Eli Tan Let META Muse "Take Over My Life:" Where AI Agent Outperformed & Failed

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Eli, thanks so much for joining us. It's really great to have you on. Your latest piece says, I gave my life over to Meta's AI agent and was blown away. Now, I'm blown away at the fact that you gave your life over to the agent, but that's just me. But I don't want to give too much away because obviously we want people to read your piece, but just explain to us what you did, what you learned, and some of your biggest takeaways.

Eli Tan (0:25)

Yeah, so I downloaded this agent for Meta, it's called Muse. It's in the App Store just like any other app. I connected, it's kind of like a chatbot that can do things for you and connect to the Internet. So I downloaded it, connected it to my bank accounts, my emails, my calendar, and basically had to take over my life for a couple of weeks. It ordered my groceries, scheduled meetings, even made a podcast for me with these two AI hosts.

By the end of it, I think there were a lot of features that worked really well. Some that didn't, some that I would never use, but in the end, I found it to be like I write in the piece, one of the most useful AI products I've ever personally experienced.

SPEAKER_3 (1:08)

So what made you reach that conclusion that it's one of the most useful AI products that you've ever used? What did it actually do for you versus what were your expectations of what it was going to do?

Eli Tan (1:21)

Well, with most chatbots you use, no matter how intelligent they are, they're basically like these tools you can converse with. But with Muse, I can give some examples. So it has a phone call feature where it can make calls for you using these two personalities, Haley and Brett, a male and female voice.

For instance, I had to call my dental insurance, and it told them who I was, gave them my member ID, passed the security question, and then waited on hold for 15 minutes, and then transferred me to the operator, saving me some time. I gave it all my bank statements and had it look through them all and put them in spreadsheets, and it found duplicate subscriptions or things I was paying for, that it could then cancel for me and save me $40 something a month. So those two things alone I found to be really useful and more useful than even like, I tried to do those type of things with something like Rocket Money or Claude, and I wasn't able to do them. So those simple things alone I found really helpful.

SPEAKER_1 (2:21)

Eli, you cover Meta and its apps for a living, like Instagram, like Threads, like WhatsApp.

I'm just wondering what is it about that Meta ecosystem and the user base that it has access to that makes this stuff so successful? And I draw comparisons to a company that I covered for many years, and that is Tencent. And I think I had WeChat before I had WhatsApp. And there has been some similarities drawn as to whether that Chinese company could actually leverage some of the capabilities that Meta is, to roll out something similar. When you think of the success of what we've seen in recent weeks when it comes to Meta, what is it about this company that maybe others would not be able to replicate?

Eli Tan (3:08)

Well, when it comes to Meta's ecosystem of, just look at Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, billions of people use those apps every single day. Something like over 3 billion people. All of the data that you have on Instagram and Facebook is connected to Muse. You can ask it, hey, can you go into my Instagram reels and look at a recipe I saved and then order the groceries to whatever grocery store?

The thing about these AI products is that the trade-off is that the more they know about you supposedly from the companies, the more helpful they can be. Meta as a company, as we've known for a long time, it knows a lot about you. Whether people find that intrusive with privacy and data concerns is a whole problem potentially, but I think for Meta, one of the upsides is that it's already connected to so many different parts of your life.

SPEAKER_3 (4:01)

You mentioned that some things that didn't do well. Eli, where did you find yourself having to step in? Where did Muse not perform up to your expectations?

Eli Tan (4:11)

Well, a lot of websites, they're just not yet made for agents to go on them and operate them. For instance, it was really helpful at booking me a restaurant reservation, or getting me a movie ticket to a local independent theater that you basically just fill out a form online and pay. But for something like getting a ticket to an AMC theater where I want to sign in to my rewards account, it had a tough time.