Can Muse make us forget the metaverse?
Platformer Casey Newton ● Covered by 11 sources
Meta wants Muse to be its next big thing, a personal AI agent after years of metaverse hype. That pivot is a bet on a product that’s still tiny — and on people trusting it with their accounts.
Based on reporting by Platformer, Casey Newton — read the original for the full story.
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Meta is trying to sell a new future again, and this time the star is Muse, a personal AI agent that is barely out of the gate. At Wednesday’s developer event in Menlo Park, Mark Zuckerberg put it at the center of the company’s pitch and said he expects it to become a “personal superintelligence” used by billions. That is a large claim for an app most people had only just heard about days earlier.
Muse is meant to do practical chores. Connect it to Google Workspace, bank accounts, and other services, and it can fill out forms, book reservations, pay bills, and handle other tasks for free. Meta says voice chat is coming, too, along with integration into its virtual reality operating system. There is also new hardware coming: the Muse Charm, a strapless smartwatch-like device with a screen, scheduled for later this year. Meta has not disclosed the price, though Bloomberg reported it would be priced like a smartwatch.
The company is leaning hard into the launch. Zuckerberg said “millions” have tried Muse, while The Information reported more than 500,000 users in the first week. That is not bad for a brand-new product. It is also nowhere near the kind of breakout Meta has pulled off before. Threads reached 100 million users in five days, and Meta still does not have a hardware plan for that app.
That gap matters because Meta needs a story right now. The company plans to spend up to $145 billion this year on infrastructure and other capital expenses, and it has already lost more than $85 billion on Reality Labs since 2021. Investors have been unusually tolerant because the advertising business is so strong, but tolerance is not the same thing as enthusiasm. Muse feels like an attempt to create the feeling of momentum while the bills get larger.
There is a reason for skepticism beyond the numbers. Personal agents can be useful, but they also feel needy in a very specific way: constant approvals, constant review, constant nudging. They behave less like coworkers than interns who keep asking where the stapler is. That may make them useful enterprise tools. It is harder to see the magic consumer wave.
And then there is the memory problem. Zuckerberg admitted he once thought virtual reality and the metaverse would be the mass-market future, and only later shifted the company’s emphasis to AI. That is probably the right pivot. It is also a reminder that Meta has already tried once to declare the next era of computing, and the world did not politely agree.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Meta is doing what Meta always does: taking one shiny thing, inflating it into a destiny, and hoping nobody remembers the last destiny. That worked better when the core ad machine was hiding the cost. With $145 billion in planned spending, the company needs more than another keynote and a new strapless watch to make the bill look wise.
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