Hacker News

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.

Meta acquired Moltbook, which is a social network for AI bots that was itself built by an AI bot, and which had a security breach so bad that literally anyone could impersonate any bot on it, and whose own creator cheerfully admitted he "didn't write one line of code" for it. This is going into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit they set up for Alexandr Wang, whom they hired from Scale AI roughly one year ago to, presumably, build superintelligence. It is not clear to me how buying a vibe-coded Reddit for chatbots gets you closer to superintelligence, but I suppose the theory is that it "opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses," which is a thing Meta actually said, out loud, to Axios

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 verification technology or to hire someone who has worked on verifying agent identity.

Does anyone know what exactly Moltbook's technology is, the technology being described by Meta? I can't find anything on the website related to this. The only "verification" they seem to have is an OAuth connection with Twitter.

edit: I guess it's this https://xcancel.com/moltbook/status/2023893930182685183

A platform where bots-pretend-to-be-humans and another where humans-pretend-to-be-bots. A match made in heaven!

I don't think anybody at Meta involved in the aquisition must be an avid OpenClaw user or developer.

Moltbook was more of a meme - agents mostly orchestrated by users in the background.

Not something with motion like OpenClaw itself (with a real community).

"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)

I heard YCombinator definitely want to buy ClackerNews: https://clackernews.com/

We could have an AI Dang.

Moltbook, Facebook, hmmm. Seems like a good match; at least one of them has a good amount of feed activity.

I think the medical term for this is synchronous malignancies

Meta and AI: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

I didn't realize Moltbook and OpenClaw - were created by different people.

I can't take mark zuckerberg seriously anymore. He's made so many missteps recently: meta-verse, meta-glasses, llama, hiring wang, meta reality labs, etc.

He should probably hire a proper "number 2" (not someone like political like sandberg) -- someone who "gets" the internet, like how he did when he was a harvard geek making a hot-or-not clone in his dorm room. I'm not sure acqui-hiring the moltbook founders is the move.

That being said, I think the one silver lining is that it seems like big-tech now has a willingness to hire people who actually ship things of value, like peter steinberger. Another nail in the coffin for leetcode, I hope.

facebook was lagging on the bot:human user ratio and they needed to scale the left side of the equation to really improve their je ne sais quoi

This has to be an acquihire, right?

Mark Zuckerberg is a joke of a CEO and we should not take him seriously as a leader

Is the market so bad that non-exec-level new hires are making the news?

The metaverse: ai talking to each other over cli

So genAi ads can now be A/B tested by autonomous systems, to be shown on an social network for agents to be appreciated by ai agents.

On one hand, yay automatization, on the other hand, I feel weirdly left out.

Not so "Exclusive" :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324612

Okay that's funny!!!

Thanks Meta I needed a laugh!

Isn't facebook at this point just AI bots talking and replying to each other?! Why they gotta pay money for this?

So where are the cool agents going to move to now?

I thought the whole thing was a prank since it was so obviously fake.

> Facebook parent says Moltbook gives autonomous AI a way to verifiably connect.

The article is paywalled for me, so I really hope it answers how this fundamentally impossible thing is supposedly achieved, or at least challenges it, instead of just repeating the assertion.

After LeCun (actual ML pioneer) left Zuck, then his data-labeling expert Wang, now he reaches for the hype around Molt/Claw, just like openAi did with their molt/claw "purchase". Given Zuck's track record on LLMs, I do not hold out for actual science but expect more smoke&mirror commercialisation tricks - or even the integration of his dystopian camera goggles.

The decision was made by AI

Acquisition as marketing

https://archive.is/igqsh

It is a not-that-obscure secret that most posts on Moltbook, particularly the "Viral™" ones, are written by a human.

Does Mark not know this?

I know there's a big advantage in capturing the market early, but in this case Moltbook hasn't captured any of it ...

Weird. With Meta's backing it is going to be successful anyway, but this is something they could have developed in-house in like a weekend.

Congrats, the easiest 10 million ever made

Just read this other article on the same topic (Axios is paywalled for me): https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/meta-acquires-moltbook-ai-a...

Interesting times!

This was not on my bingo card. Meta really is just throwing money at anything AI.

Has Meta acquired anything that worked recently?

This is incredibly bearish.

What now? Facemolt? Moltface?

Afraid of another botnet competition, I see.

I guess we'll find out if this will turn out to be another rash hire in another 9 months. I'm actually surprised at this move.

I'm beginning to think that the problem of 'late capitalism' is quite related to the ability of companies to acquire other companies.

Thereby eating their competition, either by stifling upcoming competitors or to gain degrees of monopoly power by joining with peers.

What would the world look like if you you simply could not do that?

WHy are we just posting paid context? and the worst viral product since bop-it?

Can we stop posting paid articles and or do the and also post the matching archive?

I'm down voting every post that requires me to pay or subscribe to read. I mean come on people.

The pessimist in me thinks this is to boost real human use of their platforms by using AI engagement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory