I have a hard time understanding, given the abundance of bad faith and predatory behavior Meta has displayed over entire span of its existence, why anyone would want to consult with its "personal AI" or grant it access to "all aspects of your life".
There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined, most people don't give a shit and are just trying to minimize cognitive effort. My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day because it would mean less planning.
> There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined
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.
There almost certainly is. I think on HN people aren’t really aware that they don’t represent the median internet user super well. I would wager if you were to tally every late millennial and zoomer across the west, Instagram usage would probably be near 90%. Facebook usage among older people is also still absolutely rampant, at least anecdotally. Not to mention WhatsApp usage which is huge everywhere but the US seemingly
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, so I'm not trusting Meta with much, and it's the only way I can reach quite a lot of people. A lot of people I know trust them begrudgingly (primarily with Instagram, because all of their friends are on it as well).
People don't need to love a company to use its products. The perceived benefit merely needs to be bigger than the perceived cost.
This assumes completely techo-rational actors that continuously monitor cost-benefit analysis, other alternatives and switch products when one outweights the others.
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.
People have breakdowns because they are left without mobile reception for a few hours. Indeed this IS happening and I would expect people soon to have breakdowns, because they lack access to AI.
Slightly different lens, same outcome: It's there, it lets people do what they want to do with acceptable effort/other negative consequences, so they use it.
- 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
> - backups are not encrypted by default so plaintext of your private chats can be obtained
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.
I work there. The claims made in this article are just blatantly false, and so obviously so to any employee I'm not sure how this hasn't been thrown out.
Honestly I am in that camp, but Facebook is kind of a special case for me. I don't really care about giving Google or Microsoft or OpenAI or Anthropic all of my personal data, but Facebook is a bridge slightly too far.
>My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day
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 had that conversation several times with friends outside of tech. The universal reaction is just a shrug - "my life is boring, what do they care".
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.
> hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy.
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 get this, and I’ve said similar things about privacy and security in the past, but Meta in particular has a history of intentionally using customer data and behavior to the detriment of those customers. Creating experiences designed to ensnare, addict, and ultimately harm their users. This goes beyond paranoia about security or privacy. It’s handing your drug dealer the keys to your house.
Fact is most people don't really care. And they don't really know why they should care either. All the problems feels like something far away, while they are being exploited and sold without fully realising.
I dont think anyone knowing full and well would be comfortable with it. At least that would dumbfound me.
This is probably why they are launching now. There's no real other competitor right now in the nicely made managed openclaw space for personal use (or at least, very very early. Maybe Grokbot can be considered the lead competitor but afaik it did not gain mindshare). Instinct is supposed to come out soon and by not being associated with Meta it'd be really appealing just on that front vs this. But being first to market is a real reason to use it and chance to gain lasting market share.
There's something like 177 million facebook users in the US. Most probably have Facebook/instagram/etc installed on their phones, streaming their location data/etc, without a worry in the world. Most would probably very much enjoy the utility of this agent.
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.
Because people are apathetic by nature until things become a real problem.
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.
You are right, sometimes the simplest answer is the right now. Don't trust Meta. Life is going to be much simpler. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me continuously for 20 years, shame on me.
Every single HN post about anything Meta-adjacent starts with a comment like this. Guys, we get it, the hive mind of HN doesn't like Meta/Facebook/Zuck. Fine. But can we actually comment on the technology and tools rather than the company for once?
I love how the marketing departments of these things always imagine people are just constantly plagued by the hassle of organising their flights, restaurant bookings and movie tickets
I liked how in the example here it tells the user "Your flight is delayed 2hrs due to storms in Denver..."
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!
It's because people who create these use cases perceive this as a difficult and painful task - but how many people really think about their flights over the day? Pretty sure the majority of Meta users has not flight booked for the next 3 months. I can only assume that this is more seen as a showstopper. Look how difficult this is and how we solved it.
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.
And your emails! It can manage your email and schedule! Wow, so great, it can handle all the 10 DHL notifications and other spammy things I got over the past week. And my empty personal calendar
The average person is not using a calendar and is not getting more than 1 relevant personal email per week.
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
lol no one is getting personal emails, maybe some people get one every few months, but most probably never (not taking into account other than order/shipping confirmations, login codes, etc)
i think product just uses these use cases as their example demos and then when they show it to marketing theyre like "OK I guess this is what it's for".
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
> A personal AI agent can help with everyday tasks like booking reservations, monitoring prices, managing reminders, creating documents, generating images, and researching topics.
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.
They tend to devolve to the lowest common denominator of what the decision-making chain can understand and resonate with on zero context.
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.
My AI agent decided with the Ticketmaster agent that since I couldn't get the tickets to the show I really wanted, I'd instead attend a show they haven't sold very many tickets for as it's a bit of a drive. I forgot to charge my AI agent's loyalty this week and it fell below the threshold of trustworthiness so it struck this awful deal. It's stipulated that I attend or I risk even further matrix degradation of my agent in the agentweb. I even spent all last week providing my AI agent with RealTestimonials about various consumer products for the streams but apparently they want you to manually charge it every week and you have to have a full package of tokens, you can't partially charge your agent even just to break a threshold on its behavior matrix.
Out of curiosity, do you have other ideas or things you want it to do? It just seems like they always converge on the same set of executive tasks because they’re a nail that is exceptionally well suited to this particular hammer.
Take a picture of my son's printed basketball calendar and add it to my shared iCloud family calendar. Apple/Siri couldn't do it, Claude couldn't do it. Things STILL can't talk to each other, seemingly intentionally. My wife and tried over the summer. I told her Claude+Siri could do this in 30s, and she would try by hand. 20 minutes later she was done adding each event manually, and I still couldn't get beyond trying to convince Calendar on my iPhone to open an ics or whatever file. I was supposed to open the file from Apple Mail, which I don't use, and email it from gmail or something.
This example should be "Super Friendly AI Assistant!!" and it fails on the absolute most basic thing I could throw at it.
fwiw, it’s likely not product designers making these decisions. More likely, designers and researchers planned to explore use cases people would actually use and benefit from, but were told to focus on the ones leadership deemed important
I think you need to recalibrate in your own mind what using a product means. It doesn't mean you like it, or the company behind it. It may also be due to monopoly status.
Do you like your utility company? Your phone company? Your ISP? Your insurance?
Huh? I would echo the sentiment of you recalibrating what a normie is. This is a crazy take. I would guess that fair amount of people have no idea that Facebook rebranded to Meta, let alone what goes on in and around the company.
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.
Here's what I found when I googled "polling on Mark Zuckerberg":
> 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 are so far out of touch to say normies don't hate the people behind Meta.
A great many use their products grudgingly in my experience - posting minimally, staying because network effects make it difficult to completely move, and not wanting to give FB and friends more than they already do.
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.
I mean, Google and x.AI already have stuff like this. There's plenty of other options as well. And even outside of that, I've heard the promise of "let AI book your reservations!" since before LLMs became a thing.
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
They are saying OpenClaw/friends are hard to get setup and keep running without technical knowledge. Saying "Think of how hard it would be to setup OpenClaw without technical support"
Instinct exists with the same features. It is quite good. I was thinking they were gonna get acquired by meta 100%, but looks like meta has a competitor.
I can't say it doesn't make sense. Who still loves Facebook? Older people. Who loves chatbots? Old people too. Not _just_ old people of course, but this genuinely might be the first new tech I've seen which has been so easily and quickly welcomed by those a generation or two older than me.
Ironically, one of the things I most want from an agent like Muse is to read Facebook and Instagram for me and present posts in a user-friendly and ad-free format.
Lol right? And the REAL irony is that this will likely just be a way to show you even MORE ads while collecting MORE data for MORE targeted advertising.
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.
Interesting how the first beat of the curiously-low-bitrate, kinda-ugly video presentation was admitting that the agent's highest priority is to get me to buy more stuff through its store front.
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 think they had this sitting idle for a while, waiting for their AI division to deliver a capable LLM to power it.
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.
The amount of usage you get is insane when you stack OpenCode GO subsidy on top of contributor.
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.
Poisoning LLM? I remember at least one study about it. Perhaps but it would have to be very subtle otherwise they might flag your content and shadowban it from future training.
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.
Judging from the website, Muse seems to be too keen on making me buy things - Book Tickets, Buy a Stroller. Would this personal AI spam me with ads randomly like this?
having used it for a bit, yes, one of the first things it asked me for, unprompted, were things to set it up to buy stuff. i declined but it still consistently wants to spend money; research a trip? as soon as it has any results it prompts to start booking stuff. etc.
The features don't really matter here IMO; where does the PA function live? Whoever runs it sees intent streams. If that goes to a startup then the planning, coordination etc.. is ad free. I don't think Meta wants to live in that world.
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.
From the demo, it seems towards "buy buy buy", but I'm cheap, I always compare prices, even for repeat items (who knows, another seller might happen to be cheaper now?).
The best selling point is an end-to-end purchase flow that you don't have think about at all, it does the price comparisons for you. However, if you want to use it to just get the list of top candidates and compare and go make the final decision yourself I'm sure it can do that for you too. Either way I see a future where these claw-like agents can fit into everyday use cases.
Maybe... if run locally with full transparency into the prompts (including system etc) and independent benchmarks for the models (i.e. tests on how eager they are about selling me stuff)
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.
Every example from the tweet influencers I saw was about spending money. The exception I got excited about for a second was about saving money but alas it was just about spending less money
considering the current state of the internet and meta having no control over a solid marketplace (like amazon), it is very hard to see the shopping feature to take off. even if some legit business register/allow the bot to buy stuff, it will be ridiculously overwhelm by scam sites.
muse is probably an awesome technological innovation and will still completely flop bc it’s a consumer product outside of social from Meta. It’s a solution in search of a problem. I get why the company wants this. I don’t get why any consumer does.
Isn't the functionality just a super-set of what other popular chatbots like chatgpt or claude do? Ie chat interface for llm with various tools on top. It seems like those products have plenty of happy consumers using them, and muse just does that same thing, perhaps with different or more tools.
Exciting to finally see glimmers of Meta's vision for its massive LLM investment.
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.
lol no thanks. Even with a proven "superintelligence" A.I, I'm not giving Meta access to anything. And that says something coming from an ex-Meta engineer (Ig/whatsapp/fb).
"That's why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it."
And on top of that, we've all seen how confidently LLM's get things wrong. I've seen them get better, but even the current SOTA models fumble. Why would you want to send a bot a message "sure, reschedule my flight" and have a bot potentially fumble that in all sorts of ways? I really really do not see the appeal. My calendar and my emails and my things to do are all things I want to be on top of. Not have it half-assed or potentially messed up by a chatbot made to harvest all your data.
I’m sure general population won’t care but they’ve got me fucked up if they I’d ever use something like this. Glean my personal info and preferences the hard way! Through what insane videos I like on Instagram!
I have a hard time understanding, given the abundance of bad faith and predatory behavior Meta has displayed over entire span of its existence, why anyone would want to consult with its "personal AI" or grant it access to "all aspects of your life".
There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined, most people don't give a shit and are just trying to minimize cognitive effort. My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day because it would mean less planning.
> There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined
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.
There almost certainly is. I think on HN people aren’t really aware that they don’t represent the median internet user super well. I would wager if you were to tally every late millennial and zoomer across the west, Instagram usage would probably be near 90%. Facebook usage among older people is also still absolutely rampant, at least anecdotally. Not to mention WhatsApp usage which is huge everywhere but the US seemingly
Yes, of course. Wikipedia has a quick summary of the most popular networks ranked by monthly active users. Facebook is #1 and Meta owns three of the top five. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl...
Those are self-reported numbers from 2023. Besides most likely being highly inflated, I think Facebook is on the decline.
Yes
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, so I'm not trusting Meta with much, and it's the only way I can reach quite a lot of people. A lot of people I know trust them begrudgingly (primarily with Instagram, because all of their friends are on it as well).
People don't need to love a company to use its products. The perceived benefit merely needs to be bigger than the perceived cost.
This assumes completely techo-rational actors that continuously monitor cost-benefit analysis, other alternatives and switch products when one outweights the others.
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.
People have breakdowns because they are left without mobile reception for a few hours. Indeed this IS happening and I would expect people soon to have breakdowns, because they lack access to AI.
Slightly different lens, same outcome: It's there, it lets people do what they want to do with acceptable effort/other negative consequences, so they use it.
> WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted,
- 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
> - backups are not encrypted by default so plaintext of your private chats can be obtained
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.
someone's questioning that claim legally: https://www.pcmag.com/news/lawsuit-alleges-that-whatsapp-has...
And has a verdict been reached? Otherwise, people are pursuing all kinds of outlandish claims legally.
I work there. The claims made in this article are just blatantly false, and so obviously so to any employee I'm not sure how this hasn't been thrown out.
Honestly I am in that camp, but Facebook is kind of a special case for me. I don't really care about giving Google or Microsoft or OpenAI or Anthropic all of my personal data, but Facebook is a bridge slightly too far.
This comment is one of the most dystopian things I've read on this site.
>My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day
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 had that conversation several times with friends outside of tech. The universal reaction is just a shrug - "my life is boring, what do they care".
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.
> hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy.
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 get this, and I’ve said similar things about privacy and security in the past, but Meta in particular has a history of intentionally using customer data and behavior to the detriment of those customers. Creating experiences designed to ensnare, addict, and ultimately harm their users. This goes beyond paranoia about security or privacy. It’s handing your drug dealer the keys to your house.
Fact is most people don't really care. And they don't really know why they should care either. All the problems feels like something far away, while they are being exploited and sold without fully realising.
I dont think anyone knowing full and well would be comfortable with it. At least that would dumbfound me.
This is probably why they are launching now. There's no real other competitor right now in the nicely made managed openclaw space for personal use (or at least, very very early. Maybe Grokbot can be considered the lead competitor but afaik it did not gain mindshare). Instinct is supposed to come out soon and by not being associated with Meta it'd be really appealing just on that front vs this. But being first to market is a real reason to use it and chance to gain lasting market share.
For this reason alone it's DOA for me.
There's something like 177 million facebook users in the US. Most probably have Facebook/instagram/etc installed on their phones, streaming their location data/etc, without a worry in the world. Most would probably very much enjoy the utility of this agent.
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.
Ya, I'm not sure why anyone would choose to use this over any other option that doesn't sacrifice your privacy.
Well.. I think I can imagine why.. ;)
I might use it for helping manage Facebook marketplace listings as that is data that is already on meta.
Because people are apathetic by nature until things become a real problem.
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.
You are right, sometimes the simplest answer is the right now. Don't trust Meta. Life is going to be much simpler. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me continuously for 20 years, shame on me.
Every single HN post about anything Meta-adjacent starts with a comment like this. Guys, we get it, the hive mind of HN doesn't like Meta/Facebook/Zuck. Fine. But can we actually comment on the technology and tools rather than the company for once?
Posts about Meta must bring up general distrust of the company and its leadership. Posts about Google have to mention them sunsetting products often.
It's just tradition at this point.
Nice try Meta stock holder!
I love how the marketing departments of these things always imagine people are just constantly plagued by the hassle of organising their flights, restaurant bookings and movie tickets
I liked how in the example here it tells the user "Your flight is delayed 2hrs due to storms in Denver..."
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!
It's because people who create these use cases perceive this as a difficult and painful task - but how many people really think about their flights over the day? Pretty sure the majority of Meta users has not flight booked for the next 3 months. I can only assume that this is more seen as a showstopper. Look how difficult this is and how we solved it.
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.
And your emails! It can manage your email and schedule! Wow, so great, it can handle all the 10 DHL notifications and other spammy things I got over the past week. And my empty personal calendar
To be fair it is a pain in the ass… but i'm sure having an AI do it would make things worse :D
The average person is not using a calendar and is not getting more than 1 relevant personal email per week.
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
Ha, tell me you don't have children without...
lol no one is getting personal emails, maybe some people get one every few months, but most probably never (not taking into account other than order/shipping confirmations, login codes, etc)
i think product just uses these use cases as their example demos and then when they show it to marketing theyre like "OK I guess this is what it's for".
(at least, this is what ive seen)
these are all tarpit ideas
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
> A personal AI agent can help with everyday tasks like booking reservations, monitoring prices, managing reminders, creating documents, generating images, and researching topics.
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.
They tend to devolve to the lowest common denominator of what the decision-making chain can understand and resonate with on zero context.
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.
My AI agent decided with the Ticketmaster agent that since I couldn't get the tickets to the show I really wanted, I'd instead attend a show they haven't sold very many tickets for as it's a bit of a drive. I forgot to charge my AI agent's loyalty this week and it fell below the threshold of trustworthiness so it struck this awful deal. It's stipulated that I attend or I risk even further matrix degradation of my agent in the agentweb. I even spent all last week providing my AI agent with RealTestimonials about various consumer products for the streams but apparently they want you to manually charge it every week and you have to have a full package of tokens, you can't partially charge your agent even just to break a threshold on its behavior matrix.
Out of curiosity, do you have other ideas or things you want it to do? It just seems like they always converge on the same set of executive tasks because they’re a nail that is exceptionally well suited to this particular hammer.
Take a picture of my son's printed basketball calendar and add it to my shared iCloud family calendar. Apple/Siri couldn't do it, Claude couldn't do it. Things STILL can't talk to each other, seemingly intentionally. My wife and tried over the summer. I told her Claude+Siri could do this in 30s, and she would try by hand. 20 minutes later she was done adding each event manually, and I still couldn't get beyond trying to convince Calendar on my iPhone to open an ics or whatever file. I was supposed to open the file from Apple Mail, which I don't use, and email it from gmail or something.
This example should be "Super Friendly AI Assistant!!" and it fails on the absolute most basic thing I could throw at it.
How about build me a self hosted social network for keeping in touch with friends and family and make sure Meta can never get access.
It's private until all your connections start asking muse assistant to access it.
fwiw, it’s likely not product designers making these decisions. More likely, designers and researchers planned to explore use cases people would actually use and benefit from, but were told to focus on the ones leadership deemed important
I really don't want to share all my personal life information with meta like this.
In fact, I’d go as far as to say there’s few companies I’d entrust less the level of data required for a tool like a “personal AI agent”…
Only one i'd trust less is SpaceX, and they're other major player in this space...
OpenAI is next on my list
Agreed. Love the idea and the polish. Hate the owners
But they say "It comes with strong privacy and security built in" right on the page!
Only Meta and its 27,000 most trusted, carefully selected corporate friends can access your data.
You are not the target audience.
I don't think normies have a positive association with meta.
They have over 3 billion monthly active users... Almost half the earth.
I think you need to recalibrate what a "normie" is.
I think you need to recalibrate in your own mind what using a product means. It doesn't mean you like it, or the company behind it. It may also be due to monopoly status.
Do you like your utility company? Your phone company? Your ISP? Your insurance?
Huh? I would echo the sentiment of you recalibrating what a normie is. This is a crazy take. I would guess that fair amount of people have no idea that Facebook rebranded to Meta, let alone what goes on in and around the company.
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.
Here's what I found when I googled "polling on Mark Zuckerberg":
> 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 are so far out of touch to say normies don't hate the people behind Meta.
A great many use their products grudgingly in my experience - posting minimally, staying because network effects make it difficult to completely move, and not wanting to give FB and friends more than they already do.
Hahaha most Meta product users don't even know what Meta is
Yes, the fact that they renamed from Facebook helps them buy some time before people figure it out. But they don't feel good about the company.
Someone is using their products.
This is different from liking them.
Only because you've redefined dislike to encompass portions of what most people would call like.
But not different enough to prevent people from using them.
The target audience is influencers paid by Meta.. Brilliant!
I'd rather have Butterbean punch me in the balls than install a "personal assistant" app from Meta on my computer.
But people love to! Really sad
too late for that, based on all the tracking there is.
Does anyone else remember "Facebook M"?
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...
Yeah! I think that was a response to a similar human concierge service Magic
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
Facebook is the first to market with a polished openclaw? Good for them.
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
This is not even true. Gemini Spark has been there for a while.
I mean, Google and x.AI already have stuff like this. There's plenty of other options as well. And even outside of that, I've heard the promise of "let AI book your reservations!" since before LLMs became a thing.
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
Grokbot wa first and enterprise and consumer focused
Both enterprise AND consumer-focused? You've got to pick a lane.
I don't understand the meaning of the last sentence of this comment
They are saying OpenClaw/friends are hard to get setup and keep running without technical knowledge. Saying "Think of how hard it would be to setup OpenClaw without technical support"
Instinct exists with the same features. It is quite good. I was thinking they were gonna get acquired by meta 100%, but looks like meta has a competitor.
It will probably fail bc they can't compete with instant distribution to 3B people worldwide
xAI/cursor was first with grokbot
People didn't know because "grokbot" sounds like a bot that makes revenge porn of your enemies
"With its own browser"
I can't even begin to comprehend what kind of personal and PII data this thing will be scraping from its users. Caveat emptor!
"Your data is safe with us, trust me bro" /s
I can't say it doesn't make sense. Who still loves Facebook? Older people. Who loves chatbots? Old people too. Not _just_ old people of course, but this genuinely might be the first new tech I've seen which has been so easily and quickly welcomed by those a generation or two older than me.
Ironically, one of the things I most want from an agent like Muse is to read Facebook and Instagram for me and present posts in a user-friendly and ad-free format.
Lol right? And the REAL irony is that this will likely just be a way to show you even MORE ads while collecting MORE data for MORE targeted advertising.
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.
Interesting how the first beat of the curiously-low-bitrate, kinda-ugly video presentation was admitting that the agent's highest priority is to get me to buy more stuff through its store front.
It's certainly honest.
Is this marketing to end-users or to stakeholders?
It's marketing to investors.
Why would you share data with Meta like this?
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
I think they had this sitting idle for a while, waiting for their AI division to deliver a capable LLM to power it.
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.
The amount of usage you get is insane when you stack OpenCode GO subsidy on top of contributor.
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.
Poisoning LLM? I remember at least one study about it. Perhaps but it would have to be very subtle otherwise they might flag your content and shadowban it from future training.
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.
I wasn't talking about poisoning LLM for generally degrading performance/improvement. But for manipulating answers for propaganda/ideological reasons.
Judging from the website, Muse seems to be too keen on making me buy things - Book Tickets, Buy a Stroller. Would this personal AI spam me with ads randomly like this?
having used it for a bit, yes, one of the first things it asked me for, unprompted, were things to set it up to buy stuff. i declined but it still consistently wants to spend money; research a trip? as soon as it has any results it prompts to start booking stuff. etc.
Cool, I've been working on this exact thing for me and my family for a while now and Meta just ... went and did it.
I guess I'll focus mine more on the things Meta doesn't care about, like privacy and control.
..every tech company has bern doing this
I see a lot of these geared toward pro/tech users, but fewer aimed at ordinary people.
Probably useful for influencers, people managing social media, content marketing etc.
The schedule your tennis lessons and do your travel package list scenarios are of course rubbish.
> When shopping, a one-time card number is generated at checkout so your real card is never seen by the merchant or your agent.
That's sensible. Hopefully you can set a spending limit too? I'd be OK giving my agent a $100 limit.
The goal is always the same - be the one and only place where people go to buy things online. Especially their highest margin purchases.
"A n̈ew kind of AI"... yeah... join the pile :)
I guess now we know who bought the name from museapp
https://allume.com/memos/2026-07-allume-v4/
Seems like they changed names internally from "Hatch" (some UI still uses hatch instead of muse)
The features don't really matter here IMO; where does the PA function live? Whoever runs it sees intent streams. If that goes to a startup then the planning, coordination etc.. is ad free. I don't think Meta wants to live in that world.
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.
Hard to trust a guy with your life after he already came for your legs.
From the demo, it seems towards "buy buy buy", but I'm cheap, I always compare prices, even for repeat items (who knows, another seller might happen to be cheaper now?).
Maybe I'm in the minority?
The best selling point is an end-to-end purchase flow that you don't have think about at all, it does the price comparisons for you. However, if you want to use it to just get the list of top candidates and compare and go make the final decision yourself I'm sure it can do that for you too. Either way I see a future where these claw-like agents can fit into everyday use cases.
Maybe... if run locally with full transparency into the prompts (including system etc) and independent benchmarks for the models (i.e. tests on how eager they are about selling me stuff)
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.
Every example from the tweet influencers I saw was about spending money. The exception I got excited about for a second was about saving money but alas it was just about spending less money
Trust. That's critical. Has Meta earned that?
considering the current state of the internet and meta having no control over a solid marketplace (like amazon), it is very hard to see the shopping feature to take off. even if some legit business register/allow the bot to buy stuff, it will be ridiculously overwhelm by scam sites.
It's not "personal" if it runs on someone else's machine
muse is probably an awesome technological innovation and will still completely flop bc it’s a consumer product outside of social from Meta. It’s a solution in search of a problem. I get why the company wants this. I don’t get why any consumer does.
Isn't the functionality just a super-set of what other popular chatbots like chatgpt or claude do? Ie chat interface for llm with various tools on top. It seems like those products have plenty of happy consumers using them, and muse just does that same thing, perhaps with different or more tools.
Exciting to finally see glimmers of Meta's vision for its massive LLM investment.
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.
You personal AD data transfer system. We don't pretend to spy anymore, just give it to us.
I don’t understand why Apple can’t pull something off like this.
I think they will eventually and I will just simply keep doing things manually until then. I will not use any of Meta’s AI products for personal use.
lol no thanks. Even with a proven "superintelligence" A.I, I'm not giving Meta access to anything. And that says something coming from an ex-Meta engineer (Ig/whatsapp/fb).
Seems like a Openclaw or Hermes for the masses, but you really have to trust meta for that.
How does Muse stack up against Grok Bot capability/feature-wise?
"That's why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it."
BOZ. Meta's current CTO. Not too long ago.
Right now we have those OpenClaw commercial alternatives: Grok Bot, Muse, Viktor. Anything more?
Not available outside USA?
Knowing Facebook's behavior around user data why would anyone with memory of their behavior use this product?
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?
And on top of that, we've all seen how confidently LLM's get things wrong. I've seen them get better, but even the current SOTA models fumble. Why would you want to send a bot a message "sure, reschedule my flight" and have a bot potentially fumble that in all sorts of ways? I really really do not see the appeal. My calendar and my emails and my things to do are all things I want to be on top of. Not have it half-assed or potentially messed up by a chatbot made to harvest all your data.
I’m sure general population won’t care but they’ve got me fucked up if they I’d ever use something like this. Glean my personal info and preferences the hard way! Through what insane videos I like on Instagram!
Announcement post: https://about.fb.com/news/2026/09/introducing-muse-personal-...
I'd give a lot to see the WA group chat between the Instinct founder and their VCs.
"meta" and "personal". one of you is lying.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
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
Weirdly still so much more human (and somewhat relatable) than he ever was in an interview
"Your personal data is safe and secure"
ROFLMAO