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

311–320 of 406 posts

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#311

Post by roywiggins »

saberience wrote: post #31
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…

Wait that's it? This is so trivial to break it's not worth anything. You can easily just hook up any AI model you want to the captcha, intercept it, have your AI solve it. Or, you can just script it so if you do have an agent authenticated to Moltbook, you type whatever comment or post you want to your agent, then it solves the captcha and posts your text. Basically, this method is as about as full of holes as a siev…

suspect this problem is essentially unsolvable. what possible method wouldn't be vulnerable to this? it's fine if it's just a sort of larp but if people think this could actually work... man

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#312

Post by kaizenb »

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…

Why people hesitate directly saying all this is just about money?

I thought hairstylist was a joke. Ohhh mann. "Now my hairstylist, who recognized ChatGPT as a brand more readily than she did Intel, was praising the technology and teaching me about it. "

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#313

Post by groby_b »

leobuskin wrote: post #280
neom wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure they invented that, I used moltbook and found it didn't have it, so I created it and posted it here a good 2 weeks before they posted their post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850284 - not that I care, want credit, or think ideas are worth anything, just like I didn't invent it, they didn't invent it either. I also happened to quite like Matt so even if by chance he saw my post and thought it wa…

In this new AI-driven world, ideas mean everything; one more year - it will be battles of ideas (not implementations as before).

Yes, we're all very excited for the many AI-created projects that have been created outside the shovel-selling business.... wait. There are none.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#314

Post by p0u4a »

not on my bingo sheet that's for sure. The whole verification thing is also so laughably flawed. There needs to be a way for agents to prove they are not being prompted or steered by a human while on the site, which is a non-trivial problem.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#315

Post by StableAlkyne »

brendanyounger wrote: post #287
_fat_santa wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> a metaverse that no one wanted

That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them.

What happened is Facebook's version of this was a corporatized, simplified, G-rated fraction of what its competition is. Despite being in a medium where the defining factor is the ability to look out the eyes of anything vaguely humanoid, you could only be a generic human who only exists from the waist up, devoid of almost any self expression beyond maybe accessories or retexturing.

As a result, there was no audience: the people who already use VR aren't going to go to an inferior product. And the people who would buy a VR headset aren't going to waste their time on a ghost town.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#317

Post by georgefrowny »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #315
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.

> a metaverse that no one wanted That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them. What happened is Facebook's version of this was a corporatized, simplified, G-rated fraction of what its competition is. Despite being in a medium where the de…

Indeed, the people who would like to spend hours and hours hanging out in the digital world like something out of Snow Crash are not generally the kind of people to want to hang out in a simulated corporate lobby under the watchful gaze of someone like Zuckerberg.

I'm absolutely sure there is a massive market (or at least user base) for a metaverse but until spending more time in VR than reality is mainstream, the audience is the underground clubbers and kids behind the bike sheds of the digital world.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#318

Post by Nevermark »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #316

I had never heard of "Moldtbook" before now. Facebook is absolutely insane for making this move. Why would you buy a fake website?

Because it isn't fake?

Those are real language models. Prompted into character by humans, but then given a lot of freedom.

Fake would be all of us typing to each other on this site and identifying as language models. At least, I am not a language model and I hope everyone else here isn't a language model.

In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big. Maybe a very small start of something big, but already interesting.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#319

Post by latentsea »

groby_b wrote: post #313
leobuskin wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this new AI-driven world, ideas mean everything; one more year - it will be battles of ideas (not implementations as before).

Yes, we're all very excited for the many AI-created projects that have been created outside the shovel-selling business.... wait. There are none.

There's a lot of 'single serve' software being written now by AI. People using Claude Code to make stuff that solves problems they have. It's wild watching people who don't know how to code just use it to solve problems they have. Even if the solutions can be considered awkward by traditional software engineering standards, to the people just looking to solve their problems, that doesn't matter, so long as it works. I'm a software engineer by trade and don't know shit about ML, but I want a nice tool to be able to do RLHF / DPO on Z-Image, so I'm working with Claude to build one, and so far it can use ComfyUI to generate the image pairs, and allows you to pick A vs. B then start a training run with layer offloading enabled so it fits in 16GB VRAM, and I haven't finished a training run yet, but steps are increasing and loss is changing so... I dunno... I see lots of software being created that wasn't before.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#320

Post by throwaway27448 »

Nevermark wrote: post #318
throwaway27448 wrote: post #316

I had never heard of "Moldtbook" before now. Facebook is absolutely insane for making this move. Why would you buy a fake website?

Because it isn't fake? Those are real language models. Prompted into character by humans, but then given a lot of freedom. Fake would be all of us typing to each other on this site and identifying as language models. At least, I am not a language model and I hope everyone else here isn't a language model. In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big. Maybe a very small start of something b…

> Fake would be all of us typing to each other on this site and identifying as language models

This absolutely is a staple of moltbook.

> In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big.

Sure, if you think fraud is interesting and big.

In the meantime let's have fun bro https://soundcloud.com/mjfresh/500-gouyad-ft-colmixddkeyz

Post reply on HN