Posted by yks 19 hours 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.
Is it geo-restricted to the US for now?
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.
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!