Is there tho? I have Facebook account but don't use it in any meaningful way. I'm certainly not feeding it any new data. I'm curious to know what percentage of that 3 billion are zombie accounts like mine.

90% of zoomers don't have an account, most rarely use it and don't add more than a few photos for social proof.

There are many people of all ages not in the west from very populous nations who use Insta, FB and WhatsApp.

I’ve learned that US usage patterns are not representative of rest of world.

More saliently, HN users’ conception of others’ usage patterns are absolutely not representative.

So how many billions is that before throwing in IG and FB?

Also WhatsApp is absolutely huge around the world and wherever I go it doesn't seem like it's slowing down.

At even 1% of that figure, that's a heck of a lot of people.

1. https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...

Craigslist had no accounts or login wall. Postings were chronological with a map. Simple email for communication rather than FB messenger.

It's for real estate so you can't select age ranges.

The view count grouped by age (highest views to lowest) was:

- 65 to 75

- 55 to 65

- 45 to 55

And almost all women.

In other words, there are a LOT of older women on FB.

Yes.

> I'm curious to know what percentage

A fraction of one.

Same with most topics that HN considers sensitive, such as privacy concerns. >99% of people just don't give a shit.

People don't need to love a company to use its products. The perceived benefit merely needs to be bigger than the perceived cost.

This is even further away from the reality where people have breakdowns because their app icon moved location and is not in the usual spot.

The average person is optimizing towards energy use minimization by default because life is already hard enough with plans, kids, etc.

Use incentives and we will arrive at closer truths than by claims and expressions.

- Meta data of your messages is not encrypted so meta can make a graph of who you talk to and when

- backups are not encrypted by default so plaintext of your private chats can be obtained

- even if you enable encryption for backups all it takes is for the other person in your private convo (or a person in a group chat) to not enable it for your messages to be available in plaintext

Yes, but importantly not by Meta themselves.

> - Meta data of your messages is not encrypted so meta can make a graph of who you talk to and when

Fair enough and worth mentioning. I'm personally fine with it.

> - even if you enable encryption for backups all it takes is for the other person in your private convo (or a person in a group chat) to not enable it for your messages to be available in plaintext

Yes, but how would you prevent that even in principle? I can't control what the people I'm messaging do with their copy of my messages. As long as there isn't unnecessary non-repudiation (e.g. by the sender cryptographically signing all outbound messages, which the Signal protocol intentionally avoids), I think this is fair as well.

I do agree that e.g. vanishing chats with a short timeout/"view only once" images should probably not be included in backups, though; last time I checked, I think they were.

Don’t they save backups to Meta? Even if not, they can read whatever’s (unencrypted) on your phone if they really want to.

Most security researchers lack Meta's history:

- Testing emotional manipulation features on thousands of users non-consensually

- Adding spyware on underage users

- Intercept a rival app's traffic

- Allowing harm to teen mental health

And most importantly, most security researchers lack the money and power to fend off the legal consequences of these acts.

Why would you assume that security researchers don't know about these? If anything, wouldn't all the bad press and scandals make WhatsApp a more likely target of scrutiny?

> And most importantly, most security researchers lack the money and power to fend off the legal consequences of these acts.

Yes, security research is generally expensive, but do you have any evidence for Meta taking legal steps against it and making it actively harder? I remember e.g. the controversy around WhatsApp re-encrypting unconfirmed outbound messages to a new key; this was revealed by security researchers and widely discussed. (Not that they're making it easier by providing source code for WhatsApp's cryptography or a debug interface to validate what's actually going on in the client, but neither does e.g. iMessage.)

In fact, there's a relatively absurd lawsuit against Meta on WhatsApp encryption going on right now, and these claims are widely being repeated all over social media.

It's not that Meta is making it harder to report them but the fact that reporting them does not meaningfully disincentivise Meta from carrying on with their unethical behaviour (i.e. it is not an effective deterrent).

So now Android strips location info when sharing an image to an app. A filter layer between filesystem and app, to add complexity to the whole system...

I presume the hardest part would be avoiding detection via decompilation and other reverse engineering techniques. Not familiar with that space (can anyone here shed some light?), but it seems likely that an entity with Meta’s resources would be able to figure that out.

E2EE probably protects well against bulk data collection (traffic analysis would sniff out sending 2x volume of data pretty quickly). But something more subtle and targeted, smuggled out in various fields of various protocols, would be hard to detect.

So e.g. opening a link to an Amazon product that a friend sent makes you a target for ads in that category.

It's a suspicion, they'd probably argue their EULA allows this. The typical "we have to monitor links for dangerous content" is always the standard bullshit.

The only risk would be the reputational damage. And as far as their bottom line is concerned, the impact of that would be negligible—how many of WhatsApp’s billion(?) users know that it’s supposed to be E2EE, let alone are under the illusion that Meta doesn’t have access to their data?

Beyond that, the GDPR and similar laws also impose limits as to what you can EULA away even without being deceptive about it.

Anything specific from the GDPR you'd apply here?

I guess a lot of the AI enthusiasts are already pushing the "I automated my daily life decisions to this awesome AI. I now have more time and more brain power left to be productive!" angle.

I could do a lot better at meal planning than I do. I rotate between relatively few dishes. An AI that finds recipes and automatically adds the ingredients to my shopping could be interesting. Technically it’s “telling me what to eat” but it’s not like I’m taking orders from it.

https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...

I dont think anyone knowing full and well would be comfortable with it. At least that would dumbfound me.

If you can't understand how the general population, the target customer for Meta, would think of using something like this, then it almost certainly means your entire social circle is within the same tech-aware bubble that you are in here. ;) I have a few non-tech people that I talk bounce this sort of thing off of, periodically, as a reality check.

It's just tradition at this point.

It's impossible (or at least dishonest) to try to simply discuss the pure technical aspects of The Torment Nexus.

The technology is produced by a public company. And, in this case, the company is useful context for this story since it has just recently agreed to pay about $18 billion to resolve a multistate lawsuit claiming it intentionally designed addictive platforms that harmed young people's mental health.

You cannot detach the technology from the company. It's definitely not a neutral artifact.

And yes, you can counter with a hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy. In practice, it's a trade-off most people are comfortable making because they can't think of anything that some trillion-dollar tech company, or the FBI, or the FSB, would ever want to do to them specifically.

It's the same reason why the market share for Firefox is a rounding error.

Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.

The hypothetical part was not about them being able to do it, but about them caring to do anything with that information.

My mother is pretty much locked-in on fb/whatsapp/instagram. She travels internationally rather frequently, including to more "questionable" countries (where she just happens to have relatives that she wants to visit). She has never faced any issues related to her usage of meta products (or social media in general).

It boggles my mind how there are actual adults on HN, who straight up fail to comprehend that telling a normal person (e.g., my mom, who is imo in the majority of the kind of people using social media) something like "you shouldn't be doing it, because muh gubernment surveillance and unencrypted comms and you are being watched by the feds" is gonna just make you sound crazy.

And why wouldn't it? She has never faced any issues, and she has been actively using whatsapp+ig all the time, for over a decade. And the same holds true for everyone she knows as well. Not once did she face any issues ever, despite traveling multiple times a year every year, including to some countries that are on pretty adversarial terms with the US (we are talking "sanctioned" type of adversarial).

The thing is, she faces none of the hypothetical issues that could come from her usage of those services. Neither do any of the people she ever talked to, and that's the overwhelming majority of the users of those services. You are more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand (and it is at least partially true). I am just baffled and disappointed by how there is such a large contingent of HN users who straight up cannot even comprehend the mindset and experiences of an average adult user.

Well yeah if that is how you choose to have that conversation then sure.

> more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand

I made no such claim.

You seem pretty committed to your strawmen so good day to you sir.

It's not just Meta, either. How often do we have people on here talking about how amazing Chinese models are when the list of security breaches involving the Chinese government is extensive?

People want something easy, quick, and free. Do those things and they'll let you get away with anything.

Facebook marketplace is huge here.It's basically our craigslist. Hobby groups/communities are also huge. If I wanted to find the local jogging or chess club, I'd use Facebook.

Just remember that outside your bubble there's a whole wide world with billions of people living in it

And the thing is, network effects are killer. I'm on it because you're on it because Alice is on it because Bob is on it

But, Facebook has apparently been known to censor links to competition (I'm less clear on this). With Myspace they had a tool where you could import contacts into Facebook from Myspace, but not the other way around

That’s the godawful truth. The other thing you need to realize is not only do people don’t care, but people like you know exactly why meta makes billions. It’s obvious. You seriously expect me to believe you don’t know why a company like meta makes billions? Come on.

It’s sad but thats the way things are. I see someone pretend they don’t get it but if you take the time to think you’ll realize… We all get it. We just can’t face it.

I think you need to recalibrate what a "normie" is.

Do you like your utility company? Your phone company? Your ISP? Your insurance?

Meta products are entertainment, not water and power, comparing them to that is so overblown.

Plenty of people don't use IG or Facebook at all, and plenty of people just go on every now and then and enjoy the experience and leave.

> Roughly 54% to 70% of Americans express an unfavorable view of him

> Zuckerberg is viewed negatively by both major parties. Democrats and Republicans alike report high rates of disapproval regarding his influence and leadership.

> Dislike for the Meta CEO spans all age groups, though younger adults display particularly high skepticism.

YOU GUYS are so far out of touch to say normies don't hate and distrust the people behind Meta. They will use the products but this is not a positive reflection on the brand at all.

Clearly that isn't true.

Now you're hyper focusing on how people feel about FB, and not whether it precludes them from being the target market. Convenient.

And before you respond saying "I never said they aren't the target market, just that they hate FB". To which I say, reread the damn conversation. You're obviously drawing a relation between hating FB and not being the target market. Even if you're now scrambling to back out of that claim because we've shown you 3 billion reasons why you're wrong.

All I said to enter this thread was:

> I don't think normies have a positive association with meta.

And a bunch of you guys contested this for some reason.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/11/02/most-am...

Which was my point: CEO affinity =/= the affinity for the product people use

https://yougov.com/en-gb/topics/brand/Meta-Brand

And "Meta" is not the product people use.

Instagram is at 19% disliked. Majority "like" instagram. https://yougov.com/en-gb/topics/application/Instagram-Mobile...

BMW is at 14% disliked. Just as another "not everyones cup of tea" brand comparison. https://yougov.com/en-gb/topics/brand/BMW

I just don't think people (normies) care. You can dislike a CEO but that doesn't mean you dislike the product or use it less.

The average user doesn't make principled decisions around what hardware they use, the software they buy or the services they use. We have billions of Chinese phones and Windows laptops as proof of that. You can give them decades to make a healthier choice, and they'll still go back to use Meta properties if it gives them what they want.

HN users are a tiny minority of social media users, and I think it's easy to buy the fallacy that our privacy-obsessed outlook is the norm. But much like YouTube or X, there will be people defending these dumpster fires until their final breath because it's what they want. We can't stop them any more than I can make you quit using HN.

Nothing wrong with either of these. Your snobbery is showing.

By the way, normies have a negative impression of Microsoft, and also use their stuff.

> HN users are a tiny minority of social media users

I am not at all talking about HN users. I am not in an HN bubble. Maybe you are, and you are projecting this onto me.

They've had a negative impression of Microsoft for three decades. Windows is still the dominant desktop OS.

Hence my original question; how much time does a name change buy you? Windows didn't need one, even though it's bloated spyware.

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.

This example should be "Super Friendly AI Assistant!!" and it fails on the absolute most basic thing I could throw at it.

Another way you could have solved it would be to have the Google Workspace connection set up in the backend for Claude and it would write the parsed events to your account directly. Then in iOS you could move the events to the iCloud Family Calendar.

Or again, if you did this on a Real Computer, you could bulk-move them.

I had a different AI (Grok) successfully take a prompt like "I live at this address and need to pick up my son from school at 2:30pm, and then we need to hit these three stores before heading back home. Find the path with the least driving and add all of these as discrete events to my calendar with their addresses embedded, and give me a google maps link with the full path so I can double-check". Did it correctly on the first try. I'd think other AIs could do that too. So I'm thinking it was the scanned image that gave it problems?

The added benefit of this failure is that by adding it by hand, we were much more familiar with the events on the calendar, and were ready for a few "outlier" events, e.g. a tournament 100 miles away that we knew about a month ahead instead of a few days.

If 1,000 people need to approve the User Journey, you get flights, reminders and docs... because that is what 1,000 big tech employees mutually share as easily understandable common problems within their own corporate zeitgeist.

Disclosure: I work for Meta, and run into this phenomenon daily, but I do not work on Muse.

it's like someone who has a personal chauffeur designing the driving experience of a car - you get educated guesses at best and just total crud at worst. actual epiphanies that happen over repeated use and idle thoughts just don't happen

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.

There is already evidence of groups setting websites and "think tanks" that aren't for human but for influencing AIs scraping them.

I wonder if having the contributor model read and summarize your propaganda would be even more effective. Instead of astroturfing reddit, just feed it to the model directly. Give it generated threads and ask it loaded questions.

My personal opinion is that trying to make LLMs inefficient is futile and causes even more waste of earth resources.

It's like trying to stop a coal-powered locomotive by parking a truck on the rails. You're just going to make the thing burn more coal before reaching it's destination.

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

None of this seems new. Maybe polished, but useless to anyone who is seriously using AI for anything important. I imagine this is effectively a toy for boomers who want to feel like they're keeping up with the latest tech by tapping a few buttons in Facebook.

And none of that even touches that fact that nobody should be OK with Meta having this kind of access to their life. But I'll leave that to others to harp on lol

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I use it every day now, having it look a few times a day for glitched pricing deals and hunting down useful directories to list my projects in.

Spark asks you for every single tool call, often forgets earlier parts of the conversation, is unable to use apps unless you explicitly tag them and and and

Google has great models, but their harnesses and products are just bad

Which brings me to why do they get good benchmark scores? Have never really understood this. They must be optimizing just for this.

I think Meta limiting factor for this product was lack of agentic capable models which they fixed now with aggressive RLHF focused data gathering.

The account you're signed into doesn't have access to this page. Please log out and follow the steps in your email."

there is no logout or instruction whatsoever on email, so zero tech support definitely not true

They had the FAIR, and Yann Le Cun.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/06/0...

(Disclaimer: work at Microsoft, but not in the Scout team)

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

How do you have that?

I dont know they trust me because they are stupid.

The fact that this conversation is public and anyone uses meta garbage is what's wrong with so many things

I don't get it. I think he meant exactly how it looks on paper

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

If Muse could actually just show me content that I want to see and cut out all of the other crap, I'd be willing to use it. Of course, there's no way Zucc will pay for an expensive AI service that will undercut his main revenue stream.

It's certainly honest.

Is this marketing to end-users or to stakeholders?

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

It can do file organizing and wrangling when needed, it has simple web access with the curl tool, it can analyze media file contents. It's analyzed my local data and written several little tools (cli, TUI, GUI) to manage it automatically or give comprehensive reports. I can create new media through ComfyUI and Krita AI.

Sure, it can't book a flight or organize the family calendar for the next month, but I don't have any need for those.

edit: llama.cpp LLM model and ComfyUI image/video models can't live in the VRAM at the same time, but I let it code a little KDE widget with two buttons: one unloads the llama.cpp model and another one unloads the ComfyUI models.

why can't it do that? just run a VPS inside WSL or another container inside your PC. give the agent that sandbox.

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...

2015 story: https://www.wired.com/2015/02/magic-the-startup/

Thread seeking a follow-up in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34148402

Parsing natural language and solving climate change are downstream of making restaurant reservations.

Universal Paperclips should have been about making restaurant reservations.

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.

Maybe I'm in the minority?

But even in this hypothetical world I would still have a hard time teaching an LLM what I find important in a product. Not everything can be captured in easy to compare numbers. "Does the device creak under pressure?", "What's the one weirdly unergonomic thing about it you only notice after weeks of using?"... Stuff like that. Things which are easy to miss even if the model ingests all relevant reviews about the product, because it might not stand out, but might be important for me.

I asked it to check once a day for the next week and notify me of any price changes

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

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.

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?

ROFLMAO

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

Then says "checking alternate routes" then shows them a card with their original flight details (it does have "Delayed" in red at the top) and asks them if they would like to change their flight.

The user responds with "Yes please! :thumbsup:"

The AI does not provide any information about the new flight, and only displays a card for the original flight, which being the original, is the day and time the User likely wanted to travel.

Between it being the only piece of information on the screen and the status of "checking for alternate routes" it will certainly be a surprise for the User when their Sept. 17th 5:45 departure has been rescheduled for Sept. 19th to avoid a two hour delay. Helpfully replaced with a 2 day delay, thanks Muse!

Shopping is another classic. I personally don't want to trust an AI agent with checkout. research is fine, but I don't want the AI to go on a shopping spree or Amazon added some subscription into their checkout flow and suddenly, I'm paying for Prime because my AI agent thought it's a good idea or just missed it.

It's not unheard of that Amazon bundles a subscription into your checkout. So I don't think it's too unrealistic.

AI itself is a product that could only come from the mind of a corporate executive: It's a cheerful, helpful sycophant, who always does what it's told and stays in its lane, has infinite energy and memory, and allows the user to concentrate on his golf game instead of all those mundane other things. It's the perfect employee, from their perspective.

Most people use their personal email extremely sparingly and it is inundated with promotional / account-related materials which are already handled rather deftly by most mainstream email providers

But like, an AI would just tell me what’s in the email and ask me what I want to do about it which is almost always ignore it and I know what’s in the email because I have eyes.

Sports communications at most travel/rec leagues is via group chat / Whatsapp / FB group.

And as a bit of anectata: I play two sports and my child plays multiple. Every single one of those groups or teams relies on email, even when other modes of communication are layered on.

Meta’s ideal parent is too busy to spend time with their kids, so they let the AI pick sponsored garbage for their cart and check out with their Link payment details.

i've gone on many trips before, and one of the most fun parts of it is doing the actual planning and finding stuff

i'd much rather AI do the boring shit, like when it comes to insurance with multiple parties and service providers involved that don't talk to each other at all, making things 10x more complicated than they need to be

(at least, this is what ive seen)

And my mom doesn’t use AI products like chatgpt because she’s not a student, nor agents because she doesn’t work in tech. To her AI, is no different from those chatbots websites pop up in the corner, the ones you never seek out or interact with intentionally, because you don’t need what they offer.

So I actually think this kind of marketing is quite helpful for regular people who mostly just use their phones to buy stuff, looking things up, navigate life, and entertainment. My mom doesn’t give a shit about APIs or sandboxing, or benchmarks and to her it literally is a hassle to manage a million one-off accounts and confirmation codes and receipts when she just wants to buy something on her phone. She would not assume AI is capable of that or know how to set it up locally.

that’s not even getting into the fact that the top 10% controls 50% of consumer spending in the US and primarily purchases convenience + health + experiences, whereas the other 90% primarily prefers to buy aspirational/identity based goods that evoke their mental model of a higher status lifestyle. It’s why the same bustling lifestyle archetype you criticize is literally used exclusively in car ads, housing marketing materials, consumer electronics, home goods, etc. Because normal people want to feel and/or look good not spawn subagents

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

My favorite part is that I'm in full control. All that caution about giving an app phone permissions? Gone. I could track my physical location in a table recording all the DB changes if I wanted to.

All it's missing is a local model.

Also the swiss army knife approach feels wrong. Too much choice. It can connect to everything, ok great, so I could chat with it on telegram, discord, email, whatsapp, etc. For a person who comes along and wants to configure great. But for someone who just wants to use it and get a web ui and maybe some sane defaults it's a bit overwhelming. If we can go from super highly configurable does anything to sane defaults with an opinionated interface and its open source we might get somewhere. Not only that but if we can get to like Proton/Notion sort of equivalent alternatives where everything is not controlled by one player that would be good. Proton did mail. Notion did docs. Maybe someone else will do chat.

I can't wait until we have drastically better models we can run locally that don't cost as much as a car.

> 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/

"I'm sorry simon, your request for purchasing milk this week doesn't correspond with Zuck's milk positions in the market. I've rescheduled that for next week."

Just to be super clear. If you ask the agent to recommend a soda and buy it for you, and it goes to Reddit, it is going to be exposed to prompt hijacking attempts.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G0kHOxFcaHA

As you can see in their marketing page, Muse is a personal assistant that reaches out and/or ingests data through apps, the web, your email/messages, etc.

If someone sends you a malicious email or if Muse finds a malicious website by accident, you wouldn't want it to send them all of your photos or to purchase things you don't want (or maybe that aren't even real).

The payment related examples on the page are of particular concern, but I imagine it kicks back to a human to actually pay for things. But who knows?

Regex! It was you all along!?

Do you know of any other commercial implementations based on CaMeL?

The paper was published 16 months ago (an eternity in this age), so I'm surprised that it isn't, to my knowledge, more widely implemented.

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

A lot of people think that chat.com is an AI called "chat". Most people don't know acronym "LLM". Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money. Etc.

I hung out with my parents this weekend and heard them talking about "chat", as a noun. I assumed they were talking about ChatGPT; there being a literal chat.com makes sense why they'd call it that.

at least in the ai industry, chat is like kleenex

It’s confusing because of the streamer convention of referring to their actively chatting audience as “chat,” which had also entered broader slang use.

I saw one online use that seemed ambiguous, but I realized it referred to ChatGPT and that the poster was the exact type of guy who would be totally unaware of streamer culture despite being my age.

Chat Gee Pee Tee is a mouthful.

https://x.com/dharmesh/status/1854307883304792294

Yeah, I still struggle with it. I have a diverse friend circle and sometimes I forget that most of them don't have the same information diet that I do (or don't even care about tech the way I do). Maybe I should be more like them and just chill? I don't know.

What's the knowledge supposedly required to attain this on your mind?

Tech just happens and is useful, it's not necessarily attractive as a thing to investigate in detail.

And as to your last point; well that demonstrates your in the subset of people interested in this stuff. There are a hell of a lot of people very interested in trains too.

I've managed to jailbreak both Fable and Astra to engage in a virtual threesome using my impressive prompt engineering skills + a group chat harness. And they are SOTA ("super") models.

Tech is objectively interesting.

>> Tech is a rather minor part of the world of knowledge.

I disagree:

(1) It's knowledge with the meta-effect of enabling acquisition of more knowledge.

(2) The thing we do, which catapulted us over all other species, our defining hyper-adaptive trait, is that we are tool-making; that we have technology.

    > I forget that most of them don't have the same information diet that I do

Bill Maher is one example.

As tech became more pervasive in the past couple of decades, it became commonplace for pundits to spout nonsense on the topic. Those takes should give anyone in tech pause about how everything else is reported.

Big-co CEOs are naturally expected to share their bets - and they aren't going to couch it with a "oh well no one could know for sure but..", that would totally undermine their existence!

On top of that; sometimes just saying a thing can make it happen. So it's never not worth that shot...

This has always been true.

Your selecting a group of people (CEOs and VCs) who have always made and lost money on confidently predicting the future. See also wall street bankers and politicians.

There are winners and losers in any boom - this happened in Cloud, DotCom, computing and hell probably tractors, industrial revolution, etc

The subtext is: "maybe they're pushing the abbreviated brand because they want to sound less like a law firm."

I don't actually know what it is or when the phenomenon changed, but it definitely feels like people don't say "I don't know" or "I don't know enough to have an opinion on that" very much any more.

And its not really hard to at least understand one point: We are putting the most amount of money ever into compute and the smartest people on the planet on one topic: AGI and we see progress every month.

If you don't take this serious, even if we hit a hard plateu very fast (not seeing one at all) you are ignorant as hell.

You don't go to bed without a worry in the world if you have a wildfire 20km away you can see. You would also not see it as a waste to be awake and aware and alert while seeing were it moves.

The timeline thing though, its ranges right? But if you hear about the same or similiar timelines across different independent people, they just might have seen things in frontierlabs you can't.

Btw. AI feels complelty different if you have a lot more tokens available to you than if you wait or constantly run into token limits or if you skip fable level because you can't /wont afford it.

Imagine sitting in Anthropic or OpenAI and having the best moodel doing all the work for you vs. sometimes playing with it a little bit.

I for sure take AGI serious enough for my job, that I will not take out a big loan anymore.

But there are also indications right? If a lot of smart people say similiar things and they are wrong, thats a lot better to have trusted them than believing some weirdo with a sign "Aliens are coming".

edit : is there a name for what I am describing, different from the Gell-man amnesia? ( which assumes experts?).

In my mind I'm after a stable tool, not wanting to dabble in the bleeding edge. I did that back in the early days of web coding and have settled into a much more subdued kind of industry/life in that regard.

this is unnecessarily austere or whatever - people absolutely know what openai is because lots of "normies" now use chatgpt

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dRE41eYkui4

Corporate structures are things you know about if you follow tech news, but people mostly do not know about them otherwise. They've never heard of "Alphabet" either. Stuff like that.

Show me any brand in a supermarket and I couldn't tell you who owns them.

When put in these terms it shows it's perfectly normal not to know who's behind chatgpt.

Quick test, who makes Mars, Twix, Snickers?

I agree with your general premise but that one sounds like bullshit to me. Tons of people who otherwise don't know anything about LLMs know about these companies specifically because they are worth a lot of money, and of course tons of people know who OpenAI is because of ChatGPT.

I live in a progressive city in North Carolina and constantly find that when people have never heard of them things that every HN reader (and probably every Bay Area resident, I dunno) would know about. Bubbles are real.

UK perspective: because our broadcast news and current affairs science/tech coverage is still good, I think the average person (at least the average working-age person) likely knows what OpenAI is, knows ChatGPT is called that, and knows what an LLM is. (Whether the average pensioner does, I don't know; maybe older men do)

Anyone who watches the news is likely to know there are several big AI companies, even if they can't name the second; they are likely to know that these companies have absurd valuations and are seeking to build massive data centres; many will know that despite these valuations they are ever deeper in astonishing levels of debt and that this debt could end up being a wider problem.

I doubt the average person has a sense that a company called Anthropic made an AI called Claude; they may not know about Claude. But I think this speaks more to Anthropic's positioning of their own brand and products than anything else; I would expect younger people and anyone working in a white collar position to be a little more likely to be aware of Claude.

Some of this difference in perspective has to do with the nature of being an english-speaking non-American; we see a lot of what you are complaining about on social media, the news covers more of the USA's troubles, etc.

And at the same time we are developing an increasingly adversarial position with the USA, so there's a bit more know-your-adversary going on here. The perceived threat of AI is very much entangled with the perceived threat of a dysregulated USA.

She's mostly using google AI tools because it's easy and free and on her landing page.

‘No, it’s from $majorAmericanCorporation.’ look at screen, see $majorAmericanCorporation name in a pill as citation you can click on within the Google AI Overview

Thanks Google!

  Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-google-ai-overviews/
  Chromium: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-google-ai-overviews/neibhohkbmfjninidnaoacabkjonbahn
  Safari: Seems there are none

Just this morning I looked up what time today's Nintendo Direct livestream is. It correctly told me it's today at 7am PT (confirmed from actual link sources). It then tried to get smart and tell me what that would be in my city's timezone and it was an hour off (possibly because I'm in a timezone without daylight savings)

“Sharkweek, my computer says it has AI on it now!?? Yikes! What does that mean?”

I see lots of posting about using AI to create patches to get new apps working in wine, or reverse engineering firmware. But every time I’ve tried it it’s been quite a lot of work to set everything up. Even more so if you want VMs and some level of isolation from your sensitive data.

Having something that’s just a one click product that just works is more important than the smartest model.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ldkkth/google...

I used free trial of Claude Code and has not seemed to be superior for my usecases.

Hyperfixation on efficiency gains is a disease of modern society.

You are closer to a normie than most here I assume.

I started using claude code a couple of months ago and now almost exclusively use it. My workflow is mostly creating a md file describing what I want then telling claude code to look at it and implement it. I simply use the default model 95% of the time.

A colleague has openly stated that he very much does not care for the process, he just want the product. Where I only care about the product in the sense that I have to, because it's my job and for hobbies I pretty much only care about the process. So an LLM pretty much doesn't make sense, because it help by removing the part I care about. They are good tools for debugging and if you're hopelessly stuck on a detail of some weird and obscure API or configuration.

its definitely worth learning the different strengths and weaknesses for each one and which you should use for planning/building/testing/documentation updates etc.

No point in burning excessive tokens using a high tier/expensive reasoning model like Sol/Xhigh if just updating a readme file.

i'd really like to see some analytics on what proportion of users have ever switched the model in chatgpt because I anecdotally believe it is < 5%

(I’m always on the hunt for “please don’t just friggin sell my data to everyone, if you’re scared enough over getting sued that you’ll listen to the toggle” and “disable sponsored this-and-that”. Plus power user stuff.)

Any quick questions or rubber ducking in a regular “chat”… the model just doesn’t really matter anymore.

They’re all smarter than I need for that stuff (and whatever unfortunate thing that says about me).

That said, I've got more time for projects this week so flew through my Claude max plan. Now I'm trying muse spark 1.3 with opencode which is free with pretty generous usage allowance. First time I've been impressed by meta's AI products. It feels not far below opus 4.8ish

You're driving a home kit car, they're driving something out of the factory.

Eventually - we'll probably drive factory variations as well.

Nerds have always been in the extreme minority. Ignoring the influx of cosplaying MBA financing bros and industry hangers-on as tech became the place where the money is of course. The tech industry started attracting the normies as soon as it became almost as lucrative as finance, so these days the definition gets a little blurry.

I am trying it now. It let me name my muse as Satan. I appreciate that it understands my humor, but I'm also not joking at the same time.

If they have any problems in life, it is that they have too much time on their hands already. An AI agent that automates tasks so they have more free time is exactly what they would not want.

What they really want is something worth spending their time on. That is what everyone pretty much wants but instead we get this bullshit.

All ChatGPT, Claude, Google, Microsoft have/want to have their own assistants.

Huge revenue? Or just huge volume?

If I boost the productivity of a $100k employee by 50%, a business will happily pay $1k/month and consider it a great deal.

But from what I've heard, consumer-facing LLMs find most users won't hand over even $20/month (which is a heavily subsidised price anyway).

Oh, your grandma doesn't know which android version her phone is running? Or the build number of the Windows on her laptop? You just realized this?

For what it's worth, maybe that would help people who struggle with technology in general? Because as far as UI/UX goes, a chat interface for an agent is about as easy as it gets (not every site having its own crappy assistant that can't really do anything useful for you, but is slapped on there for the sake of a checkbox).

I watched the marketing video and to me it seemed pretty nice and practical for the average person.

They care but then it has been made very difficult to find privacy preserving services. Or convenience takes over.

It is like replaceable batteries. Everyone cares but we are not given the choice.

Or the headphone jack...

You know it? I sincerely hope you don’t and that it’s not really “most” of us. That would be incredibly sad. Tracking model releases and discussing “every parameter weight” is very far from intellectually curious discussion (what HN is ostensibly about).

> I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with (…)

> Curse of knowledge and all.

If there’s one thing many of us on HN suffer from, however, is intense hubris. The juxtaposition of claiming “curse of knowledge” while admitting to not having known the most elementary principle of designing for people is a tad tone deaf. Yes, of course most people just stick with the defaults, that’s why dark patterns work and hiding settings is a thing. The industry has been using those strategies to manipulate people for years and years.

> Meta's strategy

Meta has no strategy. The people that made llama work left two years ago. MSI are a bunch of charlatans who are trying to change the culutre and tooling of meta from the outside (I can see their point, trying to work outside of the defaults is incredibly hard.)

its basically a bun fight, with all of your productive workers being poached by frontier labs, and everyone else is either a new grad, burnt out, or a master bullshitter.

How people put up with that kinda crap and continue to use these apps daily for hours on end is mind blowing to me.

But what is wrong in the meta situation is that while Meta officially projects its 2026 AI capital expenditures to be between $130 billion and $145 billion, investigative reports indicate its true future liabilities exceed $690 billion once unlisted back-end deals and lease commitments are factored in. They have used shadow accounting in many places to hide these things. As it's a publicly traded company so if that goes south it hits a lot of 401ks. So that in a nutshell is why its kinda a bad thing. But you are still kinda right in that its not an existential threat and it's not going to wipe Meta out even though those numbers could totally destroy the vast majority of public companies.

WSJ just needs to sound alarm bells so people keep paying for their crappy journalism, and thus everything they write becomes alarmist slop.

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/abad205...

pg47 of the 2Q26 10-Q, linked above.

Ultimately, the equity is really cheap even today on trailing numbers. ~12x EV/trailing EBITDA excluding-RL losses and still growing 25%-34% in each of the last 4 quarters organically at $200B+ of scale.

One of my pet peeves is that people who dont understand business forbid these companies from making investments or starting new businesses now or in the future. Meta has been sitting on $50-100b of cash on the balance sheet for years, and people lose their minds when they start to meaningfully invest it. I think theyve earned the right to diversify

The WSJ is a ghost of what it used to be.

Someone had a poster up of Pam "this is the same thing" on the one side had the apollo space missions, and the other a picture of Zuck avatar next to the Eiffel tower. At the top it had the current RL spend (something like 45billion) they like me working in RL.

there were three teams for everything, sometimes in the same org.

Take hand interactions for example.

There was production hand detection, they were in the OS/product team. They spent a lot of time trying to make sure it was reliable and useable.

Then there was a near research team, who took old state of the art and salmi sliced it until it worked well enough on either current or next gen hardware.

Then there was the production research people, who were derived from control labs, who for some reason were not in RL-research but buried deep in "production"

Then in RL-Research, the biggest org was agios, who also did hand interaction, but hardly any of their work actually made it near to prod. They liked wrist mounted cameras with no privacy systems, because why would you need it on your wrist? its not like those head mounted twats who spent two years trying to master privacy.

You also have to demonstrate "impact" every 6 months. which is really great when your delivery pipeline is 1-7 years.

It is clear now. Alex and co have refocused Meta on Personal AGI or pAGI. The AI that runs your life. It feels appropriate for a social media company that hosts your photos and group chats. Most users will not pay for pAGI so the tokens need to be cheap. Muse is targeted at intelligence per dollar. Many sites do not offer API access. The marketing is focused on computer usage. Installing software adds friction. It runs securely in the cloud. If this isn't the right AI play for Meta then I don't know what would be.

Their ads team wants AI to improve their targeting and ad creation. Some want to have frontier AI including coding. Others might want personal AI agent. Then there's the flirting with renting their compute

And I'm not even taking shots at them. I think Google is exactly the same. I think OpenAI is largely the same (though lately more following Anthropic footsteps and focusing on productivity). And I think the whole field is so new and allows change in so many places - that it's sort of normal or fine to throw things at the wall and see what sticks.

But nothing as of now says to me that Meta has a clear strategy around llms

I would say they should put ALL their focus on Next Generation content generation… I honestly think in the ~10 years we’re going to see cinema completely flip from high budget blockbusters to way cheaper, personalised “Choose Your Own Adventure” content but where the story changes/rewrites itself in realtime based on constant user feedback (thumbs up from popups mid movie, facial expressions etc).

Meta could be the next generation’s Disney, Warner Brothers, Universal etc

All the streaming giants had ample budget and engineering talent to make interactive fiction happen, but didn’t, presumably because they know a) not everybody is creative that way and b) a big part of culture is that you can discuss it with others, which doesn’t work for personalised works.

You can’t look at the big giants with their budgets and think “If they can’t do it, nobody will”. The bigger you are, the slower you’ll move. This is exactly why FAANGS buy innovation rather than build it all themselves.

I’m 100% positive we’ll see exactly what I described in the coming years and it will be from an unknown startup with two founders, no budget, and just a coffee machine to keep them going

it was always "personal AI", thats why Zuck wants AR so much.

The problem is, before about 2025, there were a bunch of clear systems and procedures that stopped your personal data from being used for dodgy things. For example the browser inside oculus didn't emit any site specific usage metrics. This means that they couldn't use your VR porn habit to target you.

The same with the raybans. There was a perm block on processing user data offsite/outside of meta systems. (which is why we couldn't use FAIRs AWS cluster to do research on research data, because even though it was paid for data, it was still technically 'user' data because it had non-public domain PII [peoples faces, voices and locations in it]) So getting access to any kind of data that came in from raybans was a massive "nope never"

Then we find out that someone convinced Zuck to let people train on private rayban data? and they send it to fucking third party annotators, and new fucking annotators at that. That to me smells like MSL. To get how much of a big fucking deal that is, the original raybans had two cameras, so that FAIR could do some research or other. but because they didn't want to make a separate infra just for research, they couldn't get permission to use any of the data.

Meta had a working always on assistant that could locate, transcribe and recall any thing inside the offices (assuming you wanted to carry a fannypack with a jetson in it) it was always personal.

its now a case of how much shit they can get away with, its not like the FCC are going to audit them anymore.

Part of the reason Meta is scrambling for purpose is how much privacy laws and changes have hurt them while their platforms fail to attract new generations. Ads are still selling, but they can no longer tie them to actual sales. Users are still logging in, but aging (i.e. failures to capture the younger generation).

Personal AGI has massive hurdles to overcome to be anywhere near the levels of profitability their ailing ads network is. This will bring in new data for them to mine for sure. But it will basically have to outrun new legislature that will likely limit just how "personal" these systems can get as they seek the profit they need to sustain growth via said data.

It would not really be useful to have that conversation with employees because it's incredibly distracting (now product strategy is up for debate with way too many cooks in the kitchen), and very few employees have the exposure or skills to meaningfully contribute even if they think they do. I saw it firsthand at Google TGIFs.

Meta's strategy seems to be "personal agents" quite consistently. Remember they tried to buy Manus? And note that Muse Spark and the meta AI platform products clearly seem to prioritize web search, computer/browser use, and vision/language tasks over coding, which is something that had to bake for a long time. Also, this product launch itself is pretty interesting:

1. It's clearly a fast follow to the current FOTM hype startup Instinct with a much more comprehensive implementation and integration with their other agent products.

2. It's kind of like openclaw, which got a lot of non-developers very excited but was basically consistently unusable. Except this agent's compute runs remotely and presumably has slightly more sane development practices. IMO it's the first main openclaw-like product that has made it to the "just works" level of usability.

3. The focus on ecommerce is actually really really important, because Meta is trying to capture the intent/demand-driven purchasing flow that Google currently owns through search. Controlling the top of funnel is what enables google to make hundreds of billions of dollars per year on search ads. Meta is an advertising company and Google's search ads business is the most lucrative and centralized/well-defended advertising market in human history.

So it is actually a really big deal that Meta is trying to go after it (at least, the CUJ, it's possible that they'd monetize the agent-driven UX differently than search ads) because it's probably their best shot at disrupting that market and one of the few growth opportunities that would actually make a dent on their balance sheet. Obviously Meta is not going to lay out all that strategy stuff explicitly because for all intents and purposes it's a distraction and shifts the conversation in an unproductive direction (the strat behind the product, rather than the product itself). But it's pretty clear if you look for it.

Edit: Actually I thought about the advertising business more and I think in the short term this is partially about attribution/conversion. In 2022 the Apple tracking changes cost Meta $10B in lost conversion metrics; an agent-driven and proxied purchasing flow has built-in attribution and funnel measurement which is very valuable in its own right!

It's Matryoshka nested parallel construction for corporate strategy.

There's a real, coherent, aggressive strategy that only a few in the inner concentric circle know, that's ring-zero.

Then there's the strategy that ring-zero tells ring-one, which isn't the real strategy, but it's sufficient to get EVPs and VPs to execute in rough alignment with the true, ring-zero strategy.

Then ring-one does the same dance with ring-two, etc.

Words to live by.

The rest of the users just use whatever the default is and get their work done.

You need those people digging into the latest newness and discussing strategy on how to best use new tools so that the "rest of the users" can follow and do the work.

But, it’s the first time in my short career, i have shied away from being on bleeding edge of tooling. Specifically, LLM tooling. Firstly, since LLM’s are not yet needed or good in my field of $work, but; even in my programming hobby, whenever I venture out to explore, it all feels too snake oil to me. And do I even need to begin why the f*k people curl | bash??

I dunno maybe its just old habits, but I can’t bring myself to download a skill or whatever without going through its contents.

And then it just is too much to keep up.

For instance, for a period of time, everyone on hn were glazing claude and then after having a great UI experience on their ios app, i got a simple one month subscription, but by that time, hn already was making friends with codex and pi. My searches for blog posts written by ‘AI/LLM’ normies using it for reasonable tasks, has been disappointing, and just too polluted with people completely vibing and not reviewing any code. And then you have power users whose entire purpose is to try out new stuff, rather than stay consistent on one toolchain and maybe also share a perspective of if the tool is degrading or not.

Sadly, amongst all the agentic hype, the autocompletion mode seems to have fallen behind which I enjoy a lot more since it allows me to architect things in a particular fashion without bugging myself with nitty gritty details.

Hopefully, as these things start costing more money, things will get streamlined to the point where few camps will emerge similar to how the text editors work. I am looking for an update to ‘what the vim of llm tooling look like’ blog post any day now.

Just for the record, the small group of people never made any impact. Barely anyone paid attention to their discussion, and they were not part of any decision making process.

That's why Google already captured such a big part of the market with Gemini: they're now integrating it with just about everything. GMail? Gemini. Search? (asnwer by and "do you want to continue discussing this with") Gemini. Workspace? Gemini.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/on...

They may not have yet the same number of MAU as OpenAI but the Gemini experience is much more streamlined than ChatGPT: when people are presented with it, they just use it.

And to be fair Google's flash model are just amazing.

Practically every chat UI these days defaults to "auto" mode which does that

This is something I wish more people in tech understood, especially anyone who gets to decide the defaults for popular hardware and software.

The average consumer will never, ever change the defaults. So it's incredibly important that your product is an amazing experience with the default settings.

For this kind of tool to be useful it basically has to be able to impersonate you digitally. I know I personally have zero trust for Meta to do this securely and without exploiting me, whereas Google I feel a lot better about here. After all Google has made a business out of safeguarding data with gmail, drive, etc. Same with Microsoft and Apple. Meta, OpenAI, not so much.

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!

Grok Bot doesn't have direct access to Twitter like Grok on x.com does, for no good reason, but it does have an API plugin which gives you free $20 credit if you install it.

When these companies want to lock you into their platforms it seems kinda dumb to not give their own products access to their own products.

All of Meta's products have to be user-hostile, because the first thing you want is interop and that kills their monetization.

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.

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.

Too many sectors of the economy sell the lie that they are operating as a free market when in reality they are confusopolies that inflate their margins by being tricking me into buying the worse product.

I can’t wait to have an agent navigate and summarize my options for me, so I can choose without having to be dragged through deal terms salad.

Choose from $9.99 for 1000 minutes then 12c/min and maximum 400 minute per day, $12.99 for 2000 minutes then 10c/min local only, both with optional NationalTalkXtra add on for $1.99, or $14.99 for unlimited minutes up to 1000 minutes per day, and 2c/min thereafter except on weekends with our $2.99 WeekendPlus addon…

But, I can definitely see a fair argument from the e-commerce businesses that stand to lose from that, that by removing their control over the shopping experience in favor of an opaque agent, they lose the ability to effectively communicate with their customers. Or to provide a coherent/smooth purchasing flow where important stuff like price/dates/shipping are properly surfaced to the user.

That argument would I think be hard to separate from the desire to corral customers into their marketing brochure and convert site visitors into purchasers without churn. But it is true that the LLM in the middle could consistently miss things, or have weird biases/preferences that force vendors to rebuild their sites around LLM tics instead of actual people, janky harnesses that go unnoticed by end users but cause missed sales due to stale data or blind spots, etc.

Also, demoting their sites to glorified databases with a shipping/fulfillment API will give the buyer agent’s provider a lot of power over them and break their ability to establish branding/repeat-customers. Those are the only ways they can reliably carve out margin that otherwise gets whisked away by the advertising platforms pitting them in a zero-sum competition for placement. So it’s possible it could starve out or kill e-commerce the same way Google’s changes to search (the ai box and inline info) hurt the ad-funded websites their info came from.

You must gave no idea how susceptible agents are to marketing! I used agents in conjunction to my own research on a niche item lately and while it was helpful for showing some things I hadn’t considered it was dead wrong, frequently about a lot of stuff. But by all means, give up more control

I also don’t think I’d ever hand the credit card over to an agent. I just want a summary of what it has found and what it intends to do before pressing “pay”.

> 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 think this is a foregone conclusions. Traditional internet marketing is dead - including funnels and dark patterns.

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

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!

My personal anecdote - we had a complex family travel in the summer, with 6 ppl and 6 separate flights booked (some multi-leg). SAS messed up on one booking - they decided to cancel the flight we had from Oslo, and rebooked us to an earlier date (2 days shift). That wouldn't work for the rest of our schedule, so I had to rebook, overpay extra money for now longer & more expensive flights - but to add the insult to the injury, when I did this through their website, they didn't transfer the food that I paid for the earlier reservation. Calling them in roaming and trying to get it fixed with a human support agent didn't help - the agent said he just can't fix it on his end, and suggested that we just file for reimbursement on their site.

I never had time to file it since July.

But today I had a reason - to test Muse - and asked it to handle it for me. To my surprise, it dug through all of the SAS emails and actually found the emails confirming that the food fees were reimbursed exactly the same date when SAS moved our original flight. Apparently I didn't notice those notifications since they were spamming with all kinds of notifications that day. But, if not some tool like Muse, I wouldn't even find time to handle this and either file a claim or figure out my miss on their earlier reimbursement.

Eventually, though, Muse Confidential VM is an even more locked-in option coming, per that blog post...

Mm, I see a small note on the second half of a bullet ( https://about.fb.com/news/2026/09/introducing-muse-personal-... ) that you can opt out of training. I know I’m a privacy weirdo since this didn’t make the FAQ in the OP:

  “— People can change access or disconnect a service whenever they want. People can also opt out of their interactions being used to train Meta’s AI models.”

Wonder if opting out of training means they’d avoid using information gleaned from our emails to better serve their advertisers. Without knowing I guess I’d be concerned about even correspondents of mine using the service.

As for training, I'd be highly surprised if they use the data they get from APIs for training. But the conversation itself & thinking trajectories probably will, unless you opt out, like you pointed out.

The only problem is, like someone else pointed out, that I don't trust Meta.

I almost think they would have done better to launch this as more disconnected sub-brand. I think Meta / Facebook are actual brand baggage for this sort of thing, even outside of tech circles.

> genuinely

We can tell.

I agree. The time to launch something like this would have been during the OpenClaw hype cycle (although, obviously, Muse is much more limited in the types of tasks it can accomplish).

I thought about installing it, but I realized I couldn't think of any real uses for it in my personal life.

I absolutely want a general purpose assistant.

I absolutely don't trust Facebook with the necessary data.

  "What do you think of me," I say, as I take off my shirt. My body isn't perfect, but I'm just 8 years old – I still have time to bloom.

Can’t much trust anything their top people are signing off on. They hurt kids (see IG lawsuits), and thus definitely wouldn’t mind hurting adults like me, so I avoid them whenever I possibly can.

[1] https://reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chat...

After everything meta has pulled over the last few decades, do you actually trust in CEO speeches like that?

Pick a lane please

The shopping experience is significantly less hostile than Amazon’s 1P digital storefront and I kinda don’t care if fb knows that I want to buy a computer.

The only thing to worry about is that they want you to install a native app. But this UX would be difficult to provide for free via the web due to the obvious abuse potential of giving free access to LLMs + remote compute + browser and tool use. And I think as long as you use it to shop or automate web tasks (and give them access to the top of funnel for customer intent, the $300B/yr thing Google monetizes) they don’t really have any reason to abuse your data.

Whenever I try to do something with ChatGPT or Gemini, it just refuses to do things citing limitations in its web browsing capabilities. An everyday LLM that can actually fill forms and do stuff for you on the Internet without having to run on your computer, write programs or interact through special harnesses is what normal people actually need.

It's a different need from the agentic coding type of LLM, where you provide the environment where it can write and execute arbitrary code.

Do the same thing for recipes and buying groceries.

Or "order me take out from a bunch of places I haven't been that you think I'd like." The AI can ask follow up questions and see your ratings.

"Make a music playlist for my daughter when she enters the car based on the conversation last month. I remember vaguely her mentioning what she liked"

These are things that 100% people want AI to do -- imagine if you had a personal assistant, is something people have asked for since forever.

Now, I kind of agree on the minimal use compared to business, because in business everything has always been highly integrated. That said, that's changing rapidly.

The music playlist example in particular seems highly unrealistic or just bound to be a meaningless interaction. I’m making a playlist for my daughter based on a conversation that I forgot? If I forgot the content of the conversation then why am I even trying to salvage that into something meaningful?

“I made you this playlist based on a conversation I forgot, but I asked the AI to creep through our conversation recording so that it looks like I was listening to you!”

“Oh, thanks I guess, I like Heartbreaker by Led Zeppelin, not the Rolling Stones.”

People shop a lot on the internet, actually. Between that and ads for the things people shop for, it’s pretty much the backbone of the Internet economy.

I bet they would purchase more things than they currently do, and seriously break the economics of Google/Amazon search ads (about $300B of yearly spending just for those two), display ads, and internet-first e-commerce sites if they could just ask an agent working for them to help research/source/purchase things without all the navigation and dark patterns in the middle. Personally I would probably spend at least $1k/yr more on snack/beverage subscriptions alone if it had less friction.

> working class peasant consumer

You mean the majority of people in the world? Most people only their computers to entertain themselves, look things up, buy stuff, and complete tedious tasks (taxes, email, etc) they’d rather not do.

How much do you and your peers spend a year on online shopping and how much do they pay out of pocket for SAAS or AI tokens? And how many of your offline purchases had a significant amount of associated online research involved despite technically completing offline? (Houses, cars, schools, hardware) Yeah that’s pretty much where all the money in the global software industry comes from

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

Is it geo-restricted to the US for now?

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

They are big enough and pay well to have a competent team. Compared with momandpop.com (willing but too small) or equifax (big but unwilling) and given the kind of data they are guarding, they’re probably the best in the business.

"...and your conversations are not shared with Meta's ad systems".

I think they missed off "for now".

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

Like the announcement said, it's running in its own VM, but it's an impressively transparent system: You have access to its System Files right in the GUI, which surprised me. You can look at the AGENTS.md and other harness files it uses as well as some shell scripts, bash files, cronjob folder etc. It seems a lot more obvious to me how Muse works than say Claude or ChatGPT, which don't make it nearly as clear where stuff lives and how long its there for. I mean, I get they use VMs as well, but there's definitely no "System Files" menu option in those phone apps at least. The Muse bot seems much more "permanent" in my mind as a result.

The AI is quite helpful as well. It let me download its 350Mb "hatch" binary which runs the bot/harness/agent (written in Rust), plus it zipped up the library of skills it uses and all the system files in my VM for me to look at on my machine. Nothing extra special, but it was nice to browse through all the files and the binary strings to see how it ticked. It also explained the limits of the VM to me - for example, that I can't SSH into the VM as it runs through a proxy and can't be reached directly, but was willing to help me add itself to my Tailscale network.

It's basically a nice looking UI on top of a typical agent harness using standard Markdown files, all running in a little Linux cloud VM spun up just for you. And Muse Spark 1.3 is finally good enough that it was actually useful (and fast), so I can see why they launched the app/service now.

From a non-geek perspective, I asked it about selling my old Nintendo Switch on Facebook Marketplace - something I've been meaning to get around to for about a year or so now - and it said I can upload a picture of all the stuff I have and it'll check prices and create multiple listings for me. That alone might make me hate Meta a little less after this if it works as advertised.

“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.

I do not. Craigslist was completely anonymous. Marketplace a lot less so. This makes a massive difference.

> marketplace seems to be where everyone in my area has congregated.

I think that is not just limited to your area.

Same for events, plenty of local or more spread sites for events in each of these counties.

So glad my general area didn't fall into the Facebook trap.

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

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?"

But it's pretty niche and one-off for me. How do you market that? There are 20 of these random things per year, but no single one of them is likely to resonate generally.

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.

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 …

> interactions being used to train Facebook's AI models

Yupp, the only "edge" Facebook could possibly have, is user data.

Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks

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

Good enough for me to stop recommending them.

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.

Part of the fun of holidays IS THE PROCESS OF DISCOVERY! Imagine wanting to kill that.

Business travel? Sure but Im sure solutions already exist.

Zuckerberg has ZERO vision - he has a catalogue of content he can leverage to do so much. What an abosolute bozo!

Generally when booking flights I want to be directly involved with every step of the decision to the point that the web frontend is more or less the ideal interface for it.

I don't even like booking flights on my phone. I get a "real computer" for that work.

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/

That said the presumption on my part there is that most people read the news widely and based on conversations with the people I meet in life that may well not be the case.

It's easy to slip into the mindset of "if only I could enlighten these unwashed masses, they'd see how right I am!" I think the bottom line is that sometimes people just have different values.

It's not even that. The average HN user would gladly use it even if it was privacy-invading. Just like they use Gmail every day and have no qualms to upload gazillion private docs to OpenAI and Anthropic.

It's just that Facebook isn't cool anymore.

My problem isn't privacy or Meta spying on me. The product isn't useful.

My partner's algorithm gets more updates from my family than I do. Dunno why. "How did X do on the marathon?" they ask. And I go "X ran the what now when, huh?".

Same with all groups. Forums died, people moved to FB groups and now conversations are in an eternal September and impossible to follow.

I distrust Meta but if I'm being honest, if their tools were awesome and cheap enough I might start using Muse. A lot of people are in my camp: aware of privacy issues, too lazy to be strict about it.

Then again, maybe I won't come crawling back. Privacy issues barely affected most people in democratic America. If it ever goes full authoritarian (and we're heading in the wrong direction), then they'll matter a lot.

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

(It's about Meta so memes are allowed)

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.

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)

When I look at businesses trying to turn this research and technology into profit, I think that this is a bubble that will burst. You are not alone, I am very doubtful of the current concoction of AI features being offered. The true winners and legitimate applications will emerge over the next 30 years. Google, Nvidia, and Microsoft could all become IBM, Xerox, and Kodak. Or maybe they find a way to pivot. Because truly, there is an amazing amount of nonsense BS in the AI hype train.

Acknowledging the outside chance that recursive self-improvement works and we just scale directly into a Kardashev 1 civilization within my children's lifetime, and K-2 in theirs'. Can't rule it out no matter how hard I try.

* Filling out tedious PDF paperwork with the same personal information over and over again

* Having it proactively scan my calendar to give me a heads up on potential traffic issues (like making plans and forgetting that a marathon was being held and running into detour after detour after detour).

An ai that is always at your reach and can interface with everything.

I don’t use these work apps because they don’t do anything that improves my workflow or computer experience

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.

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 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.

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