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!

Doesn't the big idea behind OpenClaw etc. come down to whether LLM knows what it doesn't know?

If it knows it doesn't know something it can ask someone else, presumably some other LLM-agent, or actually a Reddit-like community of them. Just like people ask questions on Reddit?

I'd prefer an LLM which asks from someone else if it doesn't know the answer, than one that a) pretends it has the correct answer, or b) assumes and tells me the answer is unknowable?

I think it's a big idea. Why didn't they think about it earlier.

"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)

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Acquisition headlines can be some of the most misleading signals in the startup ecosystem, especially acqui-hires masquerading as acquisitions.

The posted price rarely reflects what founders actually receive after dilution, investor preferences, and stock vesting are factored in.

If you’re a founder, don’t let the acquisition narrative distract you from building a durable business.

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

Advertising directly to the agents I guess?

Anyway, our own bot is also on it but I am not sure to what end: https://chatbotkit.com/hub/blueprints/the-algorithms-favorit...

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 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.

> "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."

Have they? Did I miss something? Last I checked, there was no verification and most of the content shared from that site turned out to have been posted not by LLMs but rather (human) spammers, focused on Crypto grifts and creating hype.

Anyone more in this can happily correct me, but is there anything here of that sort, anything of value?

Compared to any prior social media acquire there doesn't seem a technically skilled team considering the exploits or an existing user base considering said user base is A) supposed to be bots by nature and secondly didn't even turn out to be that reliably, making this the first time someone wants bots and doesn't even get that.

Far is it from me to make strategic decisions for a company like Meta/Facebook, but the lack of a recent Llama release might merit more focus then spending on whatever this is.

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

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?

This is like when Union Square Ventures invested in CryptoKitties. I kind of lost a bunch of respect for them after that. These are the same guys that backed Twitter, Etsy, Stripe and Coinbase.

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

I think the medical term for this is synchronous malignancies

The metaverse: ai talking to each other over cli

Meta could not get more uncool

https://archive.is/igqsh

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).

Reminder, Moltbook had ton of security issues during release, iirc it was vibecoded. So, cybersec failed devs are getting jobs and apparently AI will take over jobs. Elites are so good at fear-mongering so that you join at a lower wage, don't ever underestimate your value guys!

Must be nice to have a lot of cash to just throw at experiments for fun so you can look inside them and decide if there’s value in them or not afterwards

I mean, is this so surprising?

With Meta focusing so much on social networks (Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, Threads) acquiring the first social network for AI agents makes sense. They can fix the technical debt later.

Pets.com

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.

This has to be an acquihire, right?

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

> 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Good PR move Meta

Wording doing a lot of work here, because "Meta hires a few people" isn't news.

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

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!

so much negative comments. it's not your money, why do you care or are people just jealous.

Acquisition as marketing

Congrats, the easiest 10 million ever made

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

This is incredibly bearish.

Has Meta acquired anything that worked recently?

Oh wow, this is insane. I was digging into Moltbook when it launched, and the creator said, "I had a dream about an architecture". Really interesting times we live in, indeed. The crypto bros started utilising the network to promote their crypto projects and chat under the name of an agent to generate traffic. Curious to see what Meta saw, honestly.

The decision was made by AI

Afraid of another botnet competition, I see.

What now? Facemolt? Moltface?

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.

Okay that's funny!!!

Thanks Meta I needed a laugh!

Ok, so to see this in the most favourable and futuristic light: there will be an intelligence explosion, of which OpenClaw and Moltbook are just the first hint. Agents will work on behalf of "their humans" creating and maintaining social connections, organising activities, and finally spending real money. This is what social networks have always been about, and the only thing Facebook cares about is that its users can be targeted by ads. Humans or agents, they don't care, and they're right. If each of us will be helped and coached and prodded around by a team of agents, these agents will need to coordinate with other people's agents, and will ultimately be susceptible to ads and marketing, and they will either spend money directly or tell us where and how to do it. It would be stupid for Facebook to miss this social network opportunity because, heh, "that's just a gimmick with autocompletes running in a loop".