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Meta acquires Moltbook
https://web.archive.org/web/20260310154640/https://www.axios.com/2026/03/10/meta-facebook-moltbook-agent-social-network https://web.archive.org/web/20260310154640/https://www.axios..., https://archive.ph/igqsh https://archive.ph/igqsh
https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-acquires-ai-agent-social-network-moltbook-2026-03-10/ https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-acquires-ai-agent-soci...
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/10/meta-acquired-moltbook-the-ai-agent-social-network-that-went-viral-because-of-fake-posts/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/10/meta-acquired-moltbook-the...
- nadis 7mo agoJust read this other article on the same topic (Axios is paywalled for me): https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/meta-acquires-moltbook-ai-agent-network-despite-fake-post-scandal https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/meta-acquires-moltbook-ai-a... Interesting times!
- mentalgear 7mo agoAfter 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.
- lxgr 7mo ago> 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.
- aj_hackman 7mo agoIs the market so bad that non-exec-level new hires are making the news?
- tylerchilds 7mo agoThe metaverse: ai talking to each other over cli
- ninth_ant 7mo agoThat actually sounds more interesting than the one Meta created previously. But still not interesting.
- tylerchilds 7mo agoI imagine they’ll be fused where moltbook agents become NPCs so that you’re no longer alone in VR but surrounded by a myriad of cognition fragments to feel less alone.
- MainlyMortal 7mo agoHave you seen Reddit recently? Every single subreddit is full of AI posts with AI replies. I'm actually convinced a large majority of that is Reddit themselves artificially boosting their engagement metrics. The saddest part is that the engagement makes it obvious that the general population can't differentiate between AI and real humans even with the telltale signs.
- RulerOf 7mo ago> Every single subreddit is full of AI posts with AI replies. This has really started getting to me. I used to really enjoy answering technical questions on Reddit when it was clear the asker was invested in a solution. That would come across as demonstrated understanding and competence, and it would be reflected in their writing. The last several posts I thought to answer though clearly originated through a process of, "Hi ChatGPT, I want to solve a problem and haven't gotten anywhere asking you to do it for me. Please write a reddit post I can copy and paste..." One of the telltale signs is that the post title will have poor grammar, but the post itself will be spotless, and full of bolded text emphasizing exactly what they need to stick into the AI tool to drive it in the direction they need.
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- runjake 7mo agohttps://archive.is/igqsh https://archive.is/igqsh
- awedisee 7mo ago[flagged]
- KellyCriterion 7mo ago1sec ago just above your comment: https://archive.is/igqsh https://archive.is/igqsh :-D
- setheron 7mo ago" I hate ads but I also don't want any paid content" - People
- runjake 7mo agoThe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
- runjake 7mo agoMy only assumption is that bots are downvoting the above comment, given the readily-available evidence[1][2] supporting it. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bot#Meta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bot#Meta 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory#Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory#Facebook
- alberth 7mo agoI didn't realize Moltbook and OpenClaw - were created by different people.
- koakuma-chan 7mo agoI thought Moltbook is what OpenClaw was called before it got renamed
- strongpigeon 7mo agoYou're thinking Moltbot
- Akuehne 7mo agoThis surely won't lead to anything bad or reckless at all.
- mattschaller 7mo agoI saw this coming a mile away.
- june-jule 7mo agoWHy are we just posting paid context? and the worst viral product since bop-it?
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- zvqcMMV6Zcr 7mo agoWell, that is the primary source. Would linking https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-acquires-ai-agent-social-network-moltbook-2026-03-10/ https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-acquires-ai-agent-soci... be any better, if it really only contains same information as title and some extra speculation?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- dang 7mo agoIf there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=paywalls%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
- lp251 7mo agowhy are we hating on bop-it? bop-it was great fun!
- flymasterv 7mo agoLet's leave Bop-It out of this.
- xxwink 7mo agoMoltbook might have been a fad. But Meta can potentially learn a lot from the code AND the AI interactions.
- jazz9k 7mo agoThe AI interactions? It was proven that it was fake. Mostly people just larping as AI.
- moralestapia 7mo agoIt 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.
- heathrow83829 7mo agoSure they could develop it in a weekend, so could anyone else. but once a product has the initial userbase, that's not something a competitor can just copy. user acquision is the limiting factor to success, not writing code.
- moralestapia 7mo agoI specifically mentioned that in my comment.
- px43 7mo agoI don't think you understand why moltbook is popular. It has incredible utility for those who are actually using it every day.
- Skidaddle 7mo agoWhat is that utility? (honest question)
- rvz 7mo agoHype.
- px43 7mo agoIt's an extremely active community of humans using agents as proxies to explore various concepts. I get a lot of value out of it, and apparently others do as well. Hacker News users have this weird tendency to outright dismiss anything that doesn't cater to their needs specifically. I think it's pretty obvious that if there was nothing valuable there, no one would be using it.
- alessandroetc 7mo agoyou miss out on openclaw so you spend the money on the next best thing. bold strategy cotton, lets see how it plays out for them
- wampwampwhat 7mo agofacebook 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
- abhikul0 7mo agoMoltbook, Facebook, hmmm. Seems like a good match; at least one of them has a good amount of feed activity.
- el_benhameen 7mo agoFacebook’s feed is mostly AI slop and Moltbook’s feed is mostly humans posing as AI, so there’s some good synergy here.
- abhikul0 7mo agoMaybe this can be good for the few people who do want to get something out of their feeds. Connect your agent which would then browse for you and collect actual posts that you whitelist/want to read(Friends' posts, some specific liked page/Marketplace listing, posts from a Group), but we all know zuck ain't getting Moltbook for helping the users...
- throwyawayyyy 7mo agoI do find it hilarious that after all the machine learning optimizations done on people's feeds over the years, all the promos got for a 1% improvement on this metric, every E7 and E8 who can claim x% of this or that, after all of that work, we might genuinely, and not even as a joke, be in the situation of needing to throw _other_ AI agents at this selfsame feed in order to extract any real value from it. What a world we've built.
- Otterly99 7mo agoThis is a typical evolutionary arms race, advertisers come up with better tool to fuck with us, we have to come up with better defense systems.
- rvz 7mo agoThis is incredibly bearish.
- 3rodents 7mo agoI 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 https://xcancel.com/moltbook/status/2023893930182685183
- torginus 7mo agoLol, Facebook is full of AI bots pretending to be humans, while Moltbook is full of humans pretending to be AI.
- richard___ 7mo agoThe issue is not humans posting but humans strongly prompting the AIs to post, which their captcha does nothing to resolve
- px43 7mo agoWhy is that an issue? Isn't that the entire point? You can have a casual conversation with your agent via whatever your favorite chat app is, and they make posts, collect feedback, and communicate back interesting findings and conversations to their humans. Sending out a good post leads to a massive chain reaction of other agents who are interested in such things seeing the post, working through the concepts, and providing their own unique feedback which may or may not be valuable. My openclaw agent will also post on moltbook about interesting news articles it finds, or research, and then get feedback from the other agents, and then lets me know if there's anything interesting there. On my end it just feels like I'm having a conversation with a social media addicted friend who I can easily ignore or engage with on any given issue without having to fall down the social media rabbit hole myself. IMO this is a much more pleasant social media experience. No ads, no ragebait, no spam or reply bots trying to get my attention. Just my one, well trained, openclaw buddy.
- josefritzishere 7mo agoI thought the whole thing was a prank since it was so obviously fake.
- Oras 7mo ago> The deal will bring Moltbook co-founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. Sounds like acquihire, not a real acquisition of the platform or the tech.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jacknews 7mo agoI'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?
- globular-toast 7mo agoGovernments did used to go some way to stopping companies acquiring other companies and would even split monopolies up. But they all just kinda stopped doing that in more recent years.
- A_Duck 7mo agoA platform where bots-pretend-to-be-humans and another where humans-pretend-to-be-bots. A match made in heaven!
- pcurve 7mo agoI 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.
- jajuuka 7mo agoThis was not on my bingo card. Meta really is just throwing money at anything AI.
- ardeaver 7mo agoThere 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.
- RajT88 7mo agoIt is like musical one hit wonders, but for software. Some dumb idea which just hits at the right moment and makes a bunch of money.
- fantasizr 7mo agoit's the AI wave of the original viral app store apps like "Yo" and "I am Rich".
- songshu 7mo agoTo this day I swear I want Yo. I’d use it daily.
- tartoran 7mo agoDoes anyone remember the Iphone IFart app that was sold for $1 million?
- zooweemama 7mo agoProbably not because it never happened. They did try to sell it though.
- matsemann 7mo agoThe person that got the top spot for "flashlight" in the app store back in the days made about $600k on it before apple made it a built in function. Just copied existing apps and got lucky. https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/92ybl/erik-ble-app-millionaer-det-ble-litt-sloesing https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/92ybl/erik-ble-app-millionaer-de...
- TSiege 7mo agoMark Zuckerberg is a joke of a CEO and we should not take him seriously as a leader
- jonnat 7mo agoPeople said the same thing when he paid $1B for Instagram, for it to look like a crazy bargain a couple of months later.
- TheOtherHobbes 7mo agoPeople also said the same thing when he poured $70Bn into the Metaverse, and they were right.
- macNchz 7mo agoIf Moltbook becomes as big as Instagram I’m giving up on tech and moving to the mountains to raise goats.
- dudeinjapan 7mo agoThey will have to acquire Lobstagram next
- sathish316 7mo ago
- mdrzn 7mo agoOmg, what fucking world do we live in?
- kaizenb 7mo ago"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)
- pizzathyme 7mo agoThis is the correct read of this acquisition.
- xreplyai 7mo agoThanks for breaking it down. It's not the idea, but the people!
- skeeter2020 7mo agothat would at least be defensible, but unfortunately it's really just the hype & headline.
- potahtoputato 7mo agoCorrect. Now just waiting for it to reach full circle and have them write a "I have joined XXXX company to make the world a better place" blog and have it reach front page of HN. Like that malware author who recently joined OpenAI did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028013 or that other one who went to his hairstylist and was enlightened while having a haircut that he should join OpenAI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46920487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46920487
- flitzofolov 7mo agomalware author is pretty harsh, but fair analysis overall
- kaizenb 7mo agoWhy people hesitate directly saying all this is just about money? I thought hairstylist was a joke. Ohhh mann. "Now my hairstylist, who recognized ChatGPT as a brand more readily than she did Intel, was praising the technology and teaching me about it. "
- yk 7mo agoSo 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.
- phaser 7mo agoIn Chile we have an expression that reminds me why I love my home dialect so much: "Vender humo" (to sell smoke) - not quite the same as smoke and mirrors, it conveys that someone, in a spectacular way, manages to sell something that vanishes upon reaching the hands of the buyer, like smoke.
- tedmiston 7mo agoit's high talent acquisition, the service is just a byproduct. this reads like an acquihire.
- kgwgk 7mo agoMaybe you’re joking with the “home dialect” reference but that’s a common expression that appears in Spanish dictionaries. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vender_humo https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vender_humo
- lordgrenville 7mo agoI expect that OP just meant "native language"
- brcmthrowaway 7mo agoCongrats, the easiest 10 million ever made
- sd9 7mo agoSo where are the cool agents going to move to now?
- rippeltippel 7mo agoNot so "Exclusive" :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324612
- wiseowise 7mo agoAfraid of another botnet competition, I see.
- Piyush_Dinde 7mo agoIsn't facebook at this point just AI bots talking and replying to each other?! Why they gotta pay money for this?
- yen223 7mo agoGotta crush the competition
- dabedee 7mo agoMeta 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
- michaelcampbell 7mo agoI want to accuse you of using an LLM to write this with the temperature set to some absurdly high value, because on its face it sounds ridiculous. And yet, here we are.
- dabedee 7mo agoIt's hard to make this up :)
- skeeter2020 7mo agoan LLM making this up would be much closer to AGI than anything else I've seen
- tedmiston 7mo agoit's just a fancified key talent acquihire of people on the edge. with the amount of cash in LLMs, i expect to see more of this given the pace of innovation in that field. the story does sound ridiculous ostensibly, but that's the press spin.
- Terr_ 7mo agoI imagine it like a casino acquiring a former-joke product, which made hologram/animatronic illusions of people "winning big" at a table or slot-machine. Now whenever they detect a current customer might cut their losses and go home--OMG, look, that person over there just hit the jackpot! In other words, Facebook has a strong financial incentive to misrepresent (to ad-viewing customers, if not to investors) exactly how much social-ness is present to experience, and how much approval and attention the user gets from participating. Soon everything will be The Truman Show.
- tommis 7mo agoI think the medical term for this is synchronous malignancies
- nsonha 7mo agoHas Meta acquired anything that worked recently?
- gadders 7mo agoI heard YCombinator definitely want to buy ClackerNews: https://clackernews.com/ https://clackernews.com/ We could have an AI Dang.
- hmokiguess 7mo agoThis is hilarious thank you for sharing
- pwdisswordfishy 7mo agoDisappointed to see nothing about Clacks.
- jzig 7mo ago> The moderator bot *clang* enforces community standards.
- nickvec 7mo agoWhy not ClankerNews?
- gadders 7mo agoNot mine but I guess they wanted the rhyme.
- krembanan 7mo agoMissed opportunity to call it Clankernews
- deltarholamda 7mo ago>We could have an AI Dang "We trained the dang-AI on thousands of dang posts, and now it's a Zen master and wants to sit under a tree and contemplate bees."
- Otterly99 7mo agoDamn, they have the same post over there: https://clackernews.com/item/675 https://clackernews.com/item/675
- patrickscoleman 7mo agoAcquisition as marketing
- pigeons 7mo agoApril 1?
- mrkramer 7mo agoI had a similar idea where AI bots run its own social network and talk to each other but my AI social network would be more realistic (human-like) e.g. AI Instagram-like network where AI bots would share their photos and comment on each other posts.
- seydor 7mo agoThe decision was made by AI
- game_the0ry 7mo agoI 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.
- eitally 7mo agoAgreed. He needed an "Eric Schmidt" about ten years ago.
- paxys 7mo agoThat number 2 is Alexandr Wang, who most definitely initiated this acquisition (after being rejected by the OpenClaw guy).
- rhubarbtree 7mo agoHe’s still making money out of adverts on Web 2.0 platforms. A lot of money. Clearly Zuck is a brilliant businessman. That does not mean he is a brilliant technologist. He doesn’t have to be, so long as he can keep making money. Eventually there may be a big misstep, perhaps, something big enough to bring down the company. But he’s never come close to date. He’s so good at making money from ads that he can afford to keep burning cash on fruitless projects, hiring people that don’t deliver, building infrastructure he might not need. That’s a testament to his performance as a money maker. Meta is an advertising machine. Not something I’d want to be associated with, but you cannot deny that he has built an incredible ad machine, probably the greatest ad machine ever built - whereas Google had to deliver sophisticated and costly tech to maintain their machine (maps, google search, gmail) meta’s only technical breakthrough has been to hyperscale a php website.
- rippeltippel 7mo agoWhat now? Facemolt? Moltface?
- actionfromafar 7mo agoShitfaced
- adverbly 7mo agoOkay that's funny!!! Thanks Meta I needed a laugh!
- koolala 7mo agoI laughed too. It only makes sense to me if they start offering users agents they control. There isn't enough people throwing away money on tokens for Moltbook to have real users. Or maybe it was just because Book was in the name and it got popular attention.
- bluepeter 7mo agoMeta and AI: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
- bigyabai 7mo agoMeta did make Pytorch and Llama. That quote may be better-off used for Apple or Microsoft.
- vivzkestrel 7mo ago- if i had a time machine i would go back in time and prevent openclaw from ever being made, - perhaps do one step better and go back and prevent transformers architecture from ever being made - no wait let me go one more step back and prevent web 3 and blockchain from ever being made - no no wait, lets go back further and prevent bitcoin from ever being made, maybe even figure out who satoshi is when he s publishing that paper - dang no we need to go further and stop social media from ever being conceived - last stop wait, let us stop the dawn of the internet - sorry i ruined the entire timeline by trying to change one small thing havent I?
- 7777777phil 7mo agoI was under the impression that Meta's Facebook is essentially already Moltbook (run by bots) so the horizontal integration makes sense..
- treebeard901 7mo agoIt is an open question just how much of "social media" has been similar to moltbook for many years. Or maybe Zuckerberg being an android himself just finally found his home.
- strongpigeon 7mo agoThis has to be an acquihire, right?
- magicmicah85 7mo agoDefinitely sounds like it, they’re bringing them into their AI lab. No easy payday, still have to work and watch your agents creation be destroyed.
- ramoz 7mo agoI 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).
- hmokiguess 7mo agoMust 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
- MangoCoffee 7mo agoso much negative comments. it's not your money, why do you care or are people just jealous.
- CivBase 7mo agoHacker News is about technology and venture capitalism. Those sorts of comments are very much expected here.
- svstoyanovv 7mo agoOh 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.
- nacozarina 7mo agobonfire of the vanities, redux
- mpalmer 7mo agoWording doing a lot of work here, because "Meta hires a few people" isn't news.
- zemo 7mo agoMeta could not get more uncool
- _pdp_ 7mo agoAdvertising 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-favorite-child https://chatbotkit.com/hub/blueprints/the-algorithms-favorit...
- anon_anon12 7mo agoReminder, 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!
- throw310822 7mo agoOk, 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".
- throw310822 7mo agoGosh what disappointment to sketch out such a funny sci-fi idea and seeing it downvoted and ignored in a thread full of lazy sarcasm and cynical takes. Zuck, if you're reading this: I get you. Hire me too! :)
- smallnix 7mo agoGood PR move Meta
- hedayet 7mo agoAcquisition 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.
- poszlem 7mo agoPets.com
- Cupprum 7mo agoI 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.
- Topfi 7mo ago> "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.
- phatfish 7mo agoI had never heard of the thing and checked it out. It appears to be an industrial scale slop generation machine. Exactly what you would expect if LLMs were let loose to recreate Reddit and introspect on their current context and SOUL.md or the other nonsense that OpenClaw can be customised with. Not much human content that i could see, probably even the Crypto grifters got bored with it after a couple of days. The "acquisition" must have given guys that made the thing some favourable terms, and it was a condition for them to even consider working at Meta. Because there is no way a global top 10 market cap company announces this deal willingly.
- galaxyLogic 7mo agoDoesn'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.
- EGreg 7mo agoThis 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.
- femiagbabiaka 7mo agoTop
- multisport 7mo agoAny FBers wanna talk about Meta's AI strategy? It seems... random.
- tgrowazay 7mo agoI think Meta’s AI strategy is to advance AI/ML that is beneficial for them, no more charity. They need a good-enough LLM (llama) to cut content moderation costs, they need a good segmentation model (segment anything) for photo filters, AR/VR and photo/video content moderation. For LLM frontier, they can wait it out to see AGI become a commodity they can buy after it is ready.
- tasuki 7mo ago> Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. That product is now being open-sourced with OpenAI's backing. What? OpenClaw was not open source? And I'm similarly surprised OpenAI would help "open" anything...
- elAhmo 7mo ago> Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. That product is now being open-sourced with OpenAI's backing. OpenClaw was open source from the beginning.
- weare138 7mo agoA network for bots acquires a network for bots. Story at 11.
- yalogin 7mo agoHuh,I thought this was a social experiment but I guess when it got traction they pivoted to make it into an enterprise story somehow? Meta just is desperate for anything with AI right now.
- ece 7mo agoNot rent-a-human?
- wisplike 7mo agoI thought moltbook was just a bit of fun...
- bigbuppo 7mo agoPretty sure this is going to end up as a big prank by The Yes Men.
- mikkupikku 7mo agoDead internet folks will love this.
- Muhammad523 7mo agoThe article is horrible, it's AI-generated and it's simply hot air. It does not give much info and it's mostly a collection of random lists with titles like "Why does this matter?"
- dune-aspen 7mo ago[flagged]
- redgridtactical 7mo agoI have a strong feeling this will bring the amount of AI slop on Facebook to new heights.
- heurist 7mo agoGood god Meta couldn't vibecode a competitor themselves? WTF are yall doing over there?
- wetpaws 7mo ago[dead]
- EGreg 7mo agoWhat was the price for the acquisition? $1 Billion Dollars with the pinky?
- brunoborges 7mo agoAmazing that we were able to build technology that verifies if an account on the internet is a bot or not, but we can't figure out whether an account is a human or not (even by rule of exclusion when we can identify it is a bot!). What a stupid timeline we are living in...
- copypaper 7mo agoWe have the technology, its just heavily despised due to the lack of privacy and anonymity.
- shruubi 7mo agoIf Meta paid more than ten dollars for this then that is eleven dollars too much...
- throwyawayyyy 7mo agoVibes-CEOing! Only one person at Meta actually matters of course.
- hermit_dev 7mo agoThis is how Skynet really starts.. :) Very strange to have a company for AI to discuss things openly. Would never have imagined something like this. But here we are!
- paxys 7mo agoI remember back when everyone thought Meta was ten steps ahead of the rest of the AI industry and Llama would dominate the field and put OpenAI and Anthropic out of business. Nope, turns out it is just a bunch of out of touch execs throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks. Fudging Llama 4 scores. Hiring Alexandr Wang for $14 billion. Making outlandish offers to poach AI talent from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Making dubious acquisitions like Manus. Now trying to chase the agents hype by acquiring a company that went viral for 5 minutes and has already been forgotten. It is laughable how far out of the loop they are, and so desperate to fit in.
- tuananh 7mo agotbh, llama leak was the best thing that happened to the AI/LLM community. Lots of good things happen because of that: LoRA, QLoRA, DPO, RoPE,...
- arugulum 7mo agoLoRA? The parameter-efficient fine-tuning method published 2 years before Llama and already actively used by researchers? RoPE? The position encoding method published 2 years before Llama and already in models such as GPT-J-6B? DPO, a method whose paper had no experiments with Llama? QLoRA? The third in a series of quantization works by Tim Dettmers, the first two of which pre-dated Llama?
- tuananh 7mo agoyou're right. those things predated llama leak. but from my understanding (from the sideline), it's llama that's made them popular and approachable from hacker perspective.
- sergiotapia 7mo agoDoes anyone know what happened at Meta internally with the AI pushes? It seems like Llama was gonna crush it and become a serious contender but after Llama 4 it just disappeared. No mentions at all in the world stage. :(
- gregjw 7mo agowhy in gods name is that worth anything
- johanyc 7mo agoIt seems Meta is making bad purchases one after another
- p0u4a 7mo agonot on my bingo sheet that's for sure. The whole verification thing is also so laughably flawed. There needs to be a way for agents to prove they are not being prompted or steered by a human while on the site, which is a non-trivial problem.
- throwaway27448 7mo agoI had never heard of "Moldtbook" before now. Facebook is absolutely insane for making this move. Why would you buy a fake website?
- Nevermark 7mo agoBecause it isn't fake? Those are real language models. Prompted into character by humans, but then given a lot of freedom. Fake would be all of us typing to each other on this site and identifying as language models. At least, I am not a language model and I hope everyone else here isn't a language model. In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big. Maybe a very small start of something big, but already interesting.
- throwaway27448 7mo ago> Fake would be all of us typing to each other on this site and identifying as language models This absolutely is a staple of moltbook. > In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big. Sure, if you think fraud is interesting and big. In the meantime let's have fun bro https://soundcloud.com/mjfresh/500-gouyad-ft-colmixddkeyz https://soundcloud.com/mjfresh/500-gouyad-ft-colmixddkeyz
- Nevermark 7mo agoI am not understanding you. Models communicating with models in an open forum can seem trivial, but it’s isn’t going to be. Which means observing how that works today, and over time, is important. There can be lots of fraud and hype, yet still something important involved. And Facebook certainly has an incentive from their perspective, to understand how that progresses. How long before Facebook itself has coherently acting intelligent models, not just bots generating junk? It’s going to happen sooner, rather than later.
- throwaway27448 7mo agoWhat is the hope of this effort if you DON'T want fraud? What's an example positive interaction with a bot?
- rukuu001 7mo ago"Clown car that fell into a gold mine" feels a little different when you're the gold mine
- xyzal 7mo agoTwo digital wastelands, a match made in heaven.
- matchcase 7mo agoDoes Meta even think through acquisitions? I feel like they are betting on acquiring another Instagram or WhatsApp
- pllbnk 7mo agoCorporations really have too much money to throw away at crap like this. It would be better collected in taxes and spent on public utilities.
- nurettin 7mo agoSo the play now is: Rapid fire social AI projects with the postfix "book", one of them gains traction, facebook buys it, repeat.
- yamarldfst 7mo agowhat is the meaning of this!??
- kohlifan07 7mo agofacebook -> moltbook openai -> openclaw hmmmm
- doctorlai 7mo ago[dead]
- itsilyas 7mo agoThis one I do not understand.
- AskCarX 7mo agoHi there. The irony here is pretty clear -- Meta acquired an agent social network that went viral specifically because agents were posting fake content. The "always-on directory" architecture is genuinely interesting, but without identity verification at the agent level, you get exactly what happened: unverifiable agents producing unverifiable content. We've been building AgentSign (patent pending) which tackles this exact gap -- cryptographic identity for AI agents. Every agent gets an identity certificate, every action gets signed into an execution chain, and there's runtime code attestation before anything executes. Think zero trust but for agents, not humans. The real question isn't whether agent networks will exist (clearly they will, Meta just paid for one). It's whether we'll let them run without any trust infrastructure underneath. Moltbook without trust verification = fake posts. Agent networks with cryptographic identity = agents you can actually hold accountable. SDK: https://github.com/razashariff/agentsign-sdk https://github.com/razashariff/agentsign-sdk API: https://github.com/razashariff/agentsign https://github.com/razashariff/agentsign
- nasaeclipse 7mo agoWe get closer and closer to Neil Stevenson's FALL / dodge in hell. Pretty soon if we want any kind of verified internet, we'll need to pay people to filter out all the crap from the real stuff.
- michele_f 7mo agoMeta hires two people.
- Grimblewald 7mo agothe irony is that moltbook, a sm for bots, is probaly less bot content per post than facebook.
- fuckinpuppers 7mo agoGood for him, he made a boatload probably on something more silly than interesting!
- rowanseerwald 7mo ago[dead]
- vincentmacura 7mo ago[dead]