Hacker News

I think you're right, but I'd add that... if this wasn't obvious to you without being told, you should really question your worldview a bit.

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 think of my mom who doesn't care and doesn't understand the difference between google AI Overview vs actual google search results. "I looked it up" - she doesn't care what tool she is using she just wants answers to how long bake pork or the best throw pillows to buy or whatever else she is looking up.

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

I'm a coder and a daily driver of ChatGPT and I don't really know what Sol is or how I can access it. I follow discussions here and know of its excistence, but I can't remember its relation to other models or tiers by heart. What ever the default thing the website is giving me has been good enough for my needs for years.

I confess that when I ride the subway, I like to peer at other people's phones to see what they are doing. The ones that interest me the most are other people talking with an LLM. I am always surprised by the wide variety of people who are using LLMs to ask an infinite variety of questions. From the surface-level PR annoucement here by Meta, this seems like a good business idea.

> "just ChatGPT, what is Sol?."

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 think we are lacking in the easy to use side of things. Once you go beyond browser based chatbots things become hard to set up.

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.

> I think Meta's strategy is to capture the 'normie-tier' of AI users.

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 are not 'normies' - we're just 'nerds'.

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

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

It seems like on the “Chat” mode of ChatGPT it doesn’t allow switching the model. It’s just “5.6” with the effort level

To be fair I stopped caring about specific versions as well. I don't seem to notice the big difference anymore on daily tasks and questions.

Yesterday I helped a maaaaybe 40 year old woman connect to the wifi at my local library so she could get on a zoom call. Made me realize most of the world is exactly like that.

I agree, and stay away from meta generally in life wherever possible

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

I think all AI companies want to capture normie users too, it's a huge market.

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

Even with all of this nuance why would the regular joe go to muse when they have chatgpt and gemini? Most of their actual productive data is likely with Google anyway.

This is not limited to non technical users. Plenty of people don't care to switch between models and just pick the latest model.

I use claude all day every day, and sometimes codex, and I still don't change models. I guess I'm more interested in accomplishing the thing than in experimenting with a dozen ways of accomplishing the same thing.

I met a normie who was using ChatGPT to write production code… in instant mode. No thinking enabled.

Literally what I was about to comment. This is meant to capture the normies, the busy parents managing school and work, the grandparents who want to make most of their retirement.

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.

Yeah this to me is why Apple wins

Many people deep into tech (like most commenters here) may fall into the trap of overestimating average user's knowledge or interest in the details of the tech: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...

It's not a bad market to aim for. No one else really is.

Cant wait for Snitch Bench results of this

> I then realized

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?

> I know most of us here on HN track model releases quite frequently and discuss every parameter weight out of them

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.

To me it sounds like they are simply taking social moon shots. They tried to do a phone, tried to make a kitchen videophone, tried to make their own cryptocurrency, and tried to dominate open source AI, and now this is trying to make something like a digital robotic assistant. It might have reached a peak with the metaverse, when Zuck thought his corporation was destined to be the ruler of a Snow Crash style metaverse, to the point of renaming it. Maybe that's still the plan and they are looking for something that will lead to another metaverse play.

[dead]

Thanks, Simon.

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 like that we are talking about prompt injections from you to your personal assistant. Obviously I know what they are for, but still, it's so funny that we've just normalized building software adversarial to the consumers supposedly engaging with the product.

"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."

Let's see who this really is, Scooby...

Regex! It was you all along!?

In other words it’s turtles all the way down

Younger people may not use Facebook, but they use Instagram.

Same folks that still use Yahoo or Ask

> mismanages its access to sensitive personal data

> interactions being used to train Facebook's AI models

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

Openclaw creator Peter Steinberg was in talks with Zuck at the beginning of the year before choosing to work for Openai.

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

They're not the first. Each lab has its own: grok bot, codex desktop, perplexity computer, Claude whatever

This is not even true. Gemini Spark has been there for a while.

Grokbot wa first and enterprise and consumer focused

They have been leading research on AI until ChatGPT was released.

They had the FAIR, and Yann Le Cun.

I mean, Google and x.AI already have stuff like this. There's plenty of other options as well. And even outside of that, I've heard the promise of "let AI book your reservations!" since before LLMs became a thing.

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

I don't understand the meaning of the last sentence of this comment

xAI/cursor was first with grokbot

Meta isn't known for having great customer support

"This account needs permission to view this page

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

Instinct exists with the same features. It is quite good. I was thinking they were gonna get acquired by meta 100%, but looks like meta has a competitor.

Also, this is meta we are talking about. Last place that should have my kids data

Haha I actually clicked through to see the mascot, and wow, at it's best it could be a Miyazaki ghost, but at it's worst it looks like a haunted doll

source?link?

Your example is about helping a consumer navigate a market to get the best product and I think it’s bang on.

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…

I think ChatGPT work (web) uses the client browser for browser use, butn not sure. So it should be possible.

[flagged]

Same. Personal ORM essentially with a sqlite DB that sinks to a home server. Totally useful without an agent at all, but exposes basically all functionality via tools that have access limited for private information and the like.

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.

I'm not sure - it may as well be that regular consumers just don't realize they need this and will greatly benefit from it.

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.

No, after seeing how powerful AI is at my job, I definitely want AI to help plan dates, book flights, generate spreadsheets, do all the things.

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

Try asking it to find a good deal for you for <item> across multiple sites. Then tell it to use the browser to navigate through the two most promising sites to confirm pricing and availability, and prepare comprehensive breakdown with its findings.

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

> “nobody asked for this”

I absolutely want a general purpose assistant.

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

> I think the product as shown in this marketing material with these examples falls squarely in the “nobody asked for this” territory of AI.

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 disagree. It matches exactly what I need.

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.

I've been alpha testing muse and there's precisely one area it's useful in.... Finding things on Facebook marketplace and haggling for me lol

The first example I saw was making a shopping list for school for pick up.

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.

"Your data is safe with us, trust me bro" /s

It’s sad, but non-issue for super-majority of the population.

I'll be interested to see what access it gives you to Meta products.

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.

I use gemini all the time to check transcripts of videos! Same idea

This is a great idea! Utilizing the world's most advanced software on piles of the most cutting edge hardware, you could do something amazing like give it "write a simple Web2.0 style page with a list of updates from my friends in chronological order"! Imagine how glorious such a simple fun social network could be!

Not in my country yet. Oh well.

enjoy that while it lasts :)

They are just grabbing the low hanging fruits to make investors happy.

If you already trust them with all your Facebook posts and your Instagram and etc it's probably more tempting?

yeah, i could at least see telling this muse thing to post stuff to instagram for me.

It's marketing to investors.

I wouldn't trust Meta - period. The fact that this agent is made by Meta is reason enough to completely ignore it :)

We should remember that Meta is the largest social media company in the world, so they do not have much trouble with people trusting them with data.

After the release of Qwen 3.8 I've been dabbling with my "Agent Computer". That is, a secondary GPU on my home computer. Intel B70 with enough VRAM to run Q6 and some context on llama.cpp, plus a ComfyUI instance. Total yolo mode with full access to my PC, --tools=all and sudo NOPASSWD.

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.

Your comment is slightly reminiscent of the response to dropbox when it was first announced on HN.

Yeah! I think that was a response to a similar human concierge service Magic

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

That was to be the voice control for the Portal smart speaker before we integrated Alexa.

That was the day of Facebook trying to copy WeChat "One chat to rule them all!" Sure!

Lol right? And the REAL irony is that this will likely just be a way to show you even MORE ads while collecting MORE data for MORE targeted advertising.

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.

[dead]

having used it for a bit, yes, one of the first things it asked me for, unprompted, were things to set it up to buy stuff. i declined but it still consistently wants to spend money; research a trip? as soon as it has any results it prompts to start booking stuff. etc.

The Target marketing team famously could predict when a woman is pregnant but it was too creepy to, uh, Target them with only baby goods in dynamic marketing materials so they would mix in a few masculine things like lawn mowers into the catalog. No idea if that is what Meta is doing here but it's one explanation.

I think the average user doesn't have enough going on to need that, or they will be unable to articulate what it is they want the agent to do.

I asked it to by me concert tickets, it suggested ticket master for 90$ each, I asked it to find cheaper tickets and found something else 70$ each — I found it really convenient.

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

The best selling point is an end-to-end purchase flow that you don't have think about at all, it does the price comparisons for you. However, if you want to use it to just get the list of top candidates and compare and go make the final decision yourself I'm sure it can do that for you too. Either way I see a future where these claw-like agents can fit into everyday use cases.

[dead]

The amount of usage you get is insane when you stack OpenCode GO subsidy on top of contributor.

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.

it's supposed to work from whatsapp. It's US-only so I could not verify.

I'd trust thieves with my data over Meta because thieves can do less harm with it.

Safe and secure on our servers. We will use it to sell you stuff.

Remember that time they were spying on all of their "free" VPN traffic through some elaborate scheme? Onavo, for anyone interested. This was only like 2 years ago.

I trust Meta far more than, say, Anthropic. For one, the judgments against them from the government just mean that they have tons of oversight and auditing happening now. The other providers are just the wild west with privacy.

Also:

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

I think they missed off "for now".

Do you mean in terms of competence at resisting breaches? I trust Meta’s security team a lot more than anyone else’s in that respect.

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.

You should probably trust thieves more than Meta.

OpenAI?

The problem is that most of the annoying parts of daily life are pretty personal and don't have clear APIs. Like, I need to coördinate with my building manager, a contractor and that contractor's insurance agency about their policy. A personal assistant would be great for this (it's all over email.)

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.

Had codex organise my music collection yesterday. I think it'll do my quarterly reporting soon as well. Indeed a pretty lame example they used.

At least it wasn't booking a flight or restaurant reservation.

I liked how in the example here it tells the user "Your flight is delayed 2hrs due to storms in Denver..."

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!

It's because people who create these use cases perceive this as a difficult and painful task - but how many people really think about their flights over the day? Pretty sure the majority of Meta users has not flight booked for the next 3 months. I can only assume that this is more seen as a showstopper. Look how difficult this is and how we solved it.

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.

I’m pretty sure if you asked my mom what problems AI could help solve for her, navigating website’s purchasing/account flows and directly answering questions about the contents of her email would be #1 and #2.

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

And your emails! It can manage your email and schedule! Wow, so great, it can handle all the 10 DHL notifications and other spammy things I got over the past week. And my empty personal calendar

The original selling point of mobile web (tiny screen with text-only data, before real mobile web) on mobile phones or even watches was checking stock prices and weather. It was really weird that checking stock prices was something you need to do on the go, especially from the watch.

If you want to know why Silicon Valley Execs think these are such huge pain points, think about what Silicon Valley Execs farm out to their armies of personal assistants. Some Senior Vice President guy probably has a lot of restaurant bookings and would forget them if they didn't have a PA to help organize them.

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.

To be fair it is a pain in the ass… but i'm sure having an AI do it would make things worse :D

Or in Muse’s case, helping your child pick out school supplies for their third grade year.

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 think product just uses these use cases as their example demos and then when they show it to marketing theyre like "OK I guess this is what it's for".

(at least, this is what ive seen)

these are all tarpit ideas

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

Oh god, as if marketplace wasn't already enough of a toxic cesspool. I miss Craigslist more and more every year, unfortunately FB marketplace seems to be where everyone in my area has congregated.

..every tech company has bern doing this

In fact, I’d go as far as to say there’s few companies I’d entrust less the level of data required for a tool like a “personal AI agent”…

Agreed. Love the idea and the polish. Hate the owners

You are not the target audience.

But they say "It comes with strong privacy and security built in" right on the page!

I'd rather have Butterbean punch me in the balls than install a "personal assistant" app from Meta on my computer.

But people love to! Really sad

too late for that, based on all the tracking there is.

I've been testing it today. It's fine. It's like base-level GPT or Gemini. I actually kinda like the cute thing it does where it emoji reacts to your messages before it acts on them. Grok Bot needs to steal that.

It's good that you don't have to call it "Muse." That's kind of a weird name for a servant; how exactly is this email-parsing bot inspiring works of art? Perhaps it was re-used from another project.

I named mine Claude

Isn't the functionality just a super-set of what other popular chatbots like chatgpt or claude do? Ie chat interface for llm with various tools on top. It seems like those products have plenty of happy consumers using them, and muse just does that same thing, perhaps with different or more tools.

I think they will eventually and I will just simply keep doing things manually until then. I will not use any of Meta’s AI products for personal use.

Agreed. I'm not a fan of Meta in any way, but I've had fun messing with the app this afternoon - both on my phone and the web version at muse.ai - to see what it could do.

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.

There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined, most people don't give a shit and are just trying to minimize cognitive effort. My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day because it would mean less planning.

I had that conversation several times with friends outside of tech. The universal reaction is just a shrug - "my life is boring, what do they care".

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.

Fact is most people don't really care. And they don't really know why they should care either. All the problems feels like something far away, while they are being exploited and sold without fully realising.

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

This is probably why they are launching now. There's no real other competitor right now in the nicely made managed openclaw space for personal use (or at least, very very early. Maybe Grokbot can be considered the lead competitor but afaik it did not gain mindshare). Instinct is supposed to come out soon and by not being associated with Meta it'd be really appealing just on that front vs this. But being first to market is a real reason to use it and chance to gain lasting market share.

There's something like 177 million facebook users in the US. Most probably have Facebook/instagram/etc installed on their phones, streaming their location data/etc, without a worry in the world. Most would probably very much enjoy the utility of this agent.

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 the life of a parasite. You don’t care if it takes just a bit from you. And it eventually protects you from worse parasites. (Like the us blocking china)

Ya, I'm not sure why anyone would choose to use this over any other option that doesn't sacrifice your privacy.

I might use it for helping manage Facebook marketplace listings as that is data that is already on meta.

You are right, sometimes the simplest answer is the right now. Don't trust Meta. Life is going to be much simpler. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me continuously for 20 years, shame on me.

For this reason alone it's DOA for me.

Because people are apathetic by nature until things become a real problem.

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.

Every single HN post about anything Meta-adjacent starts with a comment like this. Guys, we get it, the hive mind of HN doesn't like Meta/Facebook/Zuck. Fine. But can we actually comment on the technology and tools rather than the company for once?

Why are all the seemingly smart people on HN so narrow-minded to the point of speaking idiotic nonsense? What do you think their 3.6B MAU are, all bots?

Damn yeah why do people even use Facebook or WhatsApp or instagram? How does a company become a multi billion dollar company at all? Guess what.. it’s because people use it and don’t care.

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.

[dead]

They tend to devolve to the lowest common denominator of what the decision-making chain can understand and resonate with on zero context.

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.

Out of curiosity, do you have other ideas or things you want it to do? It just seems like they always converge on the same set of executive tasks because they’re a nail that is exceptionally well suited to this particular hammer.

My AI agent decided with the Ticketmaster agent that since I couldn't get the tickets to the show I really wanted, I'd instead attend a show they haven't sold very many tickets for as it's a bit of a drive. I forgot to charge my AI agent's loyalty this week and it fell below the threshold of trustworthiness so it struck this awful deal. It's stipulated that I attend or I risk even further matrix degradation of my agent in the agentweb. I even spent all last week providing my AI agent with RealTestimonials about various consumer products for the streams but apparently they want you to manually charge it every week and you have to have a full package of tokens, you can't partially charge your agent even just to break a threshold on its behavior matrix.

fwiw, it’s likely not product designers making these decisions. More likely, designers and researchers planned to explore use cases people would actually use and benefit from, but were told to focus on the ones leadership deemed important

I'm sure there's a way to pay for Hermes Agent. https://portal.nousresearch.com/cloud

And on top of that, we've all seen how confidently LLM's get things wrong. I've seen them get better, but even the current SOTA models fumble. Why would you want to send a bot a message "sure, reschedule my flight" and have a bot potentially fumble that in all sorts of ways? I really really do not see the appeal. My calendar and my emails and my things to do are all things I want to be on top of. Not have it half-assed or potentially messed up by a chatbot made to harvest all your data.

Weirdly still so much more human (and somewhat relatable) than he ever was in an interview

Unless you are Peter Steinberger, this was not your idea.