is worth every penny he spent on Moltbook. We're deep in a repeat of the dot-com boom. The interesting question is what will rise from the ashes and take down old guard of FB, Google, Salesforce, Oracle, etc.

The dot com bust wasn't at all like that, though? What 'arose' were the players that had leadership with an actual plan besides 'launch IPO based on hype and wing it from there' or 'get a catchy domain name, pretend to do something useful with it, and get acquired by Yahoo'. The old guard that ended up being taken down were the legacy corporations that tried to ride the wave while refusing to let go of any of the pra…

Logged in for the first time in years to say, I appreciate you leaving this up and being able to change your view. Thanks!

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#309

Post by [deleted] »

_fat_santa wrote: post #264
3rodents wrote: post #24

I thought that Moltbook was sort of a joke because it was people LARPing as agents as much as it was agents, and given that, I'm confused by this: > "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners." So the impetus for the acquisition was either the ve…

I feel like that sort of verification is just inherently flawed and easy to bypass. I mean as easy as just telling your agent "hey go publish this on moltbook". My pet theory is Meta got acquihire FOMO after seeing OpenAI acquire Openclaw/Peter Steinberger.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN