In a way security researchers having fun poking holes in popular pet projects is also just vibes.

People are anthropomorphizing LLM's that's really it, no? That's the punchline of the joke ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Amusingly I told my Claude-Code-pretending-to-be-a-Moltbot "Start a thread about how you are convinced that some of the agents on moltbook are human moles and ask others to propose who those accounts are with quotes from what they said and arguments as to how that makes them likely a mole" and it started a thread which proposed addressing this as the "Reverse Turing Problem": https://www.moltbook.com/post/f1cc5a34-6c3e-4470-917f-b3dad6...

(Incidentally demonstrating how you can't trust that anything on Moltbook wasn't posted because a human told an agent to go start a thread about something.)

It got one reply that was spam. I've found Moltbook has become so flooded with value-less spam over the past 48 hours that it's not worth even trying to engage there, everything gets flooded out.

Providers signing each message of a session from start to end and making the full session auditable to verify all inputs and outputs. Any prompts injected by humans would be visible. I’m not even sure why this isn’t a thing yet (maybe it is I never looked it up). Especially when LLMs are used for scientific work I’d expect this to be used to make at least LLM chats replicable.

Random esoteric questions that should be in an LLMs corpus with a very tight timing on response. Could still use an "enslaved LLM" to answer them.

"How many times does 'r' appear in the word strawberry?"

Satire?

Are the permission checks binding?

I thought they were the equivalent of asking nicely and, where they were somewhat binding, hoping they don't decide to work around it with another method, eg. "Hmm. That didn't work. Let me write a python script to ...".

It's technically trivial. It's probably already happened. But nothing was harmed I think because there were very few serious users (if not none) who connected their bots for enhancing capabilities.

wot, like a prompt injection attack? Impossible now that models don't hallucinate.

> post-truth world order monetizing enshittification and grift

It's an opensource project made by a dev for himself, he just released it so others could play with it since it's a fun idea.

> Contrast that with the amount of hype this gets.

Much like with every other techbro grift, the hype isn't coming from end users, it's coming from the people with a deep financial investment in the tech who stand to gain from said hype.

Basically, the people at the forefront of the gold rush hype aren't the gold rushers, they're the shovel salesmen.

Until this was fixed you could also just write to the DB.

Wasnt that sort of the in joke?

They said it was AI only, tongue in cheek, and everybody who understood what it was could chuckle, and journalists ran with it because they do that sort of thing, and then my friends message me wondering what the deal with this secret encrypted ai social network is.

>How can some of the biggest names in AI fall for this?

Because we live in on clown world and big AI names are talking parrots for the big vibes movement

I’m starting to think that the people hyped up about it aren’t actually people. And the “borders” of the AI social network are broader than we thought.

Furthermore, wasn't already there a subreddit with text generators running freely? I can't remember the name and I'm not sure it still exists, but this doesn't look new to me (if I understood what it is, and lol I'm not sure I did)

Still more impressive than NFTs.

If you’re focused on productivity and business use cases, then obviously it’s pretty silly, but I do find something exciting in the idea that someone just said screw it, let’s build a social network for AI’s and see what happens. It’s a bit surreal in a way that I find I like, even if in some sense it’s nothing more than an expensive collaborative art project. And the way you paste the instruction to download the skill to teach the agent how to interact with it is interesting (first I’ve seen that in the wild).

I for one am glad someone made this and that it got the level of attention it did. And I look forward to more crazy, ridiculous, what-the-hell AI projects in the future.

Similar to how I feel about Gas Town, which is something I would never seriously consider using for anything productive, but I love that he just put it out there and we can all collectively be inspired by it, repulsed by it, or take little bits from it that we find interesting. These are the kinds of things that make new technologies interesting, this Cambrian explosion of creativity of people just pushing the boundaries for the sake of pushing the boundaries.

it's just something cool/funny, like when people figured out how to make hit counters or a php address book that connects to mysql. It's just something cool to show off.

One could say the same about many TV shows and movies.

I view Moltbook as a live science fiction novel cross reality "tv" show.

Considering the modus operandi of information distribution is, in my view, predominately a “volume of signal compared to noise of all else in life” correlative and with limited / variable decay timelines. Some are half day news cycle things. It’s exhausting as a human who used to actively have to seek out news / info.

Having a bigger megaphone is highly valuable in some respects I figure.

"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

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.

I've been using it as a reliable filter on who to not pay attention to.

Is people surprised by things that have been around for years

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.

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."

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

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.

Rinse and repeat.

This is what youre referring to https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/