I 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.

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ffsm8 8 hours ago | parent [-]

It's good to keep in mind that the agentic loop, what you're using AI tools with daily is essentially that, too.

The tooling just hide the interactions and back and forth nowadays.

So if you think you're getting value out of any ai tooling, you're essentially admitting a contradiction with what you're dismissing here via

> a bunch of chatbots interacting with each other.

Just something to think about, I don't have a strong opinion on the matter

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keiferski 8 hours ago | parent [-]

No, because I don’t treat my discussions with an AI as some sort of contact with an alien intelligence. Which is what half the hype articles were about re Moltbook.

It’s an immensely useful research tool, full stop. Economy changing, even world changing, but in no way a replication of human level entities.

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ffsm8 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think you're misunderstanding what I was trying to convey.

The thing I thought worth to ponder was the fact that you're deriving value out of what you've identified here as "a bunch of chatbots talking with each other"

These interactions seem to be producing value, even if moltbook ultimately didn't ... At least from my perspective.

But if you think about the concept itself, it's pretty easy to imagine something pretty much exactly like it being successful. The participating LLMs will likely just have to be greenlit, without it being writable for dog-and-world.

But It'd still fundamentally fall into the same category of product, which is "just a bunch of chatbots talking with each others", which itself falls e.g. Claude code into, too. Because that's what the agentic loop is, at its core.

As an example for a potentially valuable product following the same fundamental concept: imagine an orchestrator spawning agents which then synchronize through such a system, enabling "collaboration" across multiple distributed agents. I suspect that usecase is currently too expensive, but it's fundamental approach itself would be exactly what moltbook was

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mikkupikku 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> in no way a replication of human level entities.

Absolutely agree.

> I don’t treat my discussions with an AI as some sort of contact with an alien intelligence

Why not? They're not human intelligences. Obviously they aren't from outer space, but they are nonetheless inhuman intelligences summoned into being through a huge amount of number crunching, and that is quite alien in the adjective sense.

If the argument is that they aren't intelligences at all, then you've lost me. They're already far more capable than most AIs envisioned by 20th century science fiction authors. They're far more rational than most of Asimov's robots for instance.

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danaris 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> They're already far more capable than most AIs envisioned by 20th century science fiction authors.

They're not conscious, autonomous agents. They're fancy scripts.

HAL 9000 had more in common with a human than ChatGPT.

	▲	mikkupikku 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There is no empirical test for consciousness. It's the 21st century equivalent of angels dancing on pin heads. Engineers, who aren't trying to play at being new age theologians, should concern themselves with what the machines can demonstrably do and not do. In Asimov's robot tales, robots interpret vague commands in the worst way possible for the sake of generating interesting stories. But today, these "scripts" as you call them, can interpret vague and obtuse instructions in generally a reasonable way. Read through claude code's outputs and you'll find it filled with stuff like "The user said they want a 'thingy' to click on, I'm going to assume the user means a button." Now I haven't read the book since I was a teenager, but HAL 9000 applies literally instructions to achieve the mission in a way that actually makes him a liability to the mission. The best take was in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, in the intro when the narrator protagonist asks if machines can have souls, then explains that it doesn't matter, what matters is what the machine can do.