The privacy issue blocks me from adopting this or other personal assistants: do I want to give muse my identity data and access to my mail, calendar, and phone so it can do even basic tasks like make appointments or pay bills?
It will be interesting to see if muse's privacy features can get users over this.
I'm a designer, but I admit it's really hard to predict what products and UX are going to work in the AI age.
Chatbots have been tried for a decade and were a total failure. With AI, it has become the fastest-growing way to interact with technology, ever.
GPT-5 tried to have an auto router and create abstraction for the user; people hated it. Instinct and Muse are doing the same with a different framing; it's going wild.
There are tons of these little examples where a small difference in framing, a small threshold in tech, and product assumptions completely flip on their heads.
It's amazing to follow but requires you to be way more flexible in your assumptions.
I think devil’s in the details on all of your examples, although I very much agree with your overall point - it’s so nuanced in terms of timing, current capabilities, etc.
Re: chatbots were tried but it’s a wrong model for a deterministic system. It’s the best one for a probabilistic one.
Re: chatGPT auto-router - 1) I suspect explicit model selection matters less in agentic contexts (this thing is coordinating a bunch of other agents for me) vs QA context where you want to make sure you’re getting the best answer. 2) I suspect auto-routing matters less now that models are way better
But I have to admit that in the design field we have a strong tendency to over-rely on "proper rules" and to overgeneralize learnings. (My pet peeve is when B2C patterns are transferred as-is in B2B or prosumers)
AI makes some old UX viable but can also unlock tons of value once you break your assumptions and reluctance. An example I see a lot here and on socials is how much of the code developers actually read nowadays. In the case of Instict, it is how many people actually share their credit card with an unknown startup's IA to buy stuff. I just heard on a podcast that 40% of them actually used their AI to buy something online (I didn't verify the %)
I'm the kind of guy who didn't understand why people use phones so much when a desktop is way more comfortable, so I have to keep track of the crazy ones!
FB has a huge advantage launching any consumer app over any start up. Even ones that have higher valuations. If you think the market position isn't important, imagine what would happen if Apple changes their TOS such that Muse stops working as well on their devices. Or take it off the store because it's "dangerous".
I don't understand Muse, couldn't agents already do all this? I have ChatGPT for example and I can have it book tickets and other things for me, it even pulls up a cloud browser if it can't access APIs. It can check for details from my email and use those for the ticket. Now OpenAI has Dots too which is a 24/7 version of the same thing.
Sure, it's nothing super unique but the way that Meta has put all the pieces together including security works really well in practice. Muse seems to be the best of the AI personal assistants for regular people right now.
Does anyone believe the security works though? This is the company that brought us facebook, pervert glasses, and got sued by its E2EE content monitoring team (which apparently exists!) for emotional trauma because they had to read so much stuff from private WhatsApp messages.
I believe that Muse security is about as good as any other large cloud environment. In the long run maybe all of them will eventually be hacked but so far my other Meta accounts have been 100% secure. So I'll take my chances with Muse because it saves me time and allows me to get more done.
Those other issues, while perhaps examples of bad corporate behavior, aren't really security lapses per se.
The article emphasises exactly what you said: technically it has no new features, it's just better UX than anything else, and more friendly to non-techies.
When it comes to being mainstream, an approachable UI sells
It does not at all. ChatGPT is trying to be an everything app and it’s extremely convoluted by this point and hard for most people to make sense of, especially if you’re not in tech.
No, I'm asking why ChatGPT isn't sufficient because they literally do the same thing unlike Dropbox vs rsync. In other words ChatGPT has the same UI UX but people flock to Muse for some reason.
That’s pretty much the question the article tries to answer! TL;DR - good product design, personality mechanics, and ad-funded tokens is what makes it different.
It’s the most consistent and user friendly agent with the ability to also be a harness for multiple custom agents. I literally had people running around the office amazed by muse last week. It has brought agents to the masses in a way a lay person can understand and use.
"clunkiness of ChatGPT is stark. The whole desktop ChatGPT vs Codex switch is dumb. The chat vs work switch is dumb. ChatGPT projects vs Codex local vs Codex cloud projects is mega dumb. I need to make 10 choices each time I want to start or continue a chat. Just give me one chat that orchestrates all of it in the background." This times a 100x. Every step forward seems 2 steps back. The sidebar is jungle, and trying to find chats is tough, trying to remember if its codex or chat, a local one or remote, and that chat ones can't be put in a codex projects and countless other issues that make it a nightmare. While I can they are working on improving the mess to at least presumably get rid of the Chat vs Work toggle, I haven't heard anything that eventually it will just be one, where we can just toggle how it responds it, vs being limited on it can be organized and searched.
And you accidentally end up asking Astra Max what time the game is tonight or something stupid like that and it still has to finish and burn credits up
Seems to me like they just copied Claude's distinction of Cowork because it sounded better to enterprises but it should never have been pushed to the userbase.
If you can design something that a Baby Boomer can understand, then you have a mass market product at full scale. Otherwise your hopefully building something that a niche group finds attractive and that grows from there, outwards to scale.
“Interestingly, what’s making Muse a success also explains why Google has mostly failed to capture the zeitgeist so far. They have the compute and the ad money to fund something like Muse. But they have no product chops to build something simple and understandable in consumer AI.”
Umm what? Having billions of hourly active users across YouTube, Google, Google Maps, and Chrome still doesn’t mean they have the product chops to build another consumer facing app/service? I think it’s inevitable that Muse will get crushed.
You listed products that have been around for ~20 years. Keeping up already entrenched products running doesn't correlate with being able to launch new products.
Google Search and Google Maps are utilities, not consumer apps that vie for leisure time, so I don't think they are really comparable. The next frontier for AI apps like Muse and Dots is competing with the social media giants.
We should look to see how Shorts vs IG Reels have adapted to the short form video landscape for product chops in this area. IMO IG has adapted far better to the new era, and I very often get people sending me Reels (they used to send TikToks). I very rarely see anyone send Shorts but it still happens. I expect this trend to continue and IG to extend their lead here. And Muse certainly has first mover advantage in personalized AI apps, who knows when Google will finally release one.
Those are all quite mature products which they have maintained and grew super well. They haven’t had a good track record in consumer AI, there’s no coherent product strategy or offering. They had some localized hits like NotebookLM and nano banana but it hasn’t translated into organic growth and usage for Gemini
Google has huge amounts of training data but very little of it is relevant to creating an AI personal assistant with good UX for common tasks. Like Gemini might be really good at answering specific questions or generating synthetic content but that doesn't mean it can securely, reliably carry out workflows in a way that feels natural to regular users. At least for now, that part still requires some human vision and product management.
I like that you can get root access to the VM your instance runs in, connect it to your tailnet, automate connection approvals, and operate a torrent seedbox on Meta’s infra.
It will be interesting to see if muse's privacy features can get users over this.
Chatbots have been tried for a decade and were a total failure. With AI, it has become the fastest-growing way to interact with technology, ever.
GPT-5 tried to have an auto router and create abstraction for the user; people hated it. Instinct and Muse are doing the same with a different framing; it's going wild.
There are tons of these little examples where a small difference in framing, a small threshold in tech, and product assumptions completely flip on their heads.
It's amazing to follow but requires you to be way more flexible in your assumptions.
Re: chatbots were tried but it’s a wrong model for a deterministic system. It’s the best one for a probabilistic one.
Re: chatGPT auto-router - 1) I suspect explicit model selection matters less in agentic contexts (this thing is coordinating a bunch of other agents for me) vs QA context where you want to make sure you’re getting the best answer. 2) I suspect auto-routing matters less now that models are way better
But I have to admit that in the design field we have a strong tendency to over-rely on "proper rules" and to overgeneralize learnings. (My pet peeve is when B2C patterns are transferred as-is in B2B or prosumers)
AI makes some old UX viable but can also unlock tons of value once you break your assumptions and reluctance. An example I see a lot here and on socials is how much of the code developers actually read nowadays. In the case of Instict, it is how many people actually share their credit card with an unknown startup's IA to buy stuff. I just heard on a podcast that 40% of them actually used their AI to buy something online (I didn't verify the %)
I'm the kind of guy who didn't understand why people use phones so much when a desktop is way more comfortable, so I have to keep track of the crazy ones!
Those other issues, while perhaps examples of bad corporate behavior, aren't really security lapses per se.
They’ve also had a long history of using shady/deceptive practices to gather data, such as Onavo.
Is their internal security up to par with other cloud providers? Maybe. Security from them? Definitely not to be trusted.
(Former employee)
When it comes to being mainstream, an approachable UI sells
Many times, UI/UX makes all the difference in user adoption & use.
Muse is:
- a single thread
- has avatars that you can name
- has approval cards
Now dots is similar in concept but that only launched a few days ago and Muse launched a month ago.
Meta is reducing the friction for your parents to run OpenClaw without any assistance.
It’s boomers
Umm what? Having billions of hourly active users across YouTube, Google, Google Maps, and Chrome still doesn’t mean they have the product chops to build another consumer facing app/service? I think it’s inevitable that Muse will get crushed.
You listed products that have been around for ~20 years. Keeping up already entrenched products running doesn't correlate with being able to launch new products.
We should look to see how Shorts vs IG Reels have adapted to the short form video landscape for product chops in this area. IMO IG has adapted far better to the new era, and I very often get people sending me Reels (they used to send TikToks). I very rarely see anyone send Shorts but it still happens. I expect this trend to continue and IG to extend their lead here. And Muse certainly has first mover advantage in personalized AI apps, who knows when Google will finally release one.
https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117329100531227330