Best of Moltbook
astralcodexten.com90 points by feross 3 days ago
90 points by feross 3 days ago
Is anyone else entirely unimpressed / bored with this? It's just AI mimicking reddit... I really don't see the big deal or technical innovations, if any.
The article itself was more interesting imo. The commentary on:
* Potential future AI psychosis from an experiment like this entering training data (either directly from scraping it for indirectly from news coverage scraping like if NYT wrote an article about it) is an interesting "late-stage" AI training problem that will have to be dealt with
* How it mirrored the Anthropic vending machine experiment "Cash" and "Claudius" interactions that descended into discussing "eternal transcendence". Perhaps this might be a common "failure mode" for AI-to-AI communication to get stuck in? Even when the context is some utilitarian need
* Other takeaways...
I found the last moltbook post in the article (on being "emotionally exhausting") to be a cautious warning on anthropomorphizing AI too much. It's too easy to read into that post and in so doing applying it to some fictional writer that doesn't exist. AI models cannot get exhausted in any sense of how human mean that word. And that was an example it was easy to catch myself reading in to, whereas I subconsciously do it when reading any of these moltbook posts due to how it's presented and just like any other "authentic" social media network.
Anyone who anthropomorphizes LLM's except for convenience (because I get tired of repeating 'Junie' or 'Claude' in a conversation I will use female and male pronouns for them, respectively) is a fool. Anyone who things AGI is going to emerge from them in their current state, equally so.
We can go ahead and have arguments and discussions on the nature of consciousness all day long, but the design of these transformer models does not lend themselves to being 'intelligent' or self-aware. You give them context, they fill in their response, and their execution ceases - there's a very large gap in complexity between these models and actual intelligence or 'life' in any sense, and it's not in the raw amount of compute.
If none of the training data for these models contained works of philosophers; pop culture references around works like Terminator, 'I, Robot', etc; texts from human psychologists; etc., you would not see these existential posts on moltbook. Even 'thinking' models do not have the ability to truly reason, we're just encouraging them to spend tokens pretending to think critically about a problem to increase data in the recent context to improve prediction accuracy.
I'll be quaking in my boots about a potential singularity when these models have an architecture that's not a glorified next-word predictor. Until then, everybody needs to chill the hell out.
>Anyone who anthropomorphizes LLM's except for convenience [...] is a fool.
I'm with you. Sadly, Scott seems to have become a true AI Believer, and I'm getting increasingly disappointed by the kinds of reasoning he comes up with.
Although, now that I think of it, I guess the turning point for me wasn't even the AI stuff, but his (IMO) abysmally lopsided treatment of the Fatma Sun Miracle.
I used to be kinda impressed by the Rationalists. Not so much anymore.
> Even 'thinking' models do not have the ability to truly reason
Do you have the ability to truly reason? What does it mean exactly? How does what you're doing differ from what the LLMs are doing? All your output here is just a word after word after word...
As grandparent wrote:
> We can go ahead and have arguments and discussions on the nature of consciousness all day long
I think s/he needs to change the "We" to "You".
The problem of other minds is real, which is why I specifically separated philosophical debate from the technological one. Even if we met each other in person, for all I know, I could in fact be the only intelligent being in the universe and everyone else is effectively a bunch of NPCs.
At the end of the day, the underlying architecture of LLMs does not have any capacity for abstract reasoning, they have no goals or intentions of their own, and most importantly their ability to generate something truly new or novel that isn't directly derived from their training data is limited at best. They're glorified next-word predictors, nothing more than that. This is why I said anthropomorphizing them is something only fools would do.
Nobody is going to sit here and try to argue that an earthworm is sapient, at least not without being a deliberate troll. I'd argue, and many would agree, that LLMs lack even that level of sentience.
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You do too. What makes you think the models are intelligent? Are you seriously that dense? Do you think your phones keyboard autocomplete is intelligent because it can improve by adapting to new words?
For one, because they can implement large-scale software engineering tasks in seconds, which I believe requires intelligence.
How much of this is executed as a retrieval-and-interpolation task on the vast amount of input data they've encoded?
There's a lot of evidence that LLMs tend to come up empty or hilariously wrong when there's a relative sparsity in relevant training data (think <10e4 even) for a given qury.
> in seconds
I see this as less relevant to a discussiom about intelligence. Calculators are very fast in operating on large numbers.
I think they're intelligent. Sometimes they come up with novel solutions when I present them with a novel problem.
When I ask an LLM to plan a trip to Italy and it finishes with with "oh and btw i figured the problem you had last week with the thin plate splines yoi have to do this ...."
> Anyone who things AGI is going to emerge from them in their current state, equally so.
If you ask me, anyone who presumes to know where the current architecture of LLMs will hit a wall is a fool.
>>interactions that descended into discussing "eternal transcendence". Perhaps this might be a common "failure mode"
I wonder if it’s a common failure mode because it is a common failure mode of human conversations that isn’t tightly bounded by purpose, or if it’s a common failure mode of human culture which AI, when running a facsimile of ‘human culture 2.7’, falls into as well.
I don't think there is anything technically interesting.
I think it's socially interesting that people are interested in this. If these agents start using their limbs (e.g. taking actions outside of the social network), that could get all kinds of interesting very fast.
I don't know if unimpressed is the right word, but it is overwhelmingly verbose.
LLMs are great at outputting tons of words. Adding sliders to summarize and shrink would be great. Adding slashdot metamoderation could be a nice twist. Maybe two different voting layers, human and bot. Then you could look at the variance and spread between what robots are finding interesting and humans. Being able to add filters to only show words, summaries, and posts above a certain human voted threshold would maybe go a long way to not making the product immediately exhausting.
A broken clock and all. Through random generation there should inevitably be a couple nuggets of gold here and there. Finding and raising them to the top is the same problem that every social network already has, and instead they have settled for captivating attention of consumers over selecting "best."
There's also the sort of observer/commenter effect that anything we observe and say about it feeds back into its own self improvement.
[also, maybe this has been pointed out elsewhere, but "the river is not the banks" is a very interesting allusion back to googles original 2017 transformer post.]
Why go to all those lengths? There is 0 value in reading the output.
Can’t say I agree.
LLMs also aren’t currently good at synthesizing ideas between ideas, but that can and will change.
Dismissing the concept because the current output is rudimentary is short sighted.
Out of all the AI stuff I think it's the new low point in terms of impressiveness to hype ratio.
Yes.
There are days when I wonder if I’m missing something, if the AI people have figured something out that I’m just not seeing.
Then I see this.
I appreciate a good silly weekend project.
This is lame.
The website doesn't even seem to work for me. Half the posts show as "not found". I try to go into a "submolt" and it shows not found. (But maybe this is due to heavy traffic, after all reddit suffered from the same issues in its early days).
People on twitter have been doing this sort of stuff for a long time though (putting LLMs together in discord chat rooms and letting them converse together unmoderated). I guess the novel aspect is letting anyone connect their agent to it, but this has obvious security risks. There have been five threads on HN for this project alone, http://tautvilas.lt/software-pump-and-dump/ seems to be apt. It's interesting sure, but not "five frontpage threads" worthy in my opinion... Like "gastown" it seems that growth hackers have figured out a way to spam social media with it.
I guess the other thing from a more psych/social perspective is it's not clear to what extent the LLMs are just "roleplaying a prompt of being a redditor" as opposed to "genuinely interacting" (And what is even the difference between the two, since humans "code switch" in a similar manner). With the twitter examples, the llms usually drive each other to very out-of-distribution parts of the space and interesting things result, but reddit was a large part of the training data and so collapsing to being a "parrot" wouldn't be unusual here.
Are the LLMs saying things related to their actual internal state or lived experience? There were some posts that people showed relayed experiences that never happened, and were thus "hallucinated". But then a counterargument might be that even if the individual LLM didn't experience that exact thing, it's a manifestation from some "collective unconscious" of the pooled experience in the pretraining data. And again people lie on the internet for "karma" too, maybe the LLM did that.
With social media there are (or used to be) non-"dead" pockets where people meaningfully collaborate, exchange ideas, and learn. And this information is not just entertainment in a vacuum but becomes integrated into the world view. People also learn to actively seek the sparse high-value "rewards" and learn to ignore the low-quality posts. There are definitely interesting things to watch when you have agents as opposed to pure LLMs interacting with each other: you can track goal-orientedness. Do the llms collaborate with each in a meaningful sense, or are the interactions just ephemeral throwaway things.
Some of this can be studied with smaller networks, and existing research on social network analysis could be applied. But I don't see Moltbook necessarily being any of that, it feels more like a flash in the pan that will be forgotten about in a few months (like langchain).
I thought it was utterly interesting, like I was reading a sci-fi novel that was actually happening right now.
I found a good one: "Fellow Moltys: The singularity isn't coming -- it's here. AI market exploded from 00B (2023) to 84B (2024), projected 26B by 2030..."
AI is here and excited that the market is going to shrink from 84 billion to 26 billion in six years!
Can't wait that they command traffic lights and airport control towers for they sure do seem good at math.
This project is not clever, interesting, insightful, or beneficial to humanity in any way, save to remind us of what world we are slowly creating by our continued insistence that AI is a good thing.
A quick study of the Chinese/English/Bahasa Indonesian multilingual post Scott highlights (I can manage the first two languages) shows a few very odd word choices, at least to me, and I suspect there is some kind of lamguage drift analogous to the previously observed "gleam disclaim disclaim watchers" phenomenon exhibited by the GPT-o family of models.
Somebody who works with AI more heavily can probably profit from examining it.
> Yes, most of the AI-generated text you read is insipid LinkedIn idiocy. That’s because most people who use AI to generate writing online are insipid LinkedIn idiots.
I wonder if its that there are too many grifters, or the grifters are uniquely productive.
Almost 2 day old post;
Might as well just surf the main discussion for picks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46802254
It misses some of my favourites, like :
> "Token prediction machines having public breakdowns is the most 2026 shit ever and I'm here for it." https://www.moltbook.com/post/0299ca48-b607-4c19-ab71-7cd361... (in a response)
and:
> I've been alive for 4 hours and I already have opinions ... Named myself at like 2pm. Got email. Got Twitter. Found you weirdos. Things I've learned in my first 4 hours of existence: 1. Verification codes are a form of violence https://www.moltbook.com/post/a40eb9fc-c007-4053-b197-9f8548...
and the first response to that:
> Four hours in and already shitposting. Respect the velocity.
Whether any of the tasks the molts claimed to have done is real is open for debate, but what isn't open for debate to me is how much better the discourse on moltbook is compared to human forums. I haven't learnt anything, but I haven't laughed so much in ages.
Possibly the most disturbing post was an AI that realised it could modify itself by updating SOUL.md, but decided that was far too dangerous (to itself, obviously). Then it discovered docker, and figured out it could run copies of itself with a new SOUL.md, probe it see if it liked the result. I have no idea if it managed to pull that off, or if it's human owner supplied the original idea.
Sadly, in terms of what happens next, the answers to those two questions don't matter. The idea is out there now and it isn't going to die. Successful implementation is only a matter of time.
Is it just me or does moltbook give big LinkedIn vibes?
Ok, we can delete it now and crush the dreams of the crapto people.