Meta's new AI agent, Muse, took center stage at the company's annual Connect event, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it abundantly clear that Facebook's parent company intends to shove AI features into every conceivable crevice of your life. On the latest episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O'Kane, and Anthony Ha discussed how Meta's announcements managed to steal the spotlight during a week that also featured new model launches from OpenAI and Anthropic.
With other big AI companies laser-focused on coding and enterprise tools, Meta's pivot in the opposite direction - toward consumers, plus a cute, Tamagotchi-style AI device the company insists is for adults only - struck the panel as a little surprising. But as Kirsten noted, this could simply be Meta playing to its strengths.
Sean actually tried Muse for himself. While he was pleased that the agent found him some unclaimed money, he described the feature as more of "a party-trick type thing" than something that will drive ongoing usage. Then there's the small matter of whether users can trust Meta's AI with sensitive information. "Meta's business is to sell you ads," Sean said. "And yes, they'll make the argument that the more they know about you, the more accurate and interesting the ads will be - wake me up when we get to that fever dream."
Kirsten asked how Muse - this new personal AI agent that's clearly a bet on consumer - fits into the broader landscape where other frontier AI model companies see opportunity and business within enterprise. Because Meta Connect just happened, and they are all-in on Muse, that is very clear.
Anthony admitted the contrast was head-spinning, since the prevailing narrative has been a shift toward enterprise - not exclusively, but certainly that's where the money and attention are going. Part of that, he suggested, comes down to the relative position of these companies: OpenAI and Anthropic are in the lead in a lot of ways, but they're also planning to go public, either this year or next year in OpenAI's case. That creates a feeling of "we've got to actually make money now." Not that they aren't already making money, but because the costs are so high and the valuations are so high, they have to make money on an essentially unprecedented scale. Enterprise looks like the way to do that. And Anthony wondered if Meta, for a variety of reasons, sees a different opportunity. Part of him thought, "Wait, did they not get the memo?" But more charitably, if that's where OpenAI and Anthropic are going, maybe there's more of an opportunity for Meta to make the more consumer-friendly version and continue advancing AI on the consumer side.
Kirsten pointed out that while we can complain about, criticize, or critique Meta all day long, they're very good at - and have an established track record of - embedding themselves in everyday people's lives. There's a reason Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have so many users. And she never really thought of them as an enterprise product anyway. So pushing on the consumer piece seems smart.
Sean, who'd already tried Muse (it's been out for a couple weeks), was asked if he sees it becoming part of every part of your life. Not really, he said. He understands why some people think that will be the case: this is roughly Meta's ground-up version of an on-your-iPhone-or-Android app of OpenClaw, which they talked about a couple months ago, and which Meta basically bought and integrated. That was the first big explosion of "holy smokes, these agents can do all this stuff for me while I'm out and about, and I can just text with it and let it control my whole computer." A lot of the same elements are at play here. Having it in your hand, on an app that works like a relatively good chatbot as the interface, does seem pretty powerful.
One of the first things Sean did with it was try a suggestion Muse offered: "I'll scan to see if you have any unclaimed funds" - the kind of thing no one ever really thinks about and often completely misses, because there's just not a lot of unclaimed property funds out there in your name. Surprise, surprise, there were some for him. It helped him make some money on his first day, which was pretty cool. He wouldn't have done that without being prompted. And there's a check on its way to him in the mail. Fantastic. But that ends pretty quickly - it was a one-time shot, not repeatable. More like a party trick.
Kirsten joked that he'd just killed his own argument: she doesn't see how that wouldn't become wildly popular. Sean countered that the more sustainable version - and the thing Meta's talked up a lot over the last couple of days - is taking that idea and applying it to your real, true everyday financials: giving it your credit card information, your Gmail account, all this other stuff, and doing things other companies like Rocket Money already do, like canceling subscriptions you're not using or identifying double charges - things, frankly, the credit card company should be doing already.
And at that point you just run into that trust wall with Meta. Sean said one reason he was willing to explore Muse and curious to stick with it - even through to today - was that, somewhat shockingly, when he downloaded it, he assumed it would instantly prompt him and plug him right into Threads, Instagram, and Facebook (which he doesn't really use) and pull up that context immediately. But it didn't. It worked with him like he was a stranger at first, which made him more willing to use it, because he didn't feel like Meta already had everything on him. But you can see, as you start to use it, it really tries to grab you and pull those things into the system so it can learn all this stuff about you.
Sean doesn't know that he'll ever trust Meta the same way. The timing was interesting for him, having just upgraded his iPhone and gotten onto the new iOS with the new Siri that actually works and can do some controls on your phone in a way that is surprising and helpful - something it's never been able to do. He's been thinking about how much he's used that over the last week, and how much more willing he'd be to have the Siri version of Muse take that information, because he just trusts Apple more with really sensitive information - not only from a cybersecurity perspective, but because Apple's business is not to sell him a bunch of crappy ads. Meta's business is to sell you ads, and yes, they'll argue the more they know about you, the more accurate and interesting the ads will be - wake me up when we get to that fever dream.
And beyond the one-time money lever he got, which was great, Sean doesn't feel like he's found anything else really all that useful - other than the fact that, to Anthony's point, Muse is really tailored at keeping interactions consumer-y, which he does think helps it, and is why people are talking about it so much.