Meta AI gains momentum with Zuckerberg's agent for the masses
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images
Meta's Muse is rocketing up the app charts with a distinctly practical vision for AI — an agent that can shop, haggle, cancel subscriptions and clear away the digital drudgery of everyday life.
Why it matters: Mark Zuckerberg is staking Meta's AI comeback on one of the enduring strengths of his internet empire: making new technology feel native to billions of ordinary people.
- That mass-market instinct helps explain Zuckerberg's broader break with AI "doomerism," as he urges labs to manage risks, keep building and put the technology in as many people's hands as possible.
State of play: Ten days after launch, Muse is the No. 1 free iPhone app in America, leading ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Instagram and everything else on the App Store.
- Muse pairs a highly polished interface — built around a cuddly, customizable avatar — with serious computing power, including its own secure virtual computer and browser in the cloud.
- Users give it tasks in plain English, while Muse itself surfaces ideas, goals and suggestions that teach people about its capabilities as it works across websites and connected accounts.
The big picture: Muse poses an early test of whether Meta's structural advantages — product design, distribution and an intimate grasp of consumer behavior — can shape the AI race more than raw intelligence alone.
- Meta is marketing Muse to billions of people through products they already use, while drawing on a vast ecosystem of accounts, contacts and personal context that make an agent more useful from the start.
- The catch: Sharing your life with an agent demands an extraordinary degree of trust — an especially fraught proposition for a company that carries decades of privacy and safety baggage.
Zoom in: Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang has spent the past week curating a highlight reel of Muse wins, with one pitch surfacing again and again: this thing can save you money.
- One user says Muse took his existing car-insurance policy, found equivalent coverage for $3,500 less a year, bought the new policy and canceled the old one all in about five minutes.
- Another user says Muse uncovered a fraudulent recurring Adobe charge that Chase had missed; another had it cancel American Airlines tickets and secure a full refund entirely by text.
The intrigue: Meta is testing a voice feature that allows Muse to make phone calls on a user's behalf — one of the clearest glimpses yet of AI agents becoming real-world stand-ins for their users.
Reality check: The more useful Muse becomes, the more of your life it needs to see: email, calendars, financial accounts, purchases, contacts and eventually even the phone calls it makes in your name.
- Meta already faces a formidable trust deficit: Just last month, it agreed to pay up to $18 billion and adopt sweeping child-safety measures to settle claims that Facebook and Instagram were designed to addict children.
- Zuckerberg has repeatedly tried to reinvent both Meta and himself — from Facebook founder to metaverse evangelist to AI optimist — while a deep reservoir of public distrust has proved far harder to shed.
