Musings About the Agentic Future

Travis Hoium (0:02)

Is Muse gonna break big tech? Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now.

Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Travis Hoium, joined today by Lou Whiteman and Tyler Crowe. And guys, we've got to talk about Muse, the biggest, probably the biggest new app introduction since ChatGPT. I don't think that's too overstating how impactful this has been. Number one in all the app stores over the past. Merely weak. And Meta stock has exploded this week as a result, adding hundreds of billions of dollars in value. So...

But this is not... Not disruptive to some companies. Not everybody loves the fact that everybody's downloading Muse and giving it a try. Amazon has blocked Muse from crawling its website, so it doesn't seem like all these big tech companies are playing all that nicely.

What I wanted to start with is... How is Muse changing the way that we're potentially I think it's. going to be interacting with some of these companies because we've been talking about aggregators and the apps that we use all the time. All these big tech companies have been playing nice for a really long time. Muse comes in, gains some popularity, and suddenly everybody goes, Whoa, do we really want to change the status quo?

Lou Whiteman (1:13)

The question of how things have changed, we will see, I think. I mean, I think it's way too early to say, but look, everybody played nice before because they were all chasing different things. Now they're beginning to chase the same thing. So yeah, they're playing less nice.

I mean, we are so early stages here, though. I don't know what we can really draw in about anything as far as what's going on, but definitely look, Amazon loves being the biggest thing in e-commerce. If someone's going to come in and try to take some of what they're doing from them or kind of take some of their secret sauce, they're going to push back because this is the first time they've had to.

Travis Hoium (1:49)

Tyler, this does seem like an interesting place where there is now frenemies forming in this ecosystem where Muse can go out and shop every website, but now we're starting to get some of these sites blocked like Amazon. Some are going, hey, let's work together, PayPal. We'll talk about some of these partnerships in a moment with Shopify, PayPal.

But do you think that something like Muse will actually change the way that we shop? Because if it does, then that's a potential threat to Amazon who makes actually more than 100 percent of its profit off of advertising. That's the thing that you open up Amazon Today search for anything, you're going to see a whole bunch of ads. That's the business model. The business model for Meta is ads on its social network. But if we're suddenly shopping for stuff with an AI assistant, it seems like both of those business models are potentially going to change.

Tyler Crowe (2:42)

You probably brought two of the more cynical voices when it comes to this stuff onto the show today, so great choice on that. One of the things I'm thinking about this too is thinking about business models is for Meta, it's not necessarily like, oh, we're going to go change shopping. At least the way that they have presented Muse so far to the public is, it seems more like a way of just capturing more information. You look at the way that they've done Meta Glasses and this has gone out. Muse itself is an extremely popular app, but also there is something to be said of the reason that it is so popular is because the token limits are for free versus pay tiers. Suggest that Meta is really just like, we want to almost give this thing away. I think that they're saying like 100 million tokens before you actually get into a pay tier, which I've heard people use it constantly saying, I have still not hit that limit. Yeah. It's something like multiple novels worth of like language texts that can be entered before you actually start hitting those limits. When you think of it that way, it's like, well, it doesn't really seem like they're trying to push for pay tiers, they're trying to gather as much information as possible, and shopping is obviously part of that.

One could argue that it's part of Meta's social media empire. They don't get as much information on the shopping side, so that certainly gives them that aspect.

Again, whether this is a game-changer for Meta, I don't know, maybe it just is supplementing the status quo of more information to sell more ideas. But here's where I come back to it, because as you said, we're running into walled gardens. Amazon is like, no, we're not going to let Muse do this. I can imagine that Google or Alphabet would do the same for YouTube and Google, because they have these walled gardens of advertising. We don't want our competitors being able to scrape our information for this, this is ours and it makes our data more valuable when it's not democratized to the world. And then it starts to come to the user experience, where it's like, okay, well, I need an AI agent from Meta. I need an AI agent from Amazon. And then all of a sudden, I've got four or five different agents. Do I need to bundle my agents again? Man, that almost sounds like streaming services all over again.