Meta Debuts New Agent ‘Muse,’ OpenAI’s Math Drama & White House AI Whitelist Confusion

Akash Pasricha (0:13)

Welcome, everyone, to The Information's TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Wednesday, September 9th. Today on the show, we are talking all about Meta's new muse agent. We'll get some early reactions to it. A lot of people are impressed. We'll then talk about the math breakthrough that OpenAI says one of its models has made and why that story has also been the center of some debate. We'll also discuss our latest reporting on the administration's AI regulation. There apparently is a whitelist with partners in the works. Problem is no one knows who is on it, including the partners themselves.

To close out the show, we are going to talk about Hugging Face's robotics play and what NVIDIA plans to do with that. It's going to be a great show, so let's get right on into it.

Meta launched its first consumer AI agent on Tuesday called Muse. The information has been reporting on the product internally named Hatch for quite some time now. Mark Zuckerberg said the agent will, understand your goals and work 24-7 to get things done for you. And they're both free and paid tiers. I want to bring us someone who has been playing with it. Jaya Gupta is a partner at Foundation Capital. Jaya, welcome to the show. It's great to have you back.

Jaya Gupta (1:32)

Thanks for having me.

Akash Pasricha (1:34)

So let's, I'm going to get to your reactions in a second. What is Meta advertising Muse is going to be able to do for you?

Jaya Gupta (1:43)

Good question.

I think Mark Zuckerberg and Alex Wang are coming out and saying, hey, this is going to be able to do and take over your tasks end to end and be your personal assistant that will be able to handle admin, that will be able to handle when you're taking your kid to soccer practice and you forget about trials. It's going to be able to handle all the things that people forget to think about, or it will be handling all the things in life that people are charging you for money for things like, how do I get you money back? How do I help you shop more?

Akash Pasricha (2:20)

It's the whole personal assistant main date, essentially, things that you didn't want to do in your life.

Jaya Gupta (2:27)

Exactly.

Akash Pasricha (2:28)

Okay. Now, you've been using it. Does it live up to that hype? It only came out yesterday.

We don't have a lot of data here, but what do you think?

Jaya Gupta (2:37)

Yeah. I mean, it's insane. I would say that I obviously had Instinct first, and so that got me thinking like, oh my gosh, this thing can, it found me an apartment. It was able to negotiate my apartment with me. It was able to, my building didn't have parking, we found out. So it was able to go run like an RFP or like a bake-off between all the buildings and SF for parking.

Akash Pasricha (3:03)

You're talking about Instinct right now or about Muse?

Jaya Gupta (3:07)

That was for Muse. Okay, that's for Muse. Wow.

That was for Muse, yeah. The amount of things it's been able to do has been pretty crazy and the way you can integrate all your other apps and your e-mails super quickly. Now, you have to figure out who you trust your data with. But I think that I also really like the fact how much they thought about security and privacy, all those things on the Muse side. So I'm super impressed already.

Akash Pasricha (3:33)

So can you just maybe walk us through what is the user experience?

You download this onto your laptop, onto your phone, you have to click through and say, hey, you have access to these files or these apps and not these? What is the whole walkthrough?

Jaya Gupta (3:52)

Yeah, good question. Oh my gosh, I wish I could give you a demo in real time. But basically, from Muse, you click sign up, you get to like an app interface, and there's a button where it's like you can connect things over time, and you can connect like, it's like a one-click connect, and you choose what to connect it to. I think for me, it was very, very fast of course to connect anything to like Instagram or like Facebook, anything that they already had.

Super simple, of course. Then you can connect things like your Gmail. Then it's like a chat interface like, hey, it says the same thing that Instinct said, hey, give me one thing to take off your task list. I'm like, hey, I need help with finding an apartment. It'll go and then it'll ping you every few hours like saying, hey, I found this, I found this, I found this, there's updated pricing here.