Meta bets on AI agent Muse to catch up in AI race

Ease of use is where Meta hopes Muse will stand out from the crowd. “Anyone can use it out of the box, no technical experience required,” Meta claims, boasting that “there’s no learning curve.” Communication is simple too, as easy as messaging the assistant through the Muse app or WhatsApp, one of Meta’s messaging platforms. It will also readily remember details users share, even if only mentioned once, Meta says, enabling it to make better and unprompted suggestions.

Meta is similarly keen to emphasize Muse’s privacy and security features. Securing trust will be key for making Muse actually useful as an AI assistant, as it will require a certain amount of personal information about each user to function effectively. With this in mind, Meta says people can opt out of their interactions being used to train Meta’s AI models (it’s not known whether this is on or off by default) and can instruct Muse to “forget” specific things it has learned about them.

Given their access to personal information and credentials like passwords and payment information, agents can naturally be a security and privacy nightmare . To keep data, passwords, and other information secure, Muse runs on a virtual computer in the cloud designed to keep data safe and separate from other users’ agents. It has no visibility into passwords or payment methods, Meta says, and another AI agent, Sentinel, patrols the same virtual machine to ensure nothing Muse does can reach the internet without approval.

Meta says it plans to introduce a more secure “confidential” version of the virtual machine later this year, encrypted so that even Meta cannot access it. 1Password and Shop Pay support are also on the way, the company said, adding that Muse can already checkout securely with Stripe’s Link.

Muse, powered by the company’s in-house model Muse Spark , is being positioned as the centerpiece of Meta’s AI strategy going forward as the company seeks to regain ground after years of setbacks and failures.

Given its position as a household name and social media behemoth, Meta is in a good position to reach many of these more casual users. But there is also no shortage of baggage for Meta to overcome. Trust-wise, it has just endured a grueling trial over the harms of social media and has faced numerous bruising privacy-related ordeals in the past, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal . Its AI overtures have also been plagued with missteps, including a “Discover” feature that displayed prompts, conversations, and image outputs from other users, a support chatbot that helped hackers take over more than 20,000 Instagram accounts, and a short-lived AI-generated clickbait news feed that appeared to break its own policies on AI content. There’s also its recent and unfortunate reputation for “ pervert glasses .”