Mark Zuckerberg is barrelling toward a future in which an autonomous network of AI agents will run our lives — shopping for us, working for us, talking to other people’s AI agents for us. Are humans ready for this very specific and unrelenting vision of a life in which we communicate primarily through bot proxies? Actually, don’t answer that. The more urgent question coming off Meta’s quarterly earnings call Wednesday night is more likely to be: “Is he?”
Zuckerberg is staking Meta’s future on Muse, the personal AI agent it released to the general public last month. It’s early days, but Zuckerberg told investors during Wednesday’s call that he sees a future where “billions” of people are using Muse, and those people’s Muses are talking to and transacting with other people’s Muses in a “large-scale Muse network.”
If history is a guide, Zuckerberg will soon rename the company to “Muse,” spend billions of dollars chasing an illusion, then abandon it in favor of the next shiny.
To date, the app has been downloaded and set up by more than 10 million users in the US and Canada, making it one of Meta’s “most successful launches ever,” according to Zuckerberg. He did not share specific retention numbers but said that a quarter of people who downloaded Muse initially are using it daily.
That’s ten million users unwittingly exposing their private data to Meta, 2.5 million of them on a daily basis.
[Zuckerberg] sees the biggest opportunity in commerce: A quarter of Muse users are shopping through the platform, Zuckerberg said, and are spending, on average, more than $200 per purchase.
How much of that $200 per purchase was authorized?
Meta earns a fee for every commercial transaction that takes place on Muse. Zuckerberg’s thinking seems to be that if AI agents are doing the shopping, the potential number of transactions that could take place on the platform is, essentially, unlimited.
Zuckerberg complains when Apple inserts itself into every App Store transaction, yet has no issues siphoning money for himself. The hypocrisy is staggering.
He’s going to need the money:
The company’s capex is through the roof, and other financial obligations are piling up. It plans to spend between $135 billion and $145 billion in 2026, double what it spent last year.
Meta burned $80 billion pursuing the metaverse, with nothing to show for it. Muse feels like a redux. Coming soon to an earnings report near you: Metaverse 2: Electric Boogaloo.