If it will help me search (or rather "comb") through rental posts on the trillions Facebook groups (that Facebook spent years making in unsearchable sanely) I have to subscribe to (just for my city) and make it even 10% better for me, I might as well pay a bit for this tool. Why? Because I like it or hate it - that's where the rental posts live (and very little elsewhere - and even those are on Facebook).

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.