I think you're right, but I'd add that... if this wasn't obvious to you without being told, you should really question your worldview a bit.

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.

It seems like on the “Chat” mode of ChatGPT it doesn’t allow switching the model. It’s just “5.6” with the effort level

I think we are lacking in the easy to use side of things. Once you go beyond browser based chatbots things become hard to set up.

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.

I think of my mom who doesn't care and doesn't understand the difference between google AI Overview vs actual google search results. "I looked it up" - she doesn't care what tool she is using she just wants answers to how long bake pork or the best throw pillows to buy or whatever else she is looking up.

She's mostly using google AI tools because it's easy and free and on her landing page.

> "just ChatGPT, what is Sol?."

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%

I'm a coder and a daily driver of ChatGPT and I don't really know what Sol is or how I can access it. I follow discussions here and know of its excistence, but I can't remember its relation to other models or tiers by heart. What ever the default thing the website is giving me has been good enough for my needs for years.

Yesterday I helped a maaaaybe 40 year old woman connect to the wifi at my local library so she could get on a zoom call. Made me realize most of the world is exactly like that.

Even with all of this nuance why would the regular joe go to muse when they have chatgpt and gemini? Most of their actual productive data is likely with Google anyway.

They are not 'normies' - we're just 'nerds'.

You're driving a home kit car, they're driving something out of the factory.

Eventually - we'll probably drive factory variations as well.

Literally what I was about to comment. This is meant to capture the normies, the busy parents managing school and work, the grandparents who want to make most of their retirement.

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.

It's not a bad market to aim for. No one else really is.

Yeah this to me is why Apple wins

To me it sounds like they are simply taking social moon shots. They tried to do a phone, tried to make a kitchen videophone, tried to make their own cryptocurrency, and tried to dominate open source AI, and now this is trying to make something like a digital robotic assistant. It might have reached a peak with the metaverse, when Zuck thought his corporation was destined to be the ruler of a Snow Crash style metaverse, to the point of renaming it. Maybe that's still the plan and they are looking for something that will lead to another metaverse play.

I like that we are talking about prompt injections from you to your personal assistant. Obviously I know what they are for, but still, it's so funny that we've just normalized building software adversarial to the consumers supposedly engaging with the product.

"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."

Safe and secure on our servers. We will use it to sell you stuff.

You should probably trust thieves more than Meta.

I'm not sure - it may as well be that regular consumers just don't realize they need this and will greatly benefit from it.

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.

No, after seeing how powerful AI is at my job, I definitely want AI to help plan dates, book flights, generate spreadsheets, do all the things.

The only problem is, like someone else pointed out, that I don't trust Meta.

> I think the product as shown in this marketing material with these examples falls squarely in the “nobody asked for this” territory of AI.

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.

> “nobody asked for this”

I absolutely want a general purpose assistant.

I absolutely don't trust Facebook with the necessary data.

I disagree. It matches exactly what I need.

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.

The first example I saw was making a shopping list for school for pick up.

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.

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

Openclaw creator Peter Steinberg was in talks with Zuck at the beginning of the year before choosing to work for Openai.

I think Meta limiting factor for this product was lack of agentic capable models which they fixed now with aggressive RLHF focused data gathering.

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

Meta isn't known for having great customer support

I don't understand the meaning of the last sentence of this comment

"This account needs permission to view this page

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

xAI/cursor was first with grokbot

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'll be interested to see what access it gives you to Meta products.

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.

I use gemini all the time to check transcripts of videos! Same idea

This is a great idea! Utilizing the world's most advanced software on piles of the most cutting edge hardware, you could do something amazing like give it "write a simple Web2.0 style page with a list of updates from my friends in chronological order"! Imagine how glorious such a simple fun social network could be!

Not in my country yet. Oh well.

enjoy that while it lasts :)

"Your data is safe with us, trust me bro" /s

It’s sad, but non-issue for super-majority of the population.

Same. Personal ORM essentially with a sqlite DB that sinks to a home server. Totally useful without an agent at all, but exposes basically all functionality via tools that have access limited for private information and the like.

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.

If you already trust them with all your Facebook posts and your Instagram and etc it's probably more tempting?

yeah, i could at least see telling this muse thing to post stuff to instagram for me.

Oh god, as if marketplace wasn't already enough of a toxic cesspool. I miss Craigslist more and more every year, unfortunately FB marketplace seems to be where everyone in my area has congregated.

It's marketing to investors.

it's supposed to work from whatsapp. It's US-only so I could not verify.

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

That was to be the voice control for the Portal smart speaker before we integrated Alexa.

That was the day of Facebook trying to copy WeChat "One chat to rule them all!" Sure!

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.

Your comment is slightly reminiscent of the response to dropbox when it was first announced on HN.

The Target marketing team famously could predict when a woman is pregnant but it was too creepy to, uh, Target them with only baby goods in dynamic marketing materials so they would mix in a few masculine things like lawn mowers into the catalog. No idea if that is what Meta is doing here but it's one explanation.

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 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.

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.

I've been testing it today. It's fine. It's like base-level GPT or Gemini. I actually kinda like the cute thing it does where it emoji reacts to your messages before it acts on them. Grok Bot needs to steal that.

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 original selling point of mobile web (tiny screen with text-only data, before real mobile web) on mobile phones or even watches was checking stock prices and weather. It was really weird that checking stock prices was something you need to do on the go, especially from the watch.

If you want to know why Silicon Valley Execs think these are such huge pain points, think about what Silicon Valley Execs farm out to their armies of personal assistants. Some Senior Vice President guy probably has a lot of restaurant bookings and would forget them if they didn't have a PA to help organize them.

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.

To be fair it is a pain in the ass… but i'm sure having an AI do it would make things worse :D

Or in Muse’s case, helping your child pick out school supplies for their third grade year.

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.

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

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)

It's good that you don't have to call it "Muse." That's kind of a weird name for a servant; how exactly is this email-parsing bot inspiring works of art? Perhaps it was re-used from another project.

I named mine Claude

..every tech company has bern doing 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”…

Agreed. Love the idea and the polish. Hate the owners

You are not the target audience.

But they say "It comes with strong privacy and security built in" right on the page!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s the life of a parasite. You don’t care if it takes just a bit from you. And it eventually protects you from worse parasites. (Like the us blocking china)

Ya, I'm not sure why anyone would choose to use this over any other option that doesn't sacrifice your privacy.

I might use it for helping manage Facebook marketplace listings as that is data that is already on meta.

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.

For this reason alone it's DOA for me.

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.

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?

Why are all the seemingly smart people on HN so narrow-minded to the point of speaking idiotic nonsense? What do you think their 3.6B MAU are, all bots?

Damn yeah why do people even use Facebook or WhatsApp or instagram? How does a company become a multi billion dollar company at all? Guess what.. it’s because people use it and don’t care.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'm sure there's a way to pay for Hermes Agent. https://portal.nousresearch.com/cloud

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.

Weirdly still so much more human (and somewhat relatable) than he ever was in an interview

Unless you are Peter Steinberger, this was not your idea.

Agreed. I'm not a fan of Meta in any way, but I've had fun messing with the app this afternoon - both on my phone and the web version at muse.ai - to see what it could do.

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.