What Meta got right with Muse

> Meanwhile, Muse’s free tier is extremely permissive (and the ads are becoming pervasive) because it’s funded by the best ad business in the world

Yes and the last thing I want to do is to integrate my life with best ad business in the world

The other day I signed up for Muse (through a VPN) just to see what all the fuss was about and I have to say it’s a really nice implementation of a personal assistant. It genuinely feels great and makes me want to use it!

It has a simple surface but you can dig deep, from customizing personality, rules, communication style, avatar, etc. You can even install Tailscale onto its VM to SSH into it, but sadly once the machine shuts down, the overlay resets and that’s gone. Couldn’t figure a way to persist it out yet. Still very cool to dig around and explore all the CLIs Meta created for Muse to interact with stuff, like instagram or facebook (you can scp them off the VM)

If I had to rank them I would say: Grok Bot -> Muse -> Hermes -> dot -> OpenClaw

I would love to use Muse more but same as everyone else, there’s no way I’m giving Meta more access to my life. So for now, my Muse is jailed to only Meta owned services and general research, and for that it’s great.

A different view: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117325417843030902

> you better believe the other thing it's supposed to do aside from build a picture of your friends and loved ones is to figure out what makes you love to shop. This is actually some of the most nauseating prompt text i have ever read.

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.

There is one thing Meta got "right" here and it's not about UX. It's about security/liability brinksmanship.

People like Muse because you can put your password in and it does the thing end-to-end, which is something that I can only assume OpenAI and Anthropic had deliberately been avoiding because it's obviously a bad idea. It's pushing the "Overton window" of actions you're letting it do without regard for what happens when it goes wrong.

Just like how OpenClaw pushed it with no human-in-the-loop, Claude code pushed it before that with the all the risks of giving a third-party RCE on your machine.

You could argue that the main difference with CLI agents and OpenClaw is that they are aimed at technical users who understand the risks, whereas with Muse and GrokBot the target is explicitly "normal people" who put their password as their birthday and fall for phishing pages.

The pattern is clear, the leaders will take less risks than those in 3rd and 4th place because they have more to lose. The frontiers, smartly, keep liability low by leaving the dangerous/stupid (but incredibly fun/productive) AI uses outside of anything they actively encourage.

The insane part about Muse is that generally things like Coding agents/OpenClaw were stupider the cheaper the model you were using, which meant most people were paying for frontier to get good results (at least initially) - if you try to do complex tasks with a crappy model, you would face way more "delete production" moments. Meta is pushing boundaries AND doing so on a free plan - suggesting the use of an economical model, which makes it even more insane.

The question now becomes... will the risk be worth it? Or will people be turned away by horror stories of LLMs going on a spending spree and then being unable to make rent.

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.

I use muse.ai for code analysis and so far, I find it excellent. I’m hoping JetBrains will make it accessible through Junie.

"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.

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".

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.

I'm tempted to try the free version as I'm curious what it is about.

Is this just a productivity thing?

Out of the top of my head I can't think of a lot of use cases but maybe RSS? Maybe I could ask it to give me a summary of cool tech news for each morning, and on very specific topics too?

Not sure what else I'd use it for.

Meta stupidly chose to open Muse only in the US. If anyone wants to take the world, just copy it, you have a month. (Before someone do it. Not Meta. They stick to dumb decisions)

They compared codex with muse instead of OpenClaw?

Well I'm happy to know I'll have a job for a few years because this was incredibly weak.

Anyone trusting Zuck's company with deep personal data will deserve what they get.

Serious question: Is all of the Muse noise actually organic, or is there a giant astroturfing campaign? Like John Gruber has endlessly talked about Muse since its dropped, often in a weirdly glowing fashion, and it's incredibly weird given that a) he is almost always hyper-critical of Meta, b) It isn't Apple, c) nothing about Muse is unique or novel or differentiating.

I don't get it. Is Meta handing out big $ for everyone to make Muse happen?

If you can design something that a Baby Boomer can understand, then you have a mass market product at full scale. Otherwise your hopefully building something that a niche group finds attractive and that grows from there, outwards to scale.

It’s boomers

I thought I'd give muse a go after discovering openai's dots were not available in the UK yet.

So, yeah that was disappointing. No muse in the UK either.

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.

Honestly I just think the fact that I don’t get spawned into a new chat every time I open it is an amazing. Simple and clean, AI seriously needs its Steve Jobs

“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.

I don't get it. What muse does it better than others? it's just chat app connected to AI service.

Please don't try this software. Don't signal boost it. Don't provide feedback. Don't try to find "the good stuff about it". For the love of goodness stop calling it "Meta".

Facebook is not run or owned or operated by trustworthy individuals, and until such time as the greatest majority of their leadership if removed, the company's dissolution across its various sectors of global political control and influence ended - just stop giving it attention.

Please. I don't know how much more I can take of people demanding justice from a company that is only now being fined for sins of the past to a tune of meaningless dollars while also goofing "ooh shiny fun avatar that does an ai how useful!"

Please. Stop.

[dead]

Metas Muse is a direct ripoff from me.

I freaked out when I saw Muse.

A few months ago I made this website when it occurred to me that I and friends were starting to hand their lives to AI:

Http://lifeos.nexus

It’s bizarre it’s almost exactly what Muse is - the characters even look like Muse.

One of my characters is NAMED Muse.

It’s deeply weird what a precise copy the concept is.

Have a look at this page then compare the characters to https://lifeos.nexus

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/25/meta-is-putting-its-muscle...