I was discussing latest in tech with an accounting friend out of curiosity, and I kept talking about tiers of GPT-5.6 (Sol vs Terra vs Luna) and asked which one she used on the desktop 'Work' app, and she responded with, "just ChatGPT, what is Sol?."

I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them. So, us serial HN users and commenters are the extreme minority, and I'm sure millions of people will gobble up this Muse agent from Meta as if it's some sort of an innovative cutting-edge way to use the internet by Meta alone.

Curse of knowledge and all. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

One threat we’re particularly focused on is prompt injection, and we handle it in layers. The model is trained to recognize and resist it. The harness marks anything coming from an untrusted source. Deterministic code checks the result. And an ensemble of classifiers runs where the agent can't reach them.

That "deterministic code" bit makes me wonder if they've implemented ideas from the DeepMind CaMeL paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18813 - my notes on that paper here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/11/camel/

https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-launches-ai-agent-that...

From the article:

- … rolled out … despite internal concerns that the technology mismanages its access to sensitive personal data

- The product will be available only in the U.S.initially

- A basic version of the agent will be available for free, while Meta will offer subscriptions priced at $20 a month and $100 a month for heavier usage

- People can opt out of their interactions being used to train Meta's AI models.

- Others flagged serious security flaws, like an agent routing around guardrails …

I'm sure many others will criticize other aspects of Meta, and rightly so. But imagine using a Claw agent with zero tech support available

Summarizing FB? Christ I hope not. Paying my bills? Auto pay was like 25 years ago. I’m still staring at the whole ecosystem and shrugging a bit. That it’s offered by Facebook - the “we will never has ads ads are for losers” company promising security and privacy today with a T&C that changes by the metrics wind - is much less compelling than the other offerings that at most I believe they will use my data for training.

But I’m solicitous of use cases - has anyone actually used one of these harnesses to their benefit on some on going basis ?

(Btw I did use Claude work once - I had it shop for my daughters textbooks on a complex UX website that would have required me to tediously do a lot of repetitive tasks, and it sort of did it, over a long period of time - and felt like a perl script could have done it better faster)

You can see this not working in existing products. Alexa could book a flight for you in 2018. I've never heard of anyone using that feature. Travel planning can be extremely complex, so it's challenging to make people trust a tool is going to do the right thing.

Also, I know this is picky, but your mascot should not feel like it'd feature in a list of worst Olympic mascots.

But… this feels like a UX that won’t last once a significant portion of consumers and purchases adopt it.

Either the network traffic is getting proxied through my client (effectively making each user a residential scraper for meta’s crawler) or it’s between meta’s servers and the sites, which puts site operators in a difficult position: if real customers are making purchases through this interface and throttling/blocking meta’s IPs makes you invisible to them and meta’s userbase, you don’t want to block that traffic.

But now every consumer in the world can just ask a question or say “check all these prices and sites for a thing I want” and go do something else, right out of the box for free, and have thousands of page loads and site interactions fire off for them.

Bypassing the branding/marketing funnels or intended UX (cf. vc twitter abusing resy thru instinct) of sites, through some kind of proxy client amplifying the traffic a human would create, with the ability to let anybody scrape or interact directly with a site’s backend… definitely a consumer win, but seems unsustainable.

I can't even begin to comprehend what kind of personal and PII data this thing will be scraping from its users. Caveat emptor!

The Agent Computer is super powerful, but by definition its easier than ever to build one yourself, and a the result is a personal and private computer.

I know most "normal" people wont want to build their own this but there are still a lot of options that don't involve giving Meta or Grok all your data.

I put some notes on all this here: https://housecat.com/blog/agent-computer-101

At least with B2B AI there is a problem to be solved: reduce my labor costs and increase my business output.

What’s happened here is that consumer technology is already solved, but companies like Meta are trying to jam AI technology into something that solves the non-problems that supposedly exist in hopes of squeezing the last drops of profit out of the space.

It’s hard for me to say if this problem is with the product itself or the examples that feel like an executive’s out of touch guesstimate of what it must be like to be a working class peasant consumer. What do the poor do again…book movie tickets? Is that like making a dinner reservation at a Michelin star restaurant? I bet they’ll need an AI assistant for that!

In 2015 Facebook (not yet renamed to Meta) launched a personal assistant named simply "M" that lived in Messenger and functioned remarkably like ChatGPT does today. At the time it was basically entirely humans on the backend, with the idea that they could replace humans incrementally as they collected data. Really ahead of its time. They shut it down in 2018, which seems shortsighted in hindsight. That data would have been invaluable just a few years later.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/14/152563/facebooks...

It's certainly honest.

Is this marketing to end-users or to stakeholders?

Maybe I'm in the minority?

The onboarding experience of answering a WhatsApp message asking simply "what have you been putting off?" was pretty slick. Now I just want to see a version I can run on my own hardware so I don't have to worry about some sketchy company hoarding my data.

I know OpenClaw and Hermes are supposedly answers to this, but I find that they've each become so bloated with features that they're far more difficult to use and bug prone than I'm happy with. I'd prefer something more opinionated that limits the surface area for bugs as well as the number of decisions I need to make as an operator.

When shopping, a one-time card number is generated at checkout so your real card is never seen by the merchant or your agent.

That's sensible. Hopefully you can set a spending limit too? I'd be OK giving my agent a $100 limit.

Now they have Muse Spark 1.3, which is somewhere between Sonnet and Flable (Opus tier in my experience) in intelligence, but is very fast at 200+ tok/s.

I have been using Muse Spark 1.3 contrib (the one that shares your data for training but is much cheaper) via OpenCode Go $10/mo plan for coding and the thing flies, it's a pleasure to use. I think the only faster acessible model currently is Gemini 3.8 Flash which is around 250-280 tok/s.

As a busy professional, i hate repeated shit work, kids' extra currilulum sign up, lunch order; insurance calls; things i don't want to do but have to do;

buying sneakers or good piece of steak actually are relaxing activity for myself.

there are some very common shitful painful things people want automated, but the app did none of them.

Each of these stories will be written just for you

Great, now you can ask for a feed and the AI will create an entire world of news filling your feed, your very own echo chamber.

At any rate, it would be interesting to see what the actual capabilities would be. The Meta AI integration with WhatsApp actually sucks so bad. Hope it's better than that.

[0] - https://ai.meta.com/learn/agentic-ai/what-are-ai-agents/

[1] - https://ai.meta.com/learn/agentic-ai/agentic-ai-examples/

I never use Apple Reminders so I gave Muse read access to Reminders. I asked Muse to schedule repeating tasks that only involve web search e.g., every other morning find sci-fi movies playing in my city, 3pm EST stock market summary, etc.

I also permanently set my food preferences and just naming any restaurant in town gets me an accurate list of recommendations with costs and descriptions.

I may/not download it but if it was a WhatsApp Assistant it would already be installed in a billion devices, just like Siri

I know it's not 'just a bot', it's an agent, assistant, whatever, but it's code and can be included in some other code with the same capabilities as if stand-alone

The schedule your tennis lessons and do your travel package list scenarios are of course rubbish.

Your personal data is safe and secure

That's from the article. I can't think of anyone I'd trust less with my data than Meta. Well, thieves, I guess.

Friend: "What? How'd you manage that one?"

Zuckerberg: "People just submitted it. They trust me. Dumb fucks"

Like this is the best they can do?

"Tickets just opened for the movie you're tracking. 4:30 PM or 7:30 PM. Interesting?"

Travel is such a huge play here because its inherently social; so "^n viral loop where N is travelers; odds are most will have some meta app so possibly lower friction here too. Not to mention the adjacent travel econ: e.g.: eat, sleep etc..

Amplified an order of magnitude for the e-mail piece given how badly Meta would like to have google's g-mail data.

Either way, interesting play IMO.

Note: Moved from dupe thread.

I guess I'll focus mine more on the things Meta doesn't care about, like privacy and control.

it's known hard to surface subagent HITL back to main agent seamlessly. how is that done?

“Can you lowball fools on marketplace for me?”

It replied:

“Say less, I can do that. What am I hunting…”

People are going to use this product for bad things.

https://allume.com/memos/2026-07-allume-v4/

Seems like they changed names internally from "Hatch" (some UI still uses hatch instead of muse)

We all know that Meta is a company that makes money off personal data anyway

Meta should be honest, stop selling this to users for money, and instead pay users to buy the information

If you subscribe, you get paid; if you generate more than a certain amount of traffic, you get paid again the following month, and so on

I know there was a scandal when Meta conducted Facebook research, but that was when they tried to collect even root information Wouldn’t it be fine if you just took a screenshot of the information I told the Agent?

Instead of something like coins, please provide credits that are actually useful

I don’t want to give Meta my information for free, but if they buy it for me, I’d be willing to try it

It's not a bad product idea, but adoption might be rough because of all the negative goodwill that Meta has accumulated over the years. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if someone (maybe one of the big AI labs) ran Meta's own playbook against them here by creating an imitator and aggressively funding adoption to try and win the market as a fast follower.

I'm surprised it took this long for a company to do this.

People hate some company's AI. They love their pets. AI needs to be your pet.

Muse Secure VM runs on a persistent, dedicated virtual machine equipped with a state-of-the-art browser to navigate the web.

Will this finally be the era of thin-clients? Third times the charm

Then I had it make a marketing video as a test, pretty neat. Obviously all of this was doable but quite impressed with the model underneath since it's all free, for now.

https://x.com/ucsandman/status/2097498962714341661

https://1000thingstobegratefulfor.wordpress.com/wp-content/u...

(It's about Meta so memes are allowed)

I mean, these people must be out of their minds thinking anyone truly wants this? ... No? Am I the only one who doesn't? Well then...

Is it geo-restricted to the US for now?

For a while now I've had a startup idea for an agent that would monitor your inbox for content-free notification emails that just say "you have a new message, click here to read it" or "package delivered" with no details about the package contents. Then it would login to the website, do the 2FA dance, click through the UI, extract the actual important information, and put it back in my email inbox where it should have been in the first place.

I haven't worked on this idea because I think general purpose AI agents are likely to be able to do it very soon. And it seems like Muse is almost there already. It almost worked with MyChart, but hit a snag navigating the website after logging in. I expect this will be fully working in a matter of months.

I honestly can't think of any software ideas that won't be subsumed by general purpose agents or world models or some other form of AI in the very near future. Time to pivot to hardware ideas!

Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

Good enough for me to stop recommending them.

A personal AI agent can help with everyday tasks like booking reservations, monitoring prices, managing reminders, creating documents, generating images, and researching topics.

Always the same thing. I wish product designers would have some modicum of imagination for how agents can actually help people.

Literally none of these examples are improved by this kind of personal AI agent; on the contrary, it means letting your agency be dictated by companies that do not have your interests in mind.

Your personal AI agent that gets things done

More like: "Our personal spy on your life that can manipulate you much more deeply than we ever could with just Facebook."

That's also a useful smoke screen for the accumulation of dossiers on every user's every behavior, for consumption by those who sell not products but influence and push political behavior.

Get off every one of their products and delete them.

I tried to explain to my Meta colleagues with the virtual reality push was absolutely doomed to fail no matter how good the hardware was and this is the same. Nobody is going to look at Meta for a personal assistant, the world has caught on and besides nobody things about Facebook as the place that is useful, that's Google.

BOZ. Meta's current CTO. Not too long ago.

Are we collectively deciding we are better than others simply because we pay attention to different things?

Seems really “my farts smell better than yours” childish to me.

I'm a "normie". I like using Claude code at work but want it to be available for my personal tasks and on my mobile phone

Why would you give them access to your accounts, your email, your purchase habits, your preferences, your communication style and more.

How do they wash this stink off?

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks