Comment by Grombobulous
11 hours ago
I think the product as shown in this marketing material with these examples falls squarely in the “nobody asked for this” territory of AI.
At least with B2B AI there is a problem to be solved: reduce my labor costs and increase my business output.
What’s happened here is that consumer technology is already solved, but companies like Meta are trying to jam AI technology into something that solves the non-problems that supposedly exist in hopes of squeezing the last drops of profit out of the space.
It’s hard for me to say if this problem is with the product itself or the examples that feel like an executive’s out of touch guesstimate of what it must be like to be a working class peasant consumer. What do the poor do again…book movie tickets? Is that like making a dinner reservation at a Michelin star restaurant? I bet they’ll need an AI assistant for that!
I'm not sure - it may as well be that regular consumers just don't realize they need this and will greatly benefit from it.
My personal anecdote - we had a complex family travel in the summer, with 6 ppl and 6 separate flights booked (some multi-leg). SAS messed up on one booking - they decided to cancel the flight we had from Oslo, and rebooked us to an earlier date (2 days shift). That wouldn't work for the rest of our schedule, so I had to rebook, overpay extra money for now longer & more expensive flights - but to add the insult to the injury, when I did this through their website, they didn't transfer the food that I paid for the earlier reservation. Calling them in roaming and trying to get it fixed with a human support agent didn't help - the agent said he just can't fix it on his end, and suggested that we just file for reimbursement on their site.
I never had time to file it since July.
But today I had a reason - to test Muse - and asked it to handle it for me. To my surprise, it dug through all of the SAS emails and actually found the emails confirming that the food fees were reimbursed exactly the same date when SAS moved our original flight. Apparently I didn't notice those notifications since they were spamming with all kinds of notifications that day. But, if not some tool like Muse, I wouldn't even find time to handle this and either file a claim or figure out my miss on their earlier reimbursement.
Any privacy concerns you had connecting your email?
yes, it was not easy to mentally give that access, but then I heard from friends how much work was put in into securing it and separating LLM/agents from the API tokens access (also saw this detailed blog post from the lead developer - https://research.meta.ai/blog/security-and-safety-for-ai-age...), plus I had the pressure to get the problem resolved - so I decided to risk and try it out.
Eventually, though, Muse Confidential VM is an even more locked-in option coming, per that blog post...
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I have a hunch the real killer feature of assistants like this will actually be the ability to identify moments like this where it'd actually be helpful, instead of relying on users to actually try/do everything with it.
No, after seeing how powerful AI is at my job, I definitely want AI to help plan dates, book flights, generate spreadsheets, do all the things.
The only problem is, like someone else pointed out, that I don't trust Meta.
How long until "conversations are not shared with Meta's ad systems" quietly disappears from the site?
I almost think they would have done better to launch this as more disconnected sub-brand. I think Meta / Facebook are actual brand baggage for this sort of thing, even outside of tech circles.
This is where I'm at as well. I've been using AI increasingly more and more at work and it has been genuinely useful. I want a Siri-like assistant that is actually useful. Muse seems like it's that tool. Except, it's Meta.
> I've been using AI increasingly more and more
> genuinely
We can tell.
> “nobody asked for this”
I absolutely want a general purpose assistant.
I absolutely don't trust Facebook with the necessary data.
I think they just want to show you ads and help you buy stuff. The incentive is actually to keep the data to themselves so they can monetize access to it via ads.
The shopping experience is significantly less hostile than Amazon’s 1P digital storefront and I kinda don’t care if fb knows that I want to buy a computer.
The only thing to worry about is that they want you to install a native app. But this UX would be difficult to provide for free via the web due to the obvious abuse potential of giving free access to LLMs + remote compute + browser and tool use. And I think as long as you use it to shop or automate web tasks (and give them access to the top of funnel for customer intent, the $300B/yr thing Google monetizes) they don’t really have any reason to abuse your data.
Yes, they have a bad rep, but according to Zuck, Meta put more work into data security than any other agent like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx8lrn-cytc
-quoting Meta’s exact example of what their top ethicist figures their AI should be happy to respond to [1]
Can’t much trust anything their top people are signing off on. They hurt kids (see IG lawsuits), and thus definitely wouldn’t mind hurting adults like me, so I avoid them whenever I possibly can.
[1] https://reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chat...
Wow, well if the incorrigible Mark Zuckerberg himself says they say they put more work into data security! /s
After everything meta has pulled over the last few decades, do you actually trust in CEO speeches like that?
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Try asking it to find a good deal for you for <item> across multiple sites. Then tell it to use the browser to navigate through the two most promising sites to confirm pricing and availability, and prepare comprehensive breakdown with its findings.
People shop a lot on the internet, actually. Between that and ads for the things people shop for, it’s pretty much the backbone of the Internet economy.
I bet they would purchase more things than they currently do, and seriously break the economics of Google/Amazon search ads (about $300B of yearly spending just for those two), display ads, and internet-first e-commerce sites if they could just ask an agent working for them to help research/source/purchase things without all the navigation and dark patterns in the middle. Personally I would probably spend at least $1k/yr more on snack/beverage subscriptions alone if it had less friction.
> working class peasant consumer
You mean the majority of people in the world? Most people only their computers to entertain themselves, look things up, buy stuff, and complete tedious tasks (taxes, email, etc) they’d rather not do.
How much do you and your peers spend a year on online shopping and how much do they pay out of pocket for SAAS or AI tokens? And how many of your offline purchases had a significant amount of associated online research involved despite technically completing offline? (Houses, cars, schools, hardware) Yeah that’s pretty much where all the money in the global software industry comes from
I wonder, how long until the ad business will target agents instead of humans?
> I think the product as shown in this marketing material with these examples falls squarely in the “nobody asked for this” territory of AI.
I agree. The time to launch something like this would have been during the OpenClaw hype cycle (although, obviously, Muse is much more limited in the types of tasks it can accomplish).
I thought about installing it, but I realized I couldn't think of any real uses for it in my personal life.
I disagree. It matches exactly what I need.
Whenever I try to do something with ChatGPT or Gemini, it just refuses to do things citing limitations in its web browsing capabilities. An everyday LLM that can actually fill forms and do stuff for you on the Internet without having to run on your computer, write programs or interact through special harnesses is what normal people actually need.
It's a different need from the agentic coding type of LLM, where you provide the environment where it can write and execute arbitrary code.
I haven't used it (I just do Codex CLI), but isn't "ChatGPT Work" supposed to solve this?
I want to do it all on my phone, where my "personal life" lives.
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it's not part of the free ChatGPT tier.
I've been alpha testing muse and there's precisely one area it's useful in.... Finding things on Facebook marketplace and haggling for me lol
The first example I saw was making a shopping list for school for pick up.
Do the same thing for recipes and buying groceries.
Or "order me take out from a bunch of places I haven't been that you think I'd like." The AI can ask follow up questions and see your ratings.
"Make a music playlist for my daughter when she enters the car based on the conversation last month. I remember vaguely her mentioning what she liked"
These are things that 100% people want AI to do -- imagine if you had a personal assistant, is something people have asked for since forever.
Now, I kind of agree on the minimal use compared to business, because in business everything has always been highly integrated. That said, that's changing rapidly.
I don’t know, I am not sure I’ve ever felt like I’ve needed a personal assistant in the way you’ve described. None of these tasks seem hard and some seem entirely unnecessary.
The music playlist example in particular seems highly unrealistic or just bound to be a meaningless interaction. I’m making a playlist for my daughter based on a conversation that I forgot? If I forgot the content of the conversation then why am I even trying to salvage that into something meaningful?
“I made you this playlist based on a conversation I forgot, but I asked the AI to creep through our conversation recording so that it looks like I was listening to you!”
“Oh, thanks I guess, I like Heartbreaker by Led Zeppelin, not the Rolling Stones.”