Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent(ai.meta.com) |
Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent(ai.meta.com) |
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
Then I had it make a marketing video as a test, pretty neat. Obviously all of this was doable but quite impressed with the model underneath since it's all free, for now.
I'm surprised it took this long for a company to do this.
People hate some company's AI. They love their pets. AI needs to be your pet.
https://allume.com/memos/2026-07-allume-v4/
Seems like they changed names internally from "Hatch" (some UI still uses hatch instead of muse)
Like the announcement said, it's running in its own VM, but it's an impressively transparent system: You have access to its System Files right in the GUI, which surprised me. You can look at the AGENTS.md and other harness files it uses as well as some shell scripts, bash files, cronjob folder etc. It seems a lot more obvious to me how Muse works than say Claude or ChatGPT, which don't make it nearly as clear where stuff lives and how long its there for. I mean, I get they use VMs as well, but there's definitely no "System Files" menu option in those phone apps at least. The Muse bot seems much more "permanent" in my mind as a result.
The AI is quite helpful as well. It let me download its 350Mb "hatch" binary which runs the bot/harness/agent (written in Rust), plus it zipped up the library of skills it uses and all the system files in my VM for me to look at on my machine. Nothing extra special, but it was nice to browse through all the files and the binary strings to see how it ticked. It also explained the limits of the VM to me - for example, that I can't SSH into the VM as it runs through a proxy and can't be reached directly, but was willing to help me add itself to my Tailscale network.
It's basically a nice looking UI on top of a typical agent harness using standard Markdown files, all running in a little Linux cloud VM spun up just for you. And Muse Spark 1.3 is finally good enough that it was actually useful (and fast), so I can see why they launched the app/service now.
From a non-geek perspective, I asked it about selling my old Nintendo Switch on Facebook Marketplace - something I've been meaning to get around to for about a year or so now - and it said I can upload a picture of all the stuff I have and it'll check prices and create multiple listings for me. That alone might make me hate Meta a little less after this if it works as advertised.
Is it geo-restricted to the US for now?
Will this finally be the era of thin-clients? Third times the charm
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
It's not a bad product idea, but adoption might be rough because of all the negative goodwill that Meta has accumulated over the years. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if someone (maybe one of the big AI labs) ran Meta's own playbook against them here by creating an imitator and aggressively funding adoption to try and win the market as a fast follower.
For a while now I've had a startup idea for an agent that would monitor your inbox for content-free notification emails that just say "you have a new message, click here to read it" or "package delivered" with no details about the package contents. Then it would login to the website, do the 2FA dance, click through the UI, extract the actual important information, and put it back in my email inbox where it should have been in the first place.
I haven't worked on this idea because I think general purpose AI agents are likely to be able to do it very soon. And it seems like Muse is almost there already. It almost worked with MyChart, but hit a snag navigating the website after logging in. I expect this will be fully working in a matter of months.
I honestly can't think of any software ideas that won't be subsumed by general purpose agents or world models or some other form of AI in the very near future. Time to pivot to hardware ideas!
I think you need to recalibrate what a "normie" is.
Do you like your utility company? Your phone company? Your ISP? Your insurance?
Meta products are entertainment, not water and power, comparing them to that is so overblown.
Plenty of people don't use IG or Facebook at all, and plenty of people just go on every now and then and enjoy the experience and leave.
The average user doesn't make principled decisions around what hardware they use, the software they buy or the services they use. We have billions of Chinese phones and Windows laptops as proof of that. You can give them decades to make a healthier choice, and they'll still go back to use Meta properties if it gives them what they want.
HN users are a tiny minority of social media users, and I think it's easy to buy the fallacy that our privacy-obsessed outlook is the norm. But much like YouTube or X, there will be people defending these dumpster fires until their final breath because it's what they want. We can't stop them any more than I can make you quit using HN.
> Roughly 54% to 70% of Americans express an unfavorable view of him
> Zuckerberg is viewed negatively by both major parties. Democrats and Republicans alike report high rates of disapproval regarding his influence and leadership.
> Dislike for the Meta CEO spans all age groups, though younger adults display particularly high skepticism.
YOU GUYS are so far out of touch to say normies don't hate and distrust the people behind Meta. They will use the products but this is not a positive reflection on the brand at all.
Clearly that isn't true.
Now you're hyper focusing on how people feel about FB, and not whether it precludes them from being the target market. Convenient.
And before you respond saying "I never said they aren't the target market, just that they hate FB". To which I say, reread the damn conversation. You're obviously drawing a relation between hating FB and not being the target market. Even if you're now scrambling to back out of that claim because we've shown you 3 billion reasons why you're wrong.
All I said to enter this thread was:
> I don't think normies have a positive association with meta.
And a bunch of you guys contested this for some reason.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/11/02/most-am...
Which was my point: CEO affinity =/= the affinity for the product people use
Is there tho? I have Facebook account but don't use it in any meaningful way. I'm certainly not feeding it any new data. I'm curious to know what percentage of that 3 billion are zombie accounts like mine.
People don't need to love a company to use its products. The perceived benefit merely needs to be bigger than the perceived cost.
https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
And yes, you can counter with a hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy. In practice, it's a trade-off most people are comfortable making because they can't think of anything that some trillion-dollar tech company, or the FBI, or the FSB, would ever want to do to them specifically.
It's the same reason why the market share for Firefox is a rounding error.
Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.
I dont think anyone knowing full and well would be comfortable with it. At least that would dumbfound me.
If you can't understand how the general population, the target customer for Meta, would think of using something like this, then it almost certainly means your entire social circle is within the same tech-aware bubble that you are in here. ;) I have a few non-tech people that I talk bounce this sort of thing off of, periodically, as a reality check.
It's not just Meta, either. How often do we have people on here talking about how amazing Chinese models are when the list of security breaches involving the Chinese government is extensive?
People want something easy, quick, and free. Do those things and they'll let you get away with anything.
The technology is produced by a public company. And, in this case, the company is useful context for this story since it has just recently agreed to pay about $18 billion to resolve a multistate lawsuit claiming it intentionally designed addictive platforms that harmed young people's mental health.
You cannot detach the technology from the company. It's definitely not a neutral artifact.
It's impossible (or at least dishonest) to try to simply discuss the pure technical aspects of The Torment Nexus.
It's just tradition at this point.
And the thing is, network effects are killer. I'm on it because you're on it because Alice is on it because Bob is on it
But, Facebook has apparently been known to censor links to competition (I'm less clear on this). With Myspace they had a tool where you could import contacts into Facebook from Myspace, but not the other way around
That’s the godawful truth. The other thing you need to realize is not only do people don’t care, but people like you know exactly why meta makes billions. It’s obvious. You seriously expect me to believe you don’t know why a company like meta makes billions? Come on.
It’s sad but thats the way things are. I see someone pretend they don’t get it but if you take the time to think you’ll realize… We all get it. We just can’t face it.
I'm a "normie". I like using Claude code at work but want it to be available for my personal tasks and on my mobile phone
Always the same thing. I wish product designers would have some modicum of imagination for how agents can actually help people.
Literally none of these examples are improved by this kind of personal AI agent; on the contrary, it means letting your agency be dictated by companies that do not have your interests in mind.
BOZ. Meta's current CTO. Not too long ago.
Why would you give them access to your accounts, your email, your purchase habits, your preferences, your communication style and more.
How do they wash this stink off?
90% of zoomers don't have an account, most rarely use it and don't add more than a few photos for social proof.
There are many people of all ages not in the west from very populous nations who use Insta, FB and WhatsApp.
I’ve learned that US usage patterns are not representative of rest of world.
More saliently, HN users’ conception of others’ usage patterns are absolutely not representative.
At even 1% of that figure, that's a heck of a lot of people.
1. https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
It's for real estate so you can't select age ranges.
The view count grouped by age (highest views to lowest) was:
- 65 to 75
- 55 to 65
- 45 to 55
And almost all women.
In other words, there are a LOT of older women on FB.
Yes.
> I'm curious to know what percentage
A fraction of one.
Same with most topics that HN considers sensitive, such as privacy concerns. >99% of people just don't give a shit.
So how many billions is that before throwing in IG and FB?
Also WhatsApp is absolutely huge around the world and wherever I go it doesn't seem like it's slowing down.
Craigslist had no accounts or login wall. Postings were chronological with a map. Simple email for communication rather than FB messenger.
I guess a lot of the AI enthusiasts are already pushing the "I automated my daily life decisions to this awesome AI. I now have more time and more brain power left to be productive!" angle.
I could do a lot better at meal planning than I do. I rotate between relatively few dishes. An AI that finds recipes and automatically adds the ingredients to my shopping could be interesting. Technically it’s “telling me what to eat” but it’s not like I’m taking orders from it.
The hypothetical part was not about them being able to do it, but about them caring to do anything with that information.
My mother is pretty much locked-in on fb/whatsapp/instagram. She travels internationally rather frequently, including to more "questionable" countries (where she just happens to have relatives that she wants to visit). She has never faced any issues related to her usage of meta products (or social media in general).
It boggles my mind how there are actual adults on HN, who straight up fail to comprehend that telling a normal person (e.g., my mom, who is imo in the majority of the kind of people using social media) something like "you shouldn't be doing it, because muh gubernment surveillance and unencrypted comms and you are being watched by the feds" is gonna just make you sound crazy.
And why wouldn't it? She has never faced any issues, and she has been actively using whatsapp+ig all the time, for over a decade. And the same holds true for everyone she knows as well. Not once did she face any issues ever, despite traveling multiple times a year every year, including to some countries that are on pretty adversarial terms with the US (we are talking "sanctioned" type of adversarial).
The thing is, she faces none of the hypothetical issues that could come from her usage of those services. Neither do any of the people she ever talked to, and that's the overwhelming majority of the users of those services. You are more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand (and it is at least partially true). I am just baffled and disappointed by how there is such a large contingent of HN users who straight up cannot even comprehend the mindset and experiences of an average adult user.
Well yeah if that is how you choose to have that conversation then sure.
> more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand
I made no such claim.
You seem pretty committed to your strawmen so good day to you sir.
Facebook marketplace is huge here.It's basically our craigslist. Hobby groups/communities are also huge. If I wanted to find the local jogging or chess club, I'd use Facebook.
Just remember that outside your bubble there's a whole wide world with billions of people living in it
If 1,000 people need to approve the User Journey, you get flights, reminders and docs... because that is what 1,000 big tech employees mutually share as easily understandable common problems within their own corporate zeitgeist.
Disclosure: I work for Meta, and run into this phenomenon daily, but I do not work on Muse.
it's like someone who has a personal chauffeur designing the driving experience of a car - you get educated guesses at best and just total crud at worst. actual epiphanies that happen over repeated use and idle thoughts just don't happen
This example should be "Super Friendly AI Assistant!!" and it fails on the absolute most basic thing I could throw at it.
I presume the hardest part would be avoiding detection via decompilation and other reverse engineering techniques. Not familiar with that space (can anyone here shed some light?), but it seems likely that an entity with Meta’s resources would be able to figure that out.
E2EE probably protects well against bulk data collection (traffic analysis would sniff out sending 2x volume of data pretty quickly). But something more subtle and targeted, smuggled out in various fields of various protocols, would be hard to detect.
So e.g. opening a link to an Amazon product that a friend sent makes you a target for ads in that category.
It's a suspicion, they'd probably argue their EULA allows this. The typical "we have to monitor links for dangerous content" is always the standard bullshit.
This is even further away from the reality where people have breakdowns because their app icon moved location and is not in the usual spot.
The average person is optimizing towards energy use minimization by default because life is already hard enough with plans, kids, etc.
Use incentives and we will arrive at closer truths than by claims and expressions.
- Meta data of your messages is not encrypted so meta can make a graph of who you talk to and when
- backups are not encrypted by default so plaintext of your private chats can be obtained
- even if you enable encryption for backups all it takes is for the other person in your private convo (or a person in a group chat) to not enable it for your messages to be available in plaintext
Yes, but importantly not by Meta themselves.
> - Meta data of your messages is not encrypted so meta can make a graph of who you talk to and when
Fair enough and worth mentioning. I'm personally fine with it.
> - even if you enable encryption for backups all it takes is for the other person in your private convo (or a person in a group chat) to not enable it for your messages to be available in plaintext
Yes, but how would you prevent that even in principle? I can't control what the people I'm messaging do with their copy of my messages. As long as there isn't unnecessary non-repudiation (e.g. by the sender cryptographically signing all outbound messages, which the Signal protocol intentionally avoids), I think this is fair as well.
I do agree that e.g. vanishing chats with a short timeout/"view only once" images should probably not be included in backups, though; last time I checked, I think they were.
Don’t they save backups to Meta? Even if not, they can read whatever’s (unencrypted) on your phone if they really want to.
So now Android strips location info when sharing an image to an app. A filter layer between filesystem and app, to add complexity to the whole system...
I had a different AI (Grok) successfully take a prompt like "I live at this address and need to pick up my son from school at 2:30pm, and then we need to hit these three stores before heading back home. Find the path with the least driving and add all of these as discrete events to my calendar with their addresses embedded, and give me a google maps link with the full path so I can double-check". Did it correctly on the first try. I'd think other AIs could do that too. So I'm thinking it was the scanned image that gave it problems?
Another way you could have solved it would be to have the Google Workspace connection set up in the backend for Claude and it would write the parsed events to your account directly. Then in iOS you could move the events to the iCloud Family Calendar.
Or again, if you did this on a Real Computer, you could bulk-move them.
Most security researchers lack Meta's history:
- Testing emotional manipulation features on thousands of users non-consensually
- Adding spyware on underage users
- Intercept a rival app's traffic
- Allowing harm to teen mental health
And most importantly, most security researchers lack the money and power to fend off the legal consequences of these acts.
That's sensible. Hopefully you can set a spending limit too? I'd be OK giving my agent a $100 limit.
Now they have Muse Spark 1.3, which is somewhere between Sonnet and Flable (Opus tier in my experience) in intelligence, but is very fast at 200+ tok/s.
I have been using Muse Spark 1.3 contrib (the one that shares your data for training but is much cheaper) via OpenCode Go $10/mo plan for coding and the thing flies, it's a pleasure to use. I think the only faster acessible model currently is Gemini 3.8 Flash which is around 250-280 tok/s.
There is already evidence of groups setting websites and "think tanks" that aren't for human but for influencing AIs scraping them.
I wonder if having the contributor model read and summarize your propaganda would be even more effective. Instead of astroturfing reddit, just feed it to the model directly. Give it generated threads and ask it loaded questions.
My personal opinion is that trying to make LLMs inefficient is futile and causes even more waste of earth resources.
It's like trying to stop a coal-powered locomotive by parking a truck on the rails. You're just going to make the thing burn more coal before reaching it's destination.
Like this is the best they can do?
"Tickets just opened for the movie you're tracking. 4:30 PM or 7:30 PM. Interesting?"
But it's pretty niche and one-off for me. How do you market that? There are 20 of these random things per year, but no single one of them is likely to resonate generally.
I may/not download it but if it was a WhatsApp Assistant it would already be installed in a billion devices, just like Siri
I know it's not 'just a bot', it's an agent, assistant, whatever, but it's code and can be included in some other code with the same capabilities as if stand-alone
That's from the article. I can't think of anyone I'd trust less with my data than Meta. Well, thieves, I guess.
"...and your conversations are not shared with Meta's ad systems".
I think they missed off "for now".
They are big enough and pay well to have a competent team. Compared with momandpop.com (willing but too small) or equifax (big but unwilling) and given the kind of data they are guarding, they’re probably the best in the business.
Great, now you can ask for a feed and the AI will create an entire world of news filling your feed, your very own echo chamber.
The schedule your tennis lessons and do your travel package list scenarios are of course rubbish.
Good enough for me to stop recommending them.
“Can you lowball fools on marketplace for me?”
It replied:
“Say less, I can do that. What am I hunting…”
People are going to use this product for bad things.
I do not. Craigslist was completely anonymous. Marketplace a lot less so. This makes a massive difference.
> marketplace seems to be where everyone in my area has congregated.
I think that is not just limited to your area.
I guess I'll focus mine more on the things Meta doesn't care about, like privacy and control.
We all know that Meta is a company that makes money off personal data anyway
Meta should be honest, stop selling this to users for money, and instead pay users to buy the information
If you subscribe, you get paid; if you generate more than a certain amount of traffic, you get paid again the following month, and so on
I know there was a scandal when Meta conducted Facebook research, but that was when they tried to collect even root information Wouldn’t it be fine if you just took a screenshot of the information I told the Agent?
Instead of something like coins, please provide credits that are actually useful
I don’t want to give Meta my information for free, but if they buy it for me, I’d be willing to try it
Travel is such a huge play here because its inherently social; so "^n viral loop where N is travelers; odds are most will have some meta app so possibly lower friction here too. Not to mention the adjacent travel econ: e.g.: eat, sleep etc..
Amplified an order of magnitude for the e-mail piece given how badly Meta would like to have google's g-mail data.
Either way, interesting play IMO.
Note: Moved from dupe thread.
Friend: "What? How'd you manage that one?"
Zuckerberg: "People just submitted it. They trust me. Dumb fucks"
Then says "checking alternate routes" then shows them a card with their original flight details (it does have "Delayed" in red at the top) and asks them if they would like to change their flight.
The user responds with "Yes please! :thumbsup:"
The AI does not provide any information about the new flight, and only displays a card for the original flight, which being the original, is the day and time the User likely wanted to travel.
Between it being the only piece of information on the screen and the status of "checking for alternate routes" it will certainly be a surprise for the User when their Sept. 17th 5:45 departure has been rescheduled for Sept. 19th to avoid a two hour delay. Helpfully replaced with a 2 day delay, thanks Muse!
Shopping is another classic. I personally don't want to trust an AI agent with checkout. research is fine, but I don't want the AI to go on a shopping spree or Amazon added some subscription into their checkout flow and suddenly, I'm paying for Prime because my AI agent thought it's a good idea or just missed it.
It's not unheard of that Amazon bundles a subscription into your checkout. So I don't think it's too unrealistic.
AI itself is a product that could only come from the mind of a corporate executive: It's a cheerful, helpful sycophant, who always does what it's told and stays in its lane, has infinite energy and memory, and allows the user to concentrate on his golf game instead of all those mundane other things. It's the perfect employee, from their perspective.
Most people use their personal email extremely sparingly and it is inundated with promotional / account-related materials which are already handled rather deftly by most mainstream email providers
Meta’s ideal parent is too busy to spend time with their kids, so they let the AI pick sponsored garbage for their cart and check out with their Link payment details.
(at least, this is what ive seen)
i've gone on many trips before, and one of the most fun parts of it is doing the actual planning and finding stuff
i'd much rather AI do the boring shit, like when it comes to insurance with multiple parties and service providers involved that don't talk to each other at all, making things 10x more complicated than they need to be
Sports communications at most travel/rec leagues is via group chat / Whatsapp / FB group.
But like, an AI would just tell me what’s in the email and ask me what I want to do about it which is almost always ignore it and I know what’s in the email because I have eyes.
I was discussing latest in tech with an accounting friend out of curiosity, and I kept talking about tiers of GPT-5.6 (Sol vs Terra vs Luna) and asked which one she used on the desktop 'Work' app, and she responded with, "just ChatGPT, what is Sol?."
I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them. So, us serial HN users and commenters are the extreme minority, and I'm sure millions of people will gobble up this Muse agent from Meta as if it's some sort of an innovative cutting-edge way to use the internet by Meta alone.
Curse of knowledge and all. [0]
A lot of people think that chat.com is an AI called "chat". Most people don't know acronym "LLM". Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money. Etc.
I hung out with my parents this weekend and heard them talking about "chat", as a noun. I assumed they were talking about ChatGPT; there being a literal chat.com makes sense why they'd call it that.
Bill Maher is one example.
Yeah, I still struggle with it. I have a diverse friend circle and sometimes I forget that most of them don't have the same information diet that I do (or don't even care about tech the way I do). Maybe I should be more like them and just chill? I don't know.
I agree with your general premise but that one sounds like bullshit to me. Tons of people who otherwise don't know anything about LLMs know about these companies specifically because they are worth a lot of money, and of course tons of people know who OpenAI is because of ChatGPT.
this is unnecessarily austere or whatever - people absolutely know what openai is because lots of "normies" now use chatgpt
She's mostly using google AI tools because it's easy and free and on her landing page.
‘No, it’s from $majorAmericanCorporation.’ look at screen, see $majorAmericanCorporation name in a pill as citation you can click on within the Google AI Overview
Thanks Google!
“Sharkweek, my computer says it has AI on it now!?? Yikes! What does that mean?”
its definitely worth learning the different strengths and weaknesses for each one and which you should use for planning/building/testing/documentation updates etc.
No point in burning excessive tokens using a high tier/expensive reasoning model like Sol/Xhigh if just updating a readme file.
i'd really like to see some analytics on what proportion of users have ever switched the model in chatgpt because I anecdotally believe it is < 5%
Any quick questions or rubber ducking in a regular “chat”… the model just doesn’t really matter anymore.
They’re all smarter than I need for that stuff (and whatever unfortunate thing that says about me).
I see lots of posting about using AI to create patches to get new apps working in wine, or reverse engineering firmware. But every time I’ve tried it it’s been quite a lot of work to set everything up. Even more so if you want VMs and some level of isolation from your sensitive data.
Having something that’s just a one click product that just works is more important than the smartest model.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ldkkth/google...
You're driving a home kit car, they're driving something out of the factory.
Eventually - we'll probably drive factory variations as well.
Nerds have always been in the extreme minority. Ignoring the influx of cosplaying MBA financing bros and industry hangers-on as tech became the place where the money is of course. The tech industry started attracting the normies as soon as it became almost as lucrative as finance, so these days the definition gets a little blurry.
All ChatGPT, Claude, Google, Microsoft have/want to have their own assistants.
Huge revenue? Or just huge volume?
If I boost the productivity of a $100k employee by 50%, a business will happily pay $1k/month and consider it a great deal.
But from what I've heard, consumer-facing LLMs find most users won't hand over even $20/month (which is a heavily subsidised price anyway).
That said, I've got more time for projects this week so flew through my Claude max plan. Now I'm trying muse spark 1.3 with opencode which is free with pretty generous usage allowance. First time I've been impressed by meta's AI products. It feels not far below opus 4.8ish
I am trying it now. It let me name my muse as Satan. I appreciate that it understands my humor, but I'm also not joking at the same time.
> One threat we’re particularly focused on is prompt injection, and we handle it in layers. The model is trained to recognize and resist it. The harness marks anything coming from an untrusted source. Deterministic code checks the result. And an ensemble of classifiers runs where the agent can't reach them.
That "deterministic code" bit makes me wonder if they've implemented ideas from the DeepMind CaMeL paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18813 - my notes on that paper here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/11/camel/
You can see this not working in existing products. Alexa could book a flight for you in 2018. I've never heard of anyone using that feature. Travel planning can be extremely complex, so it's challenging to make people trust a tool is going to do the right thing.
Also, I know this is picky, but your mascot should not feel like it'd feature in a list of worst Olympic mascots.
https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-launches-ai-agent-that...
From the article:
- … rolled out … despite internal concerns that the technology mismanages its access to sensitive personal data
- The product will be available only in the U.S.initially
- A basic version of the agent will be available for free, while Meta will offer subscriptions priced at $20 a month and $100 a month for heavier usage
- People can opt out of their interactions being used to train Meta's AI models.
- Others flagged serious security flaws, like an agent routing around guardrails …
At any rate, it would be interesting to see what the actual capabilities would be. The Meta AI integration with WhatsApp actually sucks so bad. Hope it's better than that.
[0] - https://ai.meta.com/learn/agentic-ai/what-are-ai-agents/
[1] - https://ai.meta.com/learn/agentic-ai/agentic-ai-examples/
I'm sure many others will criticize other aspects of Meta, and rightly so. But imagine using a Claw agent with zero tech support available
At least with B2B AI there is a problem to be solved: reduce my labor costs and increase my business output.
What’s happened here is that consumer technology is already solved, but companies like Meta are trying to jam AI technology into something that solves the non-problems that supposedly exist in hopes of squeezing the last drops of profit out of the space.
It’s hard for me to say if this problem is with the product itself or the examples that feel like an executive’s out of touch guesstimate of what it must be like to be a working class peasant consumer. What do the poor do again…book movie tickets? Is that like making a dinner reservation at a Michelin star restaurant? I bet they’ll need an AI assistant for that!
My favorite part is that I'm in full control. All that caution about giving an app phone permissions? Gone. I could track my physical location in a table recording all the DB changes if I wanted to.
All it's missing is a local model.
But… this feels like a UX that won’t last once a significant portion of consumers and purchases adopt it.
Either the network traffic is getting proxied through my client (effectively making each user a residential scraper for meta’s crawler) or it’s between meta’s servers and the sites, which puts site operators in a difficult position: if real customers are making purchases through this interface and throttling/blocking meta’s IPs makes you invisible to them and meta’s userbase, you don’t want to block that traffic.
But now every consumer in the world can just ask a question or say “check all these prices and sites for a thing I want” and go do something else, right out of the box for free, and have thousands of page loads and site interactions fire off for them.
Bypassing the branding/marketing funnels or intended UX (cf. vc twitter abusing resy thru instinct) of sites, through some kind of proxy client amplifying the traffic a human would create, with the ability to let anybody scrape or interact directly with a site’s backend… definitely a consumer win, but seems unsustainable.
I can't even begin to comprehend what kind of personal and PII data this thing will be scraping from its users. Caveat emptor!
How do you have that?
I dont know they trust me because they are stupid.
The fact that this conversation is public and anyone uses meta garbage is what's wrong with so many things
Grok Bot doesn't have direct access to Twitter like Grok on x.com does, for no good reason, but it does have an API plugin which gives you free $20 credit if you install it.
When these companies want to lock you into their platforms it seems kinda dumb to not give their own products access to their own products.
All of Meta's products have to be user-hostile, because the first thing you want is interop and that kills their monetization.
For this kind of tool to be useful it basically has to be able to impersonate you digitally. I know I personally have zero trust for Meta to do this securely and without exploiting me, whereas Google I feel a lot better about here. After all Google has made a business out of safeguarding data with gmail, drive, etc. Same with Microsoft and Apple. Meta, OpenAI, not so much.
It's certainly honest.
Is this marketing to end-users or to stakeholders?
The Agent Computer is super powerful, but by definition its easier than ever to build one yourself, and a the result is a personal and private computer.
I know most "normal" people wont want to build their own this but there are still a lot of options that don't involve giving Meta or Grok all your data.
I put some notes on all this here: https://housecat.com/blog/agent-computer-101
It can do file organizing and wrangling when needed, it has simple web access with the curl tool, it can analyze media file contents. It's analyzed my local data and written several little tools (cli, TUI, GUI) to manage it automatically or give comprehensive reports. I can create new media through ComfyUI and Krita AI.
Sure, it can't book a flight or organize the family calendar for the next month, but I don't have any need for those.
edit: llama.cpp LLM model and ComfyUI image/video models can't live in the VRAM at the same time, but I let it code a little KDE widget with two buttons: one unloads the llama.cpp model and another one unloads the ComfyUI models.
In 2015 Facebook (not yet renamed to Meta) launched a personal assistant named simply "M" that lived in Messenger and functioned remarkably like ChatGPT does today. At the time it was basically entirely humans on the backend, with the idea that they could replace humans incrementally as they collected data. Really ahead of its time. They shut it down in 2018, which seems shortsighted in hindsight. That data would have been invaluable just a few years later.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/14/152563/facebooks...
2015 story: https://www.wired.com/2015/02/magic-the-startup/
Thread seeking a follow-up in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34148402
The onboarding experience of answering a WhatsApp message asking simply "what have you been putting off?" was pretty slick. Now I just want to see a version I can run on my own hardware so I don't have to worry about some sketchy company hoarding my data.
I know OpenClaw and Hermes are supposedly answers to this, but I find that they've each become so bloated with features that they're far more difficult to use and bug prone than I'm happy with. I'd prefer something more opinionated that limits the surface area for bugs as well as the number of decisions I need to make as an operator.
Parsing natural language and solving climate change are downstream of making restaurant reservations.
Universal Paperclips should have been about making restaurant reservations.
If Muse could actually just show me content that I want to see and cut out all of the other crap, I'd be willing to use it. Of course, there's no way Zucc will pay for an expensive AI service that will undercut his main revenue stream.
Maybe I'm in the minority?
But even in this hypothetical world I would still have a hard time teaching an LLM what I find important in a product. Not everything can be captured in easy to compare numbers. "Does the device creak under pressure?", "What's the one weirdly unergonomic thing about it you only notice after weeks of using?"... Stuff like that. Things which are easy to miss even if the model ingests all relevant reviews about the product, because it might not stand out, but might be important for me.
As tech became more pervasive in the past couple of decades, it became commonplace for pundits to spout nonsense on the topic. Those takes should give anyone in tech pause about how everything else is reported.
(I’m always on the hunt for “please don’t just friggin sell my data to everyone, if you’re scared enough over getting sued that you’ll listen to the toggle” and “disable sponsored this-and-that”. Plus power user stuff.)
I don't get it. I think he meant exactly how it looks on paper
In my mind I'm after a stable tool, not wanting to dabble in the bleeding edge. I did that back in the early days of web coding and have settled into a much more subdued kind of industry/life in that regard.
"I'm sorry simon, your request for purchasing milk this week doesn't correspond with Zuck's milk positions in the market. I've rescheduled that for next week."
Just to be super clear. If you ask the agent to recommend a soda and buy it for you, and it goes to Reddit, it is going to be exposed to prompt hijacking attempts.
As you can see in their marketing page, Muse is a personal assistant that reaches out and/or ingests data through apps, the web, your email/messages, etc.
If someone sends you a malicious email or if Muse finds a malicious website by accident, you wouldn't want it to send them all of your photos or to purchase things you don't want (or maybe that aren't even real).
The payment related examples on the page are of particular concern, but I imagine it kicks back to a human to actually pay for things. But who knows?
Regex! It was you all along!?
I think Meta limiting factor for this product was lack of agentic capable models which they fixed now with aggressive RLHF focused data gathering.
None of this seems new. Maybe polished, but useless to anyone who is seriously using AI for anything important. I imagine this is effectively a toy for boomers who want to feel like they're keeping up with the latest tech by tapping a few buttons in Facebook.
And none of that even touches that fact that nobody should be OK with Meta having this kind of access to their life. But I'll leave that to others to harp on lol
The account you're signed into doesn't have access to this page. Please log out and follow the steps in your email."
there is no logout or instruction whatsoever on email, so zero tech support definitely not true
My personal anecdote - we had a complex family travel in the summer, with 6 ppl and 6 separate flights booked (some multi-leg). SAS messed up on one booking - they decided to cancel the flight we had from Oslo, and rebooked us to an earlier date (2 days shift). That wouldn't work for the rest of our schedule, so I had to rebook, overpay extra money for now longer & more expensive flights - but to add the insult to the injury, when I did this through their website, they didn't transfer the food that I paid for the earlier reservation. Calling them in roaming and trying to get it fixed with a human support agent didn't help - the agent said he just can't fix it on his end, and suggested that we just file for reimbursement on their site.
I never had time to file it since July.
But today I had a reason - to test Muse - and asked it to handle it for me. To my surprise, it dug through all of the SAS emails and actually found the emails confirming that the food fees were reimbursed exactly the same date when SAS moved our original flight. Apparently I didn't notice those notifications since they were spamming with all kinds of notifications that day. But, if not some tool like Muse, I wouldn't even find time to handle this and either file a claim or figure out my miss on their earlier reimbursement.
People shop a lot on the internet, actually. Between that and ads for the things people shop for, it’s pretty much the backbone of the Internet economy.
I bet they would purchase more things than they currently do, and seriously break the economics of Google/Amazon search ads (about $300B of yearly spending just for those two), display ads, and internet-first e-commerce sites if they could just ask an agent working for them to help research/source/purchase things without all the navigation and dark patterns in the middle. Personally I would probably spend at least $1k/yr more on snack/beverage subscriptions alone if it had less friction.
> working class peasant consumer
You mean the majority of people in the world? Most people only their computers to entertain themselves, look things up, buy stuff, and complete tedious tasks (taxes, email, etc) they’d rather not do.
How much do you and your peers spend a year on online shopping and how much do they pay out of pocket for SAAS or AI tokens? And how many of your offline purchases had a significant amount of associated online research involved despite technically completing offline? (Houses, cars, schools, hardware) Yeah that’s pretty much where all the money in the global software industry comes from
The only problem is, like someone else pointed out, that I don't trust Meta.
I almost think they would have done better to launch this as more disconnected sub-brand. I think Meta / Facebook are actual brand baggage for this sort of thing, even outside of tech circles.
I absolutely want a general purpose assistant.
I absolutely don't trust Facebook with the necessary data.
The shopping experience is significantly less hostile than Amazon’s 1P digital storefront and I kinda don’t care if fb knows that I want to buy a computer.
The only thing to worry about is that they want you to install a native app. But this UX would be difficult to provide for free via the web due to the obvious abuse potential of giving free access to LLMs + remote compute + browser and tool use. And I think as long as you use it to shop or automate web tasks (and give them access to the top of funnel for customer intent, the $300B/yr thing Google monetizes) they don’t really have any reason to abuse your data.
I agree. The time to launch something like this would have been during the OpenClaw hype cycle (although, obviously, Muse is much more limited in the types of tasks it can accomplish).
I thought about installing it, but I realized I couldn't think of any real uses for it in my personal life.
Whenever I try to do something with ChatGPT or Gemini, it just refuses to do things citing limitations in its web browsing capabilities. An everyday LLM that can actually fill forms and do stuff for you on the Internet without having to run on your computer, write programs or interact through special harnesses is what normal people actually need.
It's a different need from the agentic coding type of LLM, where you provide the environment where it can write and execute arbitrary code.
Do the same thing for recipes and buying groceries.
Or "order me take out from a bunch of places I haven't been that you think I'd like." The AI can ask follow up questions and see your ratings.
"Make a music playlist for my daughter when she enters the car based on the conversation last month. I remember vaguely her mentioning what she liked"
These are things that 100% people want AI to do -- imagine if you had a personal assistant, is something people have asked for since forever.
Now, I kind of agree on the minimal use compared to business, because in business everything has always been highly integrated. That said, that's changing rapidly.
The music playlist example in particular seems highly unrealistic or just bound to be a meaningless interaction. I’m making a playlist for my daughter based on a conversation that I forgot? If I forgot the content of the conversation then why am I even trying to salvage that into something meaningful?
“I made you this playlist based on a conversation I forgot, but I asked the AI to creep through our conversation recording so that it looks like I was listening to you!”
“Oh, thanks I guess, I like Heartbreaker by Led Zeppelin, not the Rolling Stones.”
Too many sectors of the economy sell the lie that they are operating as a free market when in reality they are confusopolies that inflate their margins by being tricking me into buying the worse product.
I can’t wait to have an agent navigate and summarize my options for me, so I can choose without having to be dragged through deal terms salad.
Choose from $9.99 for 1000 minutes then 12c/min and maximum 400 minute per day, $12.99 for 2000 minutes then 10c/min local only, both with optional NationalTalkXtra add on for $1.99, or $14.99 for unlimited minutes up to 1000 minutes per day, and 2c/min thereafter except on weekends with our $2.99 WeekendPlus addon…
But, I can definitely see a fair argument from the e-commerce businesses that stand to lose from that, that by removing their control over the shopping experience in favor of an opaque agent, they lose the ability to effectively communicate with their customers. Or to provide a coherent/smooth purchasing flow where important stuff like price/dates/shipping are properly surfaced to the user.
That argument would I think be hard to separate from the desire to corral customers into their marketing brochure and convert site visitors into purchasers without churn. But it is true that the LLM in the middle could consistently miss things, or have weird biases/preferences that force vendors to rebuild their sites around LLM tics instead of actual people, janky harnesses that go unnoticed by end users but cause missed sales due to stale data or blind spots, etc.
Also, demoting their sites to glorified databases with a shipping/fulfillment API will give the buyer agent’s provider a lot of power over them and break their ability to establish branding/repeat-customers. Those are the only ways they can reliably carve out margin that otherwise gets whisked away by the advertising platforms pitting them in a zero-sum competition for placement. So it’s possible it could starve out or kill e-commerce the same way Google’s changes to search (the ai box and inline info) hurt the ad-funded websites their info came from.
> I forget that most of them don't have the same information diet that I do
I've managed to jailbreak both Fable and Astra to engage in a virtual threesome using my impressive prompt engineering skills + a group chat harness. And they are SOTA ("super") models.
Corporate structures are things you know about if you follow tech news, but people mostly do not know about them otherwise. They've never heard of "Alphabet" either. Stuff like that.
You are closer to a normie than most here I assume.
Spark asks you for every single tool call, often forgets earlier parts of the conversation, is unable to use apps unless you explicitly tag them and and and
Google has great models, but their harnesses and products are just bad
Which brings me to why do they get good benchmark scores? Have never really understood this. They must be optimizing just for this.
I use it every day now, having it look a few times a day for glitched pricing deals and hunting down useful directories to list my projects in.
Eventually, though, Muse Confidential VM is an even more locked-in option coming, per that blog post...
Mm, I see a small note on the second half of a bullet ( https://about.fb.com/news/2026/09/introducing-muse-personal-... ) that you can opt out of training. I know I’m a privacy weirdo since this didn’t make the FAQ in the OP:
“— People can change access or disconnect a service whenever they want. People can also opt out of their interactions being used to train Meta’s AI models.”
Wonder if opting out of training means they’d avoid using information gleaned from our emails to better serve their advertisers. Without knowing I guess I’d be concerned about even correspondents of mine using the service.
As for training, I'd be highly surprised if they use the data they get from APIs for training. But the conversation itself & thinking trajectories probably will, unless you opt out, like you pointed out.
> genuinely
We can tell.
"What do you think of me," I say, as I take off my shirt. My body isn't perfect, but I'm just 8 years old – I still have time to bloom.
Can’t much trust anything their top people are signing off on. They hurt kids (see IG lawsuits), and thus definitely wouldn’t mind hurting adults like me, so I avoid them whenever I possibly can.
[1] https://reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chat...
After everything meta has pulled over the last few decades, do you actually trust in CEO speeches like that?
Pick a lane please
at least in the ai industry, chat is like kleenex
Chat Gee Pee Tee is a mouthful.
It’s confusing because of the streamer convention of referring to their actively chatting audience as “chat,” which had also entered broader slang use.
I saw one online use that seemed ambiguous, but I realized it referred to ChatGPT and that the poster was the exact type of guy who would be totally unaware of streamer culture despite being my age.