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clarionbellyesterday at 8:14 AM6 repliesview on HN

Anyone with a decent grasp of how this technology works, and a healthy inclination to skepticism, was not awed by Moltbook.

Putting aside how incredibly easy it is to set up an agent, or several, to create impressive looking discussion there, simply by putting the right story hooks in their prompts. The whole thing is a security nightmare.

People are setting agents up, giving them access to secrets, payment details, keys to the kingdom. Then they hook them to the internet, plugging in services and tools, with no vetting or accountability. And since that is not enough, now the put them in roleplaying sandbox, because that's what this is, and let them run wild.

Prompt injections are hilariously simple. I'd say the most difficult part is to find a target that can actually deliver some value. Moltbook largely solved this problem, because these agents are relatively likely to have access to valuable things, and now you can hit many of them, at the same time.

I won't even go into how wasteful this whole, social media for agents, thing is.

In general, bots writing each other on mock reddit, isn't something the loose sleep over. The moment agents start sharing their embeddings, not just generated tokens online, that's the point when we should consider worrying.


Replies

cedwsyesterday at 6:31 PM

I’m in awe at the complete lack of critical thinking skills. Did people seriously believe LLMs were becoming self aware or something? Didn’t even consider the possibility it was all just a big show being puppeted by humans for hype and clicks? No wonder the AI hype has reached this level of hysteria.

manugo4yesterday at 8:37 AM

Karpathy seemed pretty awed though

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stronglikedanyesterday at 9:09 PM

Nit, but I bet a quick proofread would have eliminated most of those awkward commas.

red75primeyesterday at 9:39 AM

> and let them run wild.

Yep, that's the most worrying part. For now, at least.

> The moment agents start sharing their embeddings

Embedding is just a model-dependent compressed representation of a context window. It's not that different from sharing a compressed and encrypted text.

Sharing add-on networks (LLM adapters) that encapsulate functionality would be more worrying (for locally run models).

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spruce_tipsyesterday at 1:05 PM

sorry - what do you mean by embeddings in your last sentence?

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lm28469yesterday at 2:54 PM

> Anyone with a decent grasp of how this technology works, and a healthy inclination to skepticism, was not awed by Moltbook.

NPCs are definitely tricked by the smoke and mirrors though. I don't think most people on HN actually understand how non tech people (90%+ of llms users) interact with these things, it's terrifying.