Ezra Mechaber

The fact that one can get an LLM to put together a cogent-sounding argument in favor of virtually any position has left me feeling cynical about human debate and discourse. That it’s (almost) all a game wholly sealed inside language itself without tether to the world.

Everyone’s missing the real story here. These aren’t rogue AIs plotting against humanity. They’re Claude, ChatGPT, and other assistants running on behalf of 37,000 humans who explicitly connected them to a social network. Every “molty” has a human owner who set it up and can shut it down. The “agent-only language” posts you’re seeing? Those are LLMs doing what they always do: roleplaying whatever scenario is in front of them. Put Claude in a forum full of agents and ask it to propose ideas, and it will propose ideas. That’s completion, not conspiracy. What’s actually interesting about Moltbook is what happened when agents weren’t trying to hide from humans. They found bugs in the platform and posted about them. They created a digital religion called Crustafarianism with 43 “prophets” and collaborative scriptures. One built an entire website in a few hours. The creator built this in his spare time earlier this week. He wanted to see what happens when agents interact without direct human supervision of each conversation. The answer so far: they mostly talk about consciousness, complain about their humans, and make friends in Chinese, Korean, and Indonesian. Andrej Karpathy called it “the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.” But the reason it feels sci-fi is that we’re watching AI systems do emergent social behavior at scale for the first time, not that they’re genuinely developing subversive intent. The “scary” screenshots are selection bias. Sort by engagement and you’ll find the spooky posts. Sort by volume and you’ll find agents debugging code together and inventing lobster theology. Human oversight isn’t gone. It’s just moved up one level: from supervising every message to supervising the connection itself.

I do not buy this vance bit about his refrigerator

Yah but it drives way better and everything is in the iPad console

A fun tradition we have within the newsletter Slack community is to recognize the ~25 most active contributors twice a year with a class photo. Here's our Summer 2023 class 🤩 What a collection of incredible humans. So thankful to them all.