He looks like a CoComelon character who grew up and mated with an E. coli microbe.
But don’t let looks fool you. Under the hood, Meta’s new Muse agentic AI platform is incredibly powerful—and potentially incredibly risky.
I’ve been testing Muse since Meta launched him on September 8. He’s a clever little bastard, provided you’re willing to tell him basically everything about your life.
Late to the party
For years, Meta has seemed inexcusably late to the AI party. While flashy startups like OpenAI and Anthropic were winning trillion-dollar valuations, Nvidia was getting fat on its success as a shovel-seller, and Google was slowly replacing its core product with AI, Meta seemed stuck in the past.
The company encouraged AI slop on its platforms, only to change its tune. It did legitimate research in open-weight models, but also took some hilariously wrong-headed steps, like releasing AI chatbots that mimic celebrities without their permission.
It was tempting to write Meta off as an also-ran. Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg was still gun-shy from the abject failure of the Metaverse, and was going to sit this particular revolution out.
Then, Muse landed.
Almost overnight, the platform was stealing market share from Meta’s competitors, and growing shockingly fast. Less than a month post-launch, Muse had wracked up 6.6 million downloads, and an even-more-impressive 1.8 million daily active users. Citi thinks it could generate $27 billion in revenue in fairly short order.
Meta, in other words, was late to the party—but now that it’s arrived, the company’s tech is all anyone can talk about.
Distressingly fluffy
As with many things Mark Zuckerberg creates, Muse is weird.
The agentic AI platform is personified by a distressingly fluffy and cute little smiling mascot, who adorns every Muse billboard and types away cheerfully at the top of the Muse app when you chat with it.
Experts have long warned against personifying AI. “Phooey!” said Zuckerberg.
Muse is as anthropomorphized as platforms come. Users can customize their Muse avatar to their own preferences and give their specific Muse a name. (“Mark Zuckerberg” is apparently not allowed.)
When the bot chats with users, it does so in a friendly, personal manner. There are lots of first-person pronouns and text-message conventions. Ask Muse a question, and it will “thumbs-up” your chat while it slowly types out a response, just like your boomer uncle.
Chatting with ChatGPT feels a bit like schmoozing with your accountant, or perhaps your proctologist. Where ChatGPT is overly formal and stodgy, Muse’s language is zippy, confident, and a little cheeky. Behind that fluffy, personable facade, though, is a wholly different kind of AI.
Most chatbots today act essentially like glorified search engines. You type in a query, the bot does some research, and you get a response back that’s mainly informational.
Muse, in contrast, is an agentic AI platform. Rather than just providing information, it’s designed to take specific actions on behalf of its users—writing emails, booking travel, filling out forms, and signing into websites.
Meta pitches Muse as “AI that gets it done” and suggests handing it tasks like booking a flight or registering for a 10K race.
To work this specific kind of magic, Muse makes use of virtual machines. Every user essentially gets a virtual computer in the cloud, which their Muse can use to carry out its duties. This lets the bot do things that others struggle with, like browsing complex websites on your behalf, signing into your accounts, drafting and sending emails via your internet service provider of choice, and more.
It’s an approach pioneered by OpenClaw, a techie-friendly agentic AI platform. Using a virtual machine lets Muse do anything a human might do on a computer, without the risk of wrecking your actual computer when things inevitably go wrong.
Tell me everything!
That combination—a friendly and conversational demeanor, an agentic AI empowered to take specific actions, and a virtual computer that lets Muse actually act on its ideas—is a compelling one.
If you’ve ever shouted at ChatGPT, “Just do it for me!,” when it gives you complex instructions for disputing a parking ticket or making a doctor’s appointment and then bows out, you’ll love Muse’s can-do attitude.
I asked what car I should lease, and Muse got me quotes for a Kia. When I asked how I could save money, it scanned through my financial data, determined Hulu was ripping me off, found better plans tailored to my family’s actual usage, and offered to switch me to one. Its advice saved me $80 per month.
Muse’s virtual computer also allows it to work when you’re not actively chatting with it. Periodically, I’ll get a notification from Muse, telling me it’s prepared a report on how I can decrease my electric bill, or sell my old Tesla for top dollar.
All this power, though, comes with a price.
Most chatbots are squeamish about asking users for personal data, or access to their most intimate, sensitive accounts.
Not Muse.
The second you open the app, Muse asks for full access to your Gmail, as well as permission to read your text messages and browse the photos on your phone.
The app also wants to know your location at all times (via your phone’s GPS), and encourages you to share conversations you’ve had with other competing chatbots so it can “get to know you” better.
Muse also presumably has access to the copious amounts of data Meta has gathered about you through decades of low-key surveillance.
I once ran an experiment to see what data Meta was capturing about me. I found that the company was spying on nearly every website I visited, and was even tracking things like when I put a specific smoothie into my Doordash cart, even if I didn’t buy it.
Now, Muse likely has access to all that data, as well as any live accounts and data I might choose to voluntarily hand it.
Again, all that information makes it uniquely clever. But using Muse also means handing complete control of your data to a friendly little dude who happens to be owned by a demonstrably less friendly one.
Tread Carefully
Is Meta’s voracious appetite for personal data a reason to avoid Muse? Does the app’s friendly little face conceal a monster lurking below? Not necessarily.
Agentic AI is powerful, and it’s here to stay.
Muse is the first real attempt to put the technology in the hands of everyday people. But AI agents are already making huge impacts in the business world.
And now that Muse has proved the concept, Meta’s competitors are tripping over themselves to release personal agentic AI platforms of their own. OpenAI’s version features a mascot that looks like a mash-up of Clippy and the poop emoji.
Eschewing agentic bots like Muse, then, would ultimately be about as effective as ignoring ChatGPT in 2023. The tech is here. And besides, even if you avoid apps like Muse, they’ll likely slurp up your personal data via your friends and family members.
Still, personal agentic AI is a brand-new, largely untested technology. There are already reports of strangers appearing on users’ doorsteps, summoned by Muse for Facebook Marketplace transactions that no one authorized.
So it’s reasonable to proceed carefully. Personally, I’ve handed Muse select bits of data directly, but I haven’t allowed it to access my calendar or Gmail.
Amid all the furor over agentic AI, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to turn your entire life over to a gigantic tech company, even if a fluffy little bot asks you very nicely.
