Interview. How Meta's Muse Changed the AI Debate with MBI.

Drew Cohen (0:06)

Hello, and welcome to The Synopsis, a podcast for professional investors. I am really excited about today's conversation with someone who goes by the name of Mostly Borrowed Ideas. Maybe you've seen him on Twitter or his newsletter. It's actually one of the very few newsletters I actually pay for, because I do consider his opinion to be that valuable. And I'm really excited about today's conversation because we're talking about all the topics everyone wants to know about. We're talking about Metamuse, how it can disrupt a lot of different businesses, Airbnb, booking. We're gonna maybe throw in a little bit of Uber, DoorDash, costarsapartments.com. A lot of ramifications here with this new AI-agentic world. And it's interesting because with Muse, people can now start to actually see how it could potentially help them in the real world life. And so this is no longer as theoretical of a conversation. And so welcome, MBI. Really excited to have this conversation with you.

Mostly Borrowed Ideas (1:11)

Thanks, Drew. Always a pleasure to come back.

I'm looking forward to these hotly debated topics.

Drew Cohen (1:18)

Yeah. And the nature of how this started actually was, I was tweeting some stuff about booking. A lot of it could read as a defense of why booking.com isn't imminently going to be disrupted by Muse, why it does more than just help people find hotels. It's not just a dumb aggregator taking an 18 percent commission with no other value add. And MBI hit me up. He's like, you sure about that? You sure you don't want to reconsider your position? And so we talked a little bit in the DMs. And then I was like, why don't you just come on air and we could take it from there? So before maybe we get into that part of the conversation, because you did have an investment in Airbnb and you still have an investment in booking. So why don't you just kind of level set for us? What changed where you all of a sudden decided I'm going to sell my Airbnb and actually just add even more to my already large Meta position?

Mostly Borrowed Ideas (2:16)

Yeah. I think it's probably useful to kind of explain that thought process. When Meta released to Muse like probably, I don't know, 10 days ago or something like that. So I installed the app and kind of went through the process.

I noticed that they have like 100 million, I think, free weekly tokens and I thought, okay, I definitely not going to need 100 million free weekly tokens. The next day, I woke up and I checked how many tokens I have left. It's like, I know, 20 million.

But to be fair, that's not a typical usage level for me. I think right now, I have settled around like, let's say, 25 to 30 million per day tokens.

But on the first day, I was actually just trying a lot of different things. I was very curious and interested to see what I can do with this app.

Obviously, like you said, I had a pretty large position on Airbnb and I was very curious to see. Obviously, every consumer AI or consumer agent applications that's out there, they all go with this booking your travel, booking accommodation. That's one of the major use cases that all these companies talk about. I also wanted to try it. I did try it before with the HR GPT. I never really was convinced that this is a real threat. I was trying that. I gave the typical kind of context, like, hey, I want to go to San Francisco and from this state to this, eight people, let's say, give me five recommendations from Airbnb. What I noticed was, it's kind of cute to see, the muse working with a laptop. It basically just started doing exactly what I would do, if I was trying to book a home on Airbnb. So, that's kind of cute to see. So, I could see, okay, it is going to the Airbnb website and basically typing it out, you know, the destination, the number of people, everything, right? And going through the search results. And after like, you know, maybe a couple of minutes, it gave me like five home recommendation. And I went through it and I thought, okay, yeah, it's interesting. It's better than what I expected and what I experienced on ChatGPT. But again, I just did not see myself booking through Muse instead of going directly to Airbnb, right? Because, you know, Brian Chesky kind of made this point home. And I definitely subscribe to this idea that people want to see more than text when it comes to booking an Airbnb, right? They want to see what exactly they would want to stay, you know, what it's like, what are the reviews. They want to probably chat with the host and maybe send a message to the host, all that stuff. To me, Muse didn't really disrupt those workflows, those kind of flows, right? Yeah.