Meta's Muse proves that design, not tech, wins consumer AI
What Meta got right with Muse
Muse's core agentic capabilities have existed for over a year, yet Meta put the pieces together in a way that finally clicks for average consumers. By stripping away model selectors and work/chat switches, giving users a clear mental model of a personal helper with its own computer, and funding a permissive free tier through ads, Meta is positioned to own consumer AI at scale.
With LLM agents, a SaaS app is now more akin to a coworker that goes out and does the job. And how do you talk to a coworker? You chat with them.
- egl2020
The privacy issue blocks me from adopting this or other personal assistants: do I want to give muse my identity data and access to my mail, calendar, and phone so it can do even basic tasks like make appointments or pay bills?
It will be interesting to see if muse's privacy features can get users over this.
- Adrig
I'm a designer, but I admit it's really hard to predict what products and UX are going to work in the AI age.
Chatbots have been tried for a decade and were a total failure. With AI, it has become the fastest-growing way to interact with technology, ever.
GPT-5 tried to have an auto router and create abstraction for the user; people hated it. Instinct and Muse are doing the same with a different framing; it's going wild.
There are tons of these little examples where a small difference in framing, a small threshold in tech, and product assumptions completely flip on their heads.
It's amazing to follow but requires you to be way more flexible in your assumptions.
- georgeecollins
FB has a huge advantage launching any consumer app over any start up. Even ones that have higher valuations. If you think the market position isn't important, imagine what would happen if Apple changes their TOS such that Muse stops working as well on their devices. Or take it off the store because it's "dangerous".
- satvikpendem
I don't understand Muse, couldn't agents already do all this? I have ChatGPT for example and I can have it book tickets and other things for me, it even pulls up a cloud browser if it can't access APIs. It can check for details from my email and use those for the ticket. Now OpenAI has Dots too which is a 24/7 version of the same thing.
- TechRemarker
"clunkiness of ChatGPT is stark. The whole desktop ChatGPT vs Codex switch is dumb. The chat vs work switch is dumb. ChatGPT projects vs Codex local vs Codex cloud projects is mega dumb. I need to make 10 choices each time I want to start or continue a chat. Just give me one chat that orchestrates all of it in the background." This times a 100x. Every step forward seems 2 steps back. The sidebar is jungle, and trying to find chats is tough, trying to remember if its codex or chat, a local one or remote, and that chat ones can't be put in a codex projects and countless other issues that make it a nightmare. While I can they are working on improving the mess to at least presumably get rid of the Chat vs Work toggle, I haven't heard anything that eventually it will just be one, where we can just toggle how it responds it, vs being limited on it can be organized and searched.