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Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

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Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it bother you so much to see people out there who can go on without their lives being shaped by the Corporations?

It bothers me when people have terrible inefficient workflows for no good reason

“Terrible inefficient workflows”, like having to prompt Claude to change one or two words in a file rather than just manually editing it, because it gets confused when the file changes out from under it and will later overwrite the changes?

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#692
post #234

I think Meta's strategy is to capture the 'normie-tier' of AI users. I know most of us here on HN track model releases quite frequently and discuss every parameter weight out of them, but most of the world is just... oblivious? 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'…

Former meta prick, sorry employee: > Meta's strategy Meta has no strategy. The people that made llama work left two years ago. MSI are a bunch of charlatans who are trying to change the culutre and tooling of meta from the outside (I can see their point, trying to work outside of the defaults is incredibly hard.) its basically a bun fight, with all of your productive workers being poached by frontier labs, and everyo…

I genuinely think big tech co's top leadership have very sophisticated strategies/positioning that they simply cannot communicate or explicitly canonize due to their position as spokespeople for the company (and society writ large, news media, investors, customers, employees, vendors). Of course there are a lot of bozos and incompetent people flailing around and a lot of work ultimately gets wasted (which understandably bothers line employees a lot), but is inevitable and even necessary to eg hedge product strategy/comp and take risks on ideas and people.

It would not really be useful to have that conversation with employees because it's incredibly distracting (now product strategy is up for debate with way too many cooks in the kitchen), and very few employees have the exposure or skills to meaningfully contribute even if they think they do. I saw it firsthand at Google TGIFs.

Meta's strategy seems to be "personal agents" quite consistently. Remember they tried to buy Manus? And note that Muse Spark and the meta AI platform products clearly seem to prioritize web search, computer/browser use, and vision/language tasks over coding, which is something that had to bake for a long time. Also, this product launch itself is pretty interesting:

1. It's clearly a fast follow to the current FOTM hype startup Instinct with a much more comprehensive implementation and integration with their other agent products.

2. It's kind of like openclaw, which got a lot of non-developers very excited but was basically consistently unusable. Except this agent's compute runs remotely and presumably has slightly more sane development practices. IMO it's the first main openclaw-like product that has made it to the "just works" level of usability.

3. The focus on ecommerce is actually really really important, because Meta is trying to capture the intent/demand-driven purchasing flow that Google currently owns through search. Controlling the top of funnel is what enables google to make hundreds of billions of dollars per year on search ads. Meta is an advertising company and Google's search ads business is the most lucrative and centralized/well-defended advertising market in human history.

So it is actually a really big deal that Meta is trying to go after it (at least, the CUJ, it's possible that they'd monetize the agent-driven UX differently than search ads) because it's probably their best shot at disrupting that market and one of the few growth opportunities that would actually make a dent on their balance sheet. Obviously Meta is not going to lay out all that strategy stuff explicitly because for all intents and purposes it's a distraction and shifts the conversation in an unproductive direction (the strat behind the product, rather than the product itself). But it's pretty clear if you look for it.

Edit: Actually I thought about the advertising business more and I think in the short term this is partially about attribution/conversion. In 2022 the Apple tracking changes cost Meta $10B in lost conversion metrics; an agent-driven and proxied purchasing flow has built-in attribution and funnel measurement which is very valuable in its own right!

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grokbot wa first and enterprise and consumer focused

Grok is made by Elon Musk and hence fit for neither

Grok is my go-to LLM for research not because I care for Elon Musk but because it's really good. I'm not even sure if I'm paying for it? I have an X Premium account but I don't know if that's giving me more Grok usage or what. Either way, its research mode is very good and frequently pulls off tasks the competitors struggle with in my experience.

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#695

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

They're not the first. Each lab has its own: grok bot, codex desktop, perplexity computer, Claude whatever

Claude Whatever would actually be a pretty good product name

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#696
post #234

I think Meta's strategy is to capture the 'normie-tier' of AI users. I know most of us here on HN track model releases quite frequently and discuss every parameter weight out of them, but most of the world is just... oblivious? 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'…

Yup. ChatGPT is going to be the new "Microsoft Word" of the corporate AI world

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#697
post #557

I cant help feeling you'd have to be a special kind of stupid at this point to start feeding even more of your life into Meta. This is clearly aimed at the over 50's - their primary market on facebook.

Not many people in their 50s are trying new technology. No, what usually happens is a distrusted corporation just keeps sweetening the pot until the users come crawling back.

I distrust Meta but if I'm being honest, if their tools were awesome and cheap enough I might start using Muse. A lot of people are in my camp: aware of privacy issues, too lazy to be strict about it.

Then again, maybe I won't come crawling back. Privacy issues barely affected most people in democratic America. If it ever goes full authoritarian (and we're heading in the wrong direction), then they'll matter a lot.

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#698
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is one of the most dystopian things I've read on this site.

I think the phrasing is a little extreme. Rather than “tell them what to eat” I’d say something like “everyone wishes they had a personal assistant”. 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…

No, it's more like society would have failed in raising me as a human being if I'm okay with completely ignoring the people that raised + provided for me where I purposely replace human connection with a chatbot.

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#699
Always remember, Meta is a surveillance company, with no moral compunctions about being so. It's not about selling advertising, though it's also that.

That's also a useful smoke screen for the accumulation of dossiers on every user's every behavior, for consumption by those who sell not products but influence and push political behavior.

Get off every one of their products and delete them.

Re: Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

#700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billions of people use Facebook regularly. It's a tiny minority of us who would not use a useful product because of privacy concerns. I think you are wrong. It's not they who are a "special kind of stupid." It is us who are a "special kind of paranoid." Justifiably so, I would contend.

No, they're not wrong. There are just a very large number of people who are a special kind of stupid.

Not you though. You're the only smart one, huh?
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