That's entirely why Zuck's been pushing VR and the metaverse for so long. they have no OS to control - Microsoft has desktop, Apple has their vertically integrated devices, Google has both Android and also Chrome.

Meta is at the whims of these other companies to play nice - and they already got hit hard once by apple when they decided to anonimize add profiles on the iphone and go privacy first.

Until Opus 5.5 I agreed with this. But since then... I'm now able to build just about anything I want, quickly. Including... all the reasons I'm on a mac (or presumably, one on windows) in the first place. IDK if I believe in my heart just yet, but as a long time mac user, if you gave me the choice between mac + commodity model or a near naked Linux laptop + Opus 5.5, I would easily choose Opus 5.5 and build what I want. If this is real, I think Google is still in a good spot, but are Apple and Microsoft? They have no models themselves. They do have hardware but the value of their OS (in Apples case) and software (in MS case) becomes extremely devalued, relatively speaking.

> How has Meta responded? With a failed phone and speculative headset.

I guess their spin on Muse would be, by building the AI agent that Apple has shown it's nowhere near being able to build

Being one of if not the top advertisers in the world? I think Meta is doing just fine.

Muse, the pi/openclaw/AI assistant app is maybe not impressive to HN, because you can always just "get an FTP account", as it were, but if you're outside of the HN bubble and don't hate Facebook, Muse is an absolute winner. It's currently the top downloaded app on iOS, above ChatGPT, TikTok, and Claude. I think they've currently got the strongest consumer AI play but we'll have to wait and see how the situation evolves.

>Google, Apple, and Microsoft are each in a stronger position to win consumer AI

Microsoft has completely lost the ability to make good software; see Microsoft Teams and what they've done to Windows 11. Apple don't have a foundation models team so they're limited to using other people's models, which handicaps them as they can't do vertical integration like with their other products. Google hasn't made a single competitive consumer product in the past decade, but has certainly killed a few.

Apple should have morphed Siri into a Muse-like experience a year ago. But they didn't. Muse is great and millions of people are already getting used to having it be a part of their daily lives.

>Google, Apple, and Microsoft are each in a stronger position to win consumer AI because they're guardians over the foundations of the user's experience.

From everything I've seen, they're all too large and dysfunctional to make a competent play in consumer AI. Anyone in there trying to work on it is too far removed from end product and is answering to too many masters.

Seriously. Muse hasn't even been around long enough to determine if it is "sticky" in any meaningful way, let alone in the context of competing against frontier models from competitors.

And based on what I'm seeing, it's far from even being in that category as a service yet. Seems like the OP is conflating seeing a bunch of Muse ads on Facebook with its presence as a competing frontier model.

Unfounded assertions by marketing accounts, obviously.

Muse is not sticky at all, it's just OpenClaw wrapped in meta branding. Any company can roll one out

Impossible to even know if he was talking about the harness, the model, the assistant... But yeah, sticky... Ok.

Basically once it has sucked all of your data dry you no longer have the ability to leave the Meta Network.

The ecosystem of meta products like Instagram

Velcro

Good anthropomorphism.

the bear is sticky with honey

definitely not me; I wouldn't doubt if Zster is working on turning muse into sleeper agents, _assuming_ chinese models will do the same, so they crib data and send it home like a good little maleware model.

In fact, we're going to see an explosion of the worst kind of AI model thanks to thinks mr Z thinks is in his best interest.

Remember, they had reports going back more than a decade about how they're harming children and destabilizing entire countries and as soon as Trumps in the whitehouse, they're licking boot.

> Google, and now they’re irrelevant.

Argon is tied for first at worst.

> Google is one of many funded models that were close to SOTA, but we realized it’s benchmaxxed.

Who is "we"? Google is the least benchmaxxed.

These are good points, though OP did specifically say that Meta is going to win "consumer" AI. I don't think the average consumer of AI is going to ever have to think about harnesses or worry about SOTA, they really will continue to interact with whatever is stickiest.

> And if you’re for using this to run your business, think for yourself who’s going to win...

That's not consumer AI though. The whole "vs out of the box" is pretty much the definition of consumer AI. People don't want to fiddle with things. That's why UX matters. SOTA only matters in consumer if it translates to the UX. And no one has landed that yet. Many are working on it.

When I worked at Microsoft, I learned that the average user will fail to do ANY process that is longer than 2 steps. Let that sink in and then reread your comment. Nobody cares about SOTA outside of tech. They want the basic floor of “it does what I need at a reasonable price” that’s it.

I think any personal AI agent at this point is "very sticky", not just Muse. You really aren't going to switch when a lot of the value is in the agent memory and there's no easy way to export that, similarly to how you aren't going to switch away from Spotify when it's learned all your song preferences which you can't export. Right now, maybe the agent memory is small enough that if you ask the agent to export you'll get most of it out (Claude has notably made official export instructions to encourage switching from ChatGPT in the past), but in the future the memory will be too large and complex to do that effectively, and platforms could also block the memory export or degrade it deliberately.

So, in the long run you pretty much have to pick one personal agent and stick with it, and switching is costly (unless you are using an open agent that lets you just download the memory, in which case it actually becomes cheap, because AI agents make other parts of switching way easier in general). For the purposes of Meta this means whatever user they get they'll probably keep.

HOWEVER, the thing that Muse doesn't have is network effects. They're running into the exact same problem as ChatGPT in this area, IMO. There's no reason for you to be running specifically Muse even if all of your friends are running it. So that gives other vendors a chance to catch up.

> devices but with superintelligence

Donald, is that you?

Sure, just not nearly enough for sustainability I think. I'd reserve that call for the moment we can stop bathing in free VC money by using subscriptions.

Also, as far as my own use goes, I found that the capabilities/price ratio of DeepSeek's offering is very hard to beat. It's really good enough so the thing that matters to me (besides table stakes like uptime, latency, etc.) is price at this point.

They are just repeating old tropes about unprofitability without reassessing

OpenaAI and Anthropic models are priced quite competitively with open ones, they even cut prices by quite a bit since spring. So it's not too surprising that their revenue is pretty high, the question is whether the competition and downward price pressure from open model providers combined with their extremely high R&D spending is sustainable.