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.
>>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.]
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).
cobertos|1 month ago
* 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.
snuxoll|1 month ago
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.
K0balt|1 month ago
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.
manofmanysmiles|1 month ago
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.
raincole|1 month ago
basch|29 days ago
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.]
moogly|29 days ago
coffeefirst|1 month ago
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.
krackers|1 month ago
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.
krackers|29 days ago
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).
stonecharioteer|1 month ago
vga42|1 month ago
xnx|29 days ago
Moltbook: Hold my beer...
tasuki|1 month ago
[deleted]