Meta’s new Muse AI agent gives investors the warm-'n-fuzzies

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Megan McCarty-Corino (0:31)

Meta shows off its new, cute and cuddly side. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino.

Meta's new Muse AI Assistant is having a moment, and it's kind of adorable. We'll get into it on today's Marketplace Tech Fights Week in Review. Plus, Wall Street is betting billions on growing demand for cybersecurity in the age of AI, and the social media platform Discord enters its age-gating era.

But first, back to all the Muse news. Meta announced a slew of new integrations for its AI Assistant at a company event this week. They include a customizable furry little avatar and a Tamogatchi-like wearable device for interacting with it. Anita Ramaswamy at The Information is here to help us unpack the week in tech.

Anita Ramaswamy (1:33)

It's kind of funny to see how they've decided to put the avatars and how different AI companies have almost dehumanized their AI products. And I guess this one is making it a cute cartoon.

Megan McCarty-Corino (1:44)

Wall Street has been pretty happy with Meta's performance here.

The stock popped. What are investors thinking? What is Muse doing for Meta and in the narrative of how Meta has been doing?

Anita Ramaswamy (1:56)

So Meta has been seen as sort of behind in terms of rolling out AI products in the past. They've had a couple of different launches. They haven't exactly gone well, but this launch of Muse is huge for them. They're in the same ballpark in terms of downloads and popularity initially out the gate as ChatGPT even, and they have this massive distribution and a massive network of people. So they've tried to launch things like this AI-powered social media platform before that didn't quite take off. I think the key unlock and the key breakthrough here is that this agent can actually take actions on a user's behalf. And people are pretty excited by that. There have been some missteps, but also there's a lot that this agent actually can do for people.

Yeah.

Megan McCarty-Corino (2:37)

I mean, it seems really geared to wide adoption of an AI personal assistant. A lot of the stuff that we've seen before this, they really were geared toward, I think, a different, maybe more sophisticated, more sort of tech savvy kind of crowd. And this really seems like this is a consumer kind of product. I guess like the question is going to be like, how do they monetize this? What's the breakdown of consumer versus enterprise application for this kind of stuff? Because enterprise has really been dominating the business use.

Anita Ramaswamy (3:13)

Yeah. We haven't seen a big consumer AI product that people have gotten super excited about. Honestly, since ChatGPT and that chatbot interface, I think now Meta's Muse is not the only assistant or AI agent that people are getting excited about. In Silicon Valley, a lot of folks have been using Instinct, which is like a startup, their product, where you can text with it and it can take actions on your behalf as well. I think just the idea of AI being useful to people in their day-to-day lives with things like scheduling a doctor's appointment or being able to fill out some forms online, or I even saw somebody who was using Meta's Muse to set their fantasy football lineup, for example. I think those are the kinds of tasks that people want to be able to use Meta's astronomy on a day-to-day basis. But it's not quite so simple always.

Megan McCarty-Corino (3:54)

One of the big hurdles that it seems like Meta is going to have to overcome is a sort of trust deficit that I think that they have with the public. Last time we spoke, we were talking about this big settlement that Meta came to in this social media addiction case. There are a number of these cases. There's, I think, a lot of skepticism about Meta's handling of data, you know, how they sort of handle the user experience and, you know, what kind of privacy we're going to have with this stuff. And this is an application where it's really up in your business. Like, it needs all kinds of, you know, personal access to your bank account and all kinds of stuff. So that seems like a potential friction point for Meta.