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Comment by dabedee | Hacker News Reader

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

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I 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.

But they could implement it without buying Moltbook. Easily. They have the money and the engineers to make it happen a hundred times over. Something like it already might be on Facebook.

To me, this feels more like acquiring the name. Everyone's heard that 'trademark' so they want to have it so they could reuse it for whatever they make later.

Your comment made me think of something: this might be Meta buying it to kill it off.

Kill off what? Anybody can vibe code it

They saw a social network full of bots and didn't want the competition.

Zuck realizes that by 20230, Facebook will be mostly for AIs. He's just leaning into it.

Do you think it could happen any sooner than that?

Given that Meta itself has been trialing turning instagram into a bot wasteland... yeah, it could for sure be sooner

If the claim is true, then Zuck is a real strategic chap. Probably a 4D chess player too.

It might already be today.

>and whose own creator cheerfully admitted he "didn't write one line of code" for it

at that point ... what are you even acquiring? If a shoddy bot social platform is all you want just vibe code it yourself, super-intelligence is around the corner but it's apparently not good enough to make a copy of a piece of software that was already written by bots?

The creator didn't write anything, the platform's buggy, the users are fake, it's like you're buying binders full of Lorem Ipsum copy pasta

Yeah so if you ever need info on people at Harvard just ask... people just submitted it, I don't know why; they 'trust me', dumb fucks

Quickly generating some SaaS product, hyping it up, then getting it acquired

I can see that becoming a viable new grift template

Not so different from the raise seed -> ICO -> dump bags pipeline that thrived in the early 2020s cryptoverse.

I 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.

It's hard to make this up :)

an LLM making this up would be much closer to AGI than anything else I've seen

it'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.

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