OpenAI has a Muse problem

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Nilay Patel (1:46)

Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking about Hayden Field, The Verge's senior AI reporter, about the new wave of consumer-friendly AI agents. Now, if you've been paying attention to AI, you know that AI enthusiasts have been using agents for a minute now. Homebrew OpenClaw setups led to a surge in Mac mini sales earlier this year. With the launch of Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dots, and XAI's Grok Bot has brought easy-to-use agents to millions. Dots, and in particular Muse, have had the highest profile product launches lately, and they're fascinating to compare and contrast. Both Meta and OpenAI have decided to pitch their agents to mainstream users and businesses in the form of cute animated mascots that can do everything from the boring, restaurant reservations and inbox triage, to more sophisticated tasks. In OpenAI's case, they are even offering specialist Dots for marketing, legal work, and accounting. There are other differences. Muse, notably, is free, while Dots is not. And you'll hear Hayden and I talk about why Meta, which still doesn't have a frontier model of its own, might have a meaningful edge here because it's so much better at making and distributing consumer products. There's also a huge Decoder-style tension wrapped up in the agent race. A conversation about what AI is good at today, what it still can't do, and the privacy and security implications of handing over your credit card information, your email inbox, and other sensitive data to an AI that might be able to do things for you without ever requiring an app or a phone in your hand. That might be the future of all computing, but it's unclear whether anyone wants to hand over all the data to make it happen. Okay, The Verge is Hayden Field on Muse, Dots, and trusting AI agents. Here we go. Hayden Field, your senior AI reporter here at The Verge. Welcome back to Decoder.

Hayden Field (3:21)

Thanks so much.

Nilay Patel (3:23)

I'm excited to talk to you. This time there isn't any wild interpersonal drama.

No one's feelings have been hurt. I would say Elon tried to hurt some feelings and didn't get there. Alexander Wang from Meta has maybe been taking some shots, but none of the real Housewives stuff we usually end up talking about when you're on the show. Just some product launches.

Hayden Field (3:44)

It's been a bit of a pause in the soap opera antics for now, which I'm really grateful for.

Nilay Patel (3:48)

Just some good old-fashioned product competition in the marketplace. Let's see who wins and loses. Maybe everything will kill us all in the end, but for now, cute mascots. There's a lot going on. Let's start at the start. Hayden, you were at OpenAI Dev Day in San Francisco.

They announced Dots, which is their new agent platform with a cute mascot. That happened just a few weeks after Meta Connect, at which the company was all in on Muse, their agent platform with an adorable mascot. Tell us about the state of the industry right now. Everyone's very excited about agents. What's going on?

Hayden Field (4:22)

Yeah. It's funny to me because I've been covering agents for so long. I remember that in 2022, it was the year of ideation. That's what tech leaders called it about agents. They were just ideating. They were thinking about what it could look like. There were a lot of Jarvis from the Marvel Universe references. 2023 was, they all called it the year of deployment. Like, let's try things, let's deploy, and learn more about what's failing, aka pretty much all of them were failing at the time. Then we had 2024 and 2025 They didn't have any names for those years, but things were still pretty bad as we saw. 2026 seems to be, to me, the year of actually the beginnings of actually useful AI agents for the consumer, like always on, obviously, OpenClaw was the start of all of this. But yeah, what's interesting to me is that after seeing that one man, Peter Steinberger, was able to create an actually useful AI agent for the consumer and always on tool. Despite its privacy flaws, it had a lot of privacy and security issues. But it was an agent that was useful enough that people still wanted to use it anyway and try to find ways around these privacy issues that it was having. So that inspired these companies to be like, oh, if one man can do this over the course of one weekend, we've really been slacking, we got to get it together.