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What Meta got right with Muse

23 points by young_mete ago | 31 comments

georgeecollins |next [-]

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".

TechRemarker |next |previous [-]

"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.

young_mete |root |parent [-]

The Tibo is on X asking things like “If we were to add one more sidebar, what should be in it”

egl2020 |next |previous [-]

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.

satvikpendem |next |previous [-]

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.

nradov |root |parent |next [-]

Sure, it's nothing super unique but the way that Meta has put all the pieces together including security works really well in practice. Muse seems to be the best of the AI personal assistants for regular people right now.

hedora |root |parent |next [-]

Does anyone believe the security works though? This is the company that brought us facebook, pervert glasses, and got sued by its E2EE content monitoring team (which apparently exists!) for emotional trauma because they had to read so much stuff from private WhatsApp messages.

nradov |root |parent [-]

I believe that Muse security is about as good as any other large cloud environment. In the long run maybe all of them will eventually be hacked but so far my other Meta accounts have been 100% secure.

Those other issues, while perhaps examples of bad corporate behavior, aren't really security lapses per se.

yellow_postit |root |parent |previous [-]

Grok as well seems to have a hit a sweet spot.

lanza |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I don't understand C, couldn't assembly already do all this?

bentcorner |root |parent |next [-]

And dropbox is just rsync and some UI

kelvinjps10 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

But chatgpt is still user friendly or claude I think also do these kinda of things

satvikpendem |root |parent |previous [-]

Difference being they're already largely similar so the analogy would be between C# and Java.

tiffanyh |root |parent |next |previous [-]

UI/UX

Many times, UI/UX makes all the difference in user adoption & use.

satvikpendem |root |parent [-]

But ChatGPT already has the same UI UX.

yellow_postit |root |parent |next [-]

OpenAI does now with Dots but it’s still desktop only so they flubbed the ease of use that has made Muse and Grok such growth engines.

tiffanyh |root |parent |next |previous [-]

It isn’t though.

Muse is:

- a single thread

- has avatars that you can name

- has approval cards

Now dots is similar in concept but that only launched a few days ago and Muse launched a month ago.

young_mete |root |parent |previous [-]

It does not at all. ChatGPT is trying to be an everything app and it’s extremely convoluted by this point and hard for most people to make sense of, especially if you’re not in tech.

goatherders |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Facebook's install base is 3x that of cgpt

young_mete |root |parent |next |previous [-]

That’s pretty much the question the article tries to answer! TL;DR - good product design, personality mechanics, and ad-funded tokens is what makes it different.

iAMkenough |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Think of it as a Meta-hosted OpenClaw VM for each Facebook user.

Meta is reducing the friction for your parents to run OpenClaw without any assistance.

486sx33 |root |parent |previous [-]

It’s the most consistent and user friendly agent with the ability to also be a harness for multiple custom agents. I literally had people running around the office amazed by muse last week. It has brought agents to the masses in a way a lay person can understand and use.

iAMkenough |next |previous [-]

I like that you can get root access to the VM your instance runs in, connect it to your tailnet, automate connection approvals, and operate a torrent seedbox on Meta’s infra.

Forgeties79 |root |parent |next [-]

Totally theoretical of course

iAMkenough |root |parent |next [-]

right, it could be made up

https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117329100531227330

verdverm |root |parent |previous [-]

perhaps its for plausible deniability next time they torrent training data /s

prng2021 |previous [-]

“Interestingly, what’s making Muse a success also explains why Google has mostly failed to capture the zeitgeist so far. They have the compute and the ad money to fund something like Muse. But they have no product chops to build something simple and understandable in consumer AI.”

Umm what? Having billions of hourly active users across YouTube, Google, Google Maps, and Chrome still doesn’t mean they have the product chops to build another consumer facing app/service? I think it’s inevitable that Muse will get crushed.

Anon1096 |root |parent |next [-]

Google Search and Google Maps are utilities, not consumer apps that vie for leisure time, so I don't think they are really comparable. The next frontier for AI apps like Muse and Dots is competing with the social media giants.

We should look to see how Shorts vs IG Reels have adapted to the short form video landscape for product chops in this area. IMO IG has adapted far better to the new era, and I very often get people sending me Reels (they used to send TikToks). I very rarely see anyone send Shorts but it still happens. I expect this trend to continue and IG to extend their lead here. And Muse certainly has first mover advantage in personalized AI apps, who knows when Google will finally release one.

dezgeg |root |parent |next |previous [-]

> YouTube, Google, Google Maps, and Chrome

You listed products that have been around for ~20 years. Keeping up already entrenched products running doesn't correlate with being able to launch new products.

young_mete |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Those are all quite mature products which they have maintained and grew super well. They haven’t had a good track record in consumer AI, there’s no coherent product strategy or offering. They had some localized hits like NotebookLM and nano banana but it hasn’t translated into organic growth and usage for Gemini

nradov |root |parent |previous [-]

Google has huge amounts of training data but very little of it is relevant to creating an AI personal assistant with good UX for common tasks. Like Gemini might be really good at answering specific questions or generating synthetic content but that doesn't mean it can securely, reliably carry out workflows in a way that feels natural to regular users. At least for now, that part still requires some human vision and product management.