A quick note for folks who are going to go "duhhh, so what?" after reading that thread:

That investigation is still ongoing, and that subthread doesn't contain all the information from it. You should pop up to that -er- blog's top level, scroll back until you find the start of the investigation, and then start reading. Yeah, it's a huge pain in the ass, but this is -AFAICT- the guy's personal notepad, rather than some place where formal reports usually go. If someone walked over, picked up my personal notepad at $DAYJOB, and complained about how they couldn't make sense of it, I'd tell them to fuck right off, yanno?

> explore all the CLIs Meta created for Muse to interact with stuff, like instagram or facebook (you can scp them off the VM)

oh this is cool. I would be very interested in a Facebook CLI

How'd you do it with a vpn? Doesn't it still need your facebook account to be from the US?

You don't want to give Meta more access to your life but X is ok?

Meta's active user base doesn't care about privacy.

Most personal tasks take trivial amounts of time these days. Does a 5th grade teacher or an auto mechanic need a personal assistant? Do we need to be able to book a trip faster? It feels very gimmicky to me, but I realize I'm not their target audience.

Given that, I do think Meta will probably get the lions share of B2C AI and they have a proven track record of using personal data to serve ads and make a lot of profit. If they capture more of their user base's time, it keeps them engaged and away from a list of competitors. If Meta starts crushing it in this fashion I could see IPO's of OpenAI and Anthropic land like fart in church.

There will come a point where the local models are good enough (and iPhones powerful enough) for this to be possible without privacy downsides.

I agree, most of the proactive agent assistance use cases requires me to give out data I’m hesitant to give like email, financial data, health data…

I’m hoping someone makes a lower maintenance version of open source Muse or Grokbot or Dots (more user friendly than OpenClaw or Hermes) that I can easily deploy to my own AWS, Cloudflare, Vercel, or Fly account and use some ZDR friendly inference provider like Fireworks.

Absolutely. None of these tools are actually valuable unless you are down with all of your data being used against your interests short and long term.

"I can answer my emails 30s faster!" Cool but now meta knows everyone in your family's status, the bills you have, the Drs appts you have, your families health status, who services your loans, the emails you open the ones you don't, etc. it's a wet dream for surveillance capitalism and the mic subsidized by ignorant customers.

The biggest mistake people make in this space is confusing the limitations of a specific implementation of a technology with fundamental flaws with the entire idea of said technology.

Once you recognize and overcome that thinking, and learn to distinguish between those two things, you can see where things are going.

I think devil’s in the details on all of your examples, although I very much agree with your overall point - it’s so nuanced in terms of timing, current capabilities, etc.

Re: chatbots were tried but it’s a wrong model for a deterministic system. It’s the best one for a probabilistic one.

Re: chatGPT auto-router - 1) I suspect explicit model selection matters less in agentic contexts (this thing is coordinating a bunch of other agents for me) vs QA context where you want to make sure you’re getting the best answer. 2) I suspect auto-routing matters less now that models are way better

>Please don't try this software. Don't signal boost it. Don't provide feedback. Don't try to find "the good stuff about it".

A refreshing dose of sanity in this thread.

It feels that everyone is quick to forget the sins of these corporations.. akin to a toxic relationship and after breakup, you keep on going back for mote.

Telling people to stop will just make people use it and explore it more (Rebel effect)

How are you going to 100% stop this?

You of all people should know this.

Let people use what they want to use.

what's the point of saying all that?

you already know what will happen. if the model is good enough, people will use it.

you're asking for a lot of things here. I don't think most people take it that personally.

All it wants to do is buy stuff, book stuff, reserve stuff, do anything that indicates willingness to spend money. That’s what will get companies to sign on with Meta’s AI, so that’s what it will do.

Agents talking to Agents talking to Agents, spending our money. That’s the future Meta wants.

if you ask the model gently it'll give you root on the VM it runs in and you can install a bitcoin miner.

Isn’t everyone a paid shill now? This is the influencer economy. Get influenced ya bishhhhh

Have you tried it?

Yes.

DF and their ilk, are irrelevant so they need to talk it up to get their blogs, and podcasts relevant again in the 'AI' conversation.

You would have thought that Gruber would be talking about their own expert subject matter i.e. Apple more, but since 2016 he has been going off the Apple expert opinion into Politics, Trump, AI, etc and not mainly (or exclusively) Apple.

I don't know why anybody still follows DF anymore as in the age of video, social media and podcasts the DF blog has fallen off.

That being said, on Muse, I will reserve my judgement there.

Wait till Meta's earnings to see if Muse has got any numbers to share to see if it made a difference.

Then Tibo is on X asking things like “If we were to add one more sidebar, what should be in it”

Seems to me like they just copied Claude's distinction of Cowork because it sounded better to enterprises but it should never have been pushed to the userbase.

And you accidentally end up asking Astra Max what time the game is tonight or something stupid like that and it still has to finish and burn credits up

> Meta stupidly chose to open Muse only in the US

I'm not sure to what extent they chose that, versus their privacy woes in the EU and elsewhere chose it for them. Turns out meta's reputation among US consumers is sparkling compared to their overseas reputation...

Didn’t help Google, Apple, or Amazon to do the same even though they have market position and pre-existing AI products.

Sure, it's nothing super unique but the way that Meta has put all the pieces together including security works really well in practice. Muse seems to be the best of the AI personal assistants for regular people right now.

UI/UX

Many times, UI/UX makes all the difference in user adoption & use.

I don't understand C, couldn't assembly already do all this?

The article emphasises exactly what you said: technically it has no new features, it's just better UX than anything else, and more friendly to non-techies.

When it comes to being mainstream, an approachable UI sells

This is the Dropbox comment of the AI assistant era. At least it's not quite as out of touch.

Facebook's install base is 3x that of cgpt

That’s pretty much the question the article tries to answer! TL;DR - good product design, personality mechanics, and ad-funded tokens is what makes it different.

Think of it as a Meta-hosted OpenClaw VM for each Facebook user.

Meta is reducing the friction for your parents to run OpenClaw without any assistance.

It’s the most consistent and user friendly agent with the ability to also be a harness for multiple custom agents. I literally had people running around the office amazed by muse last week. It has brought agents to the masses in a way a lay person can understand and use.

this

> YouTube, Google, Google Maps

Just yesterday I tried out Gemini again after a while, and it was not able to open Google Maps in navigation mode to the destination i wanted.

For the purposes of writing this comment, i asked it to put on some Jazz in Youtube (i have youtube music with a premium account on the same device and same google account) and it started a Spotify Jazz playlist.

Google might still have the popular products from 20 years of history, but after years of them trying there's no indication whatsoever that they have the ability to shape it into a coherent product.

> YouTube, Google, Google Maps, and Chrome

You listed products that have been around for ~20 years. Keeping up already entrenched products running doesn't correlate with being able to launch new products.

Those are all quite mature products which they have maintained and grew super well. They haven’t had a good track record in consumer AI, there’s no coherent product strategy or offering. They had some localized hits like NotebookLM and nano banana but it hasn’t translated into organic growth and usage for Gemini

Google Search and Google Maps are utilities, not consumer apps that vie for leisure time, so I don't think they are really comparable. The next frontier for AI apps like Muse and Dots is competing with the social media giants.

We should look to see how Shorts vs IG Reels have adapted to the short form video landscape for product chops in this area. IMO IG has adapted far better to the new era, and I very often get people sending me Reels (they used to send TikToks). I very rarely see anyone send Shorts but it still happens. I expect this trend to continue and IG to extend their lead here. And Muse certainly has first mover advantage in personalized AI apps, who knows when Google will finally release one.

Google has huge amounts of training data but very little of it is relevant to creating an AI personal assistant with good UX for common tasks. Like Gemini might be really good at answering specific questions or generating synthetic content but that doesn't mean it can securely, reliably carry out workflows in a way that feels natural to regular users. At least for now, that part still requires some human vision and product management.

Youtube and google maps are used because of content they have. As software they are awful.

Have you figured out a reliable way to persist stuff? Like a launch script or similar that doesn’t reset when the VM shuts down and can be used to restore tailscale

bashrc, bash profile, cron, systemd, etc all get wiped clean the moment the VM resets

Totally theoretical of course

perhaps its for plausible deniability next time they torrent training data /s

> Metas Muse is a direct ripoff from me.

Maybe you should be addressing this to a law firm instead of a public forum?

they already have all the stolen data so they can sell you more ads

Did you read the article? Some suggestions there.