> you better believe the other thing it's supposed to do aside from build a picture of your friends and loved ones is to figure out what makes you love to shop. This is actually some of the most nauseating prompt text i have ever read.
There's no "prompt injection" like the OP claims. You can just ask Muse for all the info for its dedicated VM, and Muse will tell you. Meta has confirmed this it intended behavior.
And idk what's even being implied by that quote. (Yes, it tries to help you shop. And? Or is the critique just that OP doesn't like the prose in that markdown file?)
What's being implied is that your nefarious company is building another product that exists solely to suck up people's attention and time in order to build a profile of them to sell them garbage that they don't need and use their personal data to manipulate them.
I don't know how anyone can use Muse. It's like taking everything that Facebook has had to guess and infer about you over the years using various analytics and instead just dumping it directly into a chat bot and giving the company everything it wants. Zuckerberg and his soulless C-suite must be licking their lips.
> What's being implied is that your nefarious company is building another product that exists solely to suck up people's attention and time inorder to build a profile to sell them garbage that they don't need and use their personal data to manipulate them.
You're free to speculate that Meta is lying about what it will or won't use the data for. I won't argue over that. That's an important topic and I'm not gonna persuade anyone via an HN comment. Skepticism is fine
But the example linked to in the above comment is not evidence of that at all. A skill explaining how to format purchase history in markdown format is not evidence of hidden motivations.
In general the entire thread is nothing-burger, and that's all I'm getting at.
I understand what is being implied. I'm saying that the provided example is poor evidence of what's being implied.
We all know Meta can already track things like certain purchases. A skill file telling AI how to format purchase history in markdown format is not going to help any of Meta's ads or RecSys systems.
You can believe Meta does bad things without thinking everything Meta does is an example of said bad things
So we should judge each piece of evidence in a vacuum?
Facebook has broken its promises about user data many times before. I don't buy anything they say about Muse, and nobody in their right mind should. Unless they’re getting paid to, of course.
Aside, if “a skill file organizing purchase history in markdown format” is the only thing you took away from that thread, you might want to take a closer look.
> So we should judge each piece of evidence in a vacuum?
You're free to believe whatever you want about Meta. But no, you shouldn't point to non-evidence, interpret it through the lens of your prior beliefs, and then claim that it's actually evidence supporting your beliefs.
> Aside, if “a skill file organizing purchase history in markdown format” is the only thing you took away from that thread, you might want to take a closer look.
That's what that specific quote I was referencing was referring to. I already responded to the supposed prompt injection/security concerns above.
<< you shouldn't point to non-evidence, interpret it through the lens of your prior beliefs, and then claim that it's actually evidence supporting your beliefs
Not parent, but it is worth responding to as it applies. Not prior beliefs. From prior actions. Unless you are only now becoming aware of the existing ecosystem, there is almost no way in which you can buy into that ecosystem without expecting hard rug pull. And the beauty is, everyone gets to make a choice, but they best do it is with eyes wide open and the understanding of the deal for it will be changing soon.
I think you're saying that prior actions justify the beliefs you hold. Fair enough, I'll concede that for the sake of argument.
My above comment still stands. Even if your beliefs are justified, that doesn't mean you should treat non-evidence as evidence supporting your beliefs. (Tbh my point is kinda trivial/pedantic. But I feel like folks just always want to double down that every criticism of meta is correct).
> So we should judge each piece of evidence in a vacuum?
I mean… little drops of water make the ocean, so if the complaint is with the drop then yes. Doesn’t mean the ocean is poisoned by some of these droplets though.
Two things can be true at the same time - Facebook as a whole is untrustable but you can use Muse Glimmer from them without giving them this data.
The comment you're responding to has two sentences separated by a period. You can use that as an indication that the two issues being pointed out are, in fact, separate things. Do you understand now?
Totally fair if that's just a public stratch pad (which happens to make several specific, unsubstantiated claims). Not hating on that guy.
But if someone posts the thread with no other context than "check this out", then it seems appropriate explain this missing context.
And for the record, I did scroll back read through what he's saying as you suggested. The broader context is exactly what makes it clear he's just a bit confused about what he's "uncovered". (Obvious caveat: I haven't read through everything this guy has written, I could be missing something)
> I did scroll back read through what he's saying as you suggested. ... Obvious caveat: I haven't read through everything this guy has written...
Did you also scroll forward to read what he wrote after the stuff in the thread that was linked to? This tool is pretty obviously designed -whether intentionally or not- to enable the exfiltration of a ton of sensitive data to untrusted third parties while leaving its intended user none the wiser.
a) More being surprised the muse will just provide internal details (which again, as intended)
b) the bash scripts are ugly (okay? I don't think that's what we're arguing about)
c) surprise that muse runs as root (then realizing this is explained by the VM-in-VM model and linking to the blog which explains this)
d) surprise that muse can run as a seed box (idk is this supposed to be the security concern?)
Could you please be more specific about which part you're concerned about? I think that'd be more productive than linking to a long thread, me responding to what I see, then being told that it's just a scratch pad and I'm silly for taking it seriously but also if I look closer I'll see the deeper truth.
> ...then being told that it's just a scratch pad and I'm silly for taking it seriously...
Yeah, given how this has been going, I expected that sort of misrepresentation. A careful reader remembers that this is what I said:
You should pop up to that -er- blog's top level, scroll back until you find the start of the investigation, and then start reading. Yeah, it's a huge pain in the ass, but this is -AFAICT- the guy's personal notepad, rather than some place where formal reports usually go. If someone walked over, picked up my personal notepad at $DAYJOB, and complained about how they couldn't make sense of it, I'd tell them to fuck right off, yanno?
Anyway. I'm certain that your answer to this is going to be some flavor of "no, of course it isn't", but are the combination of these things simply no problem?
I remembered what you said and I genuinely don't understand what I mischaracterized.
TBH I saw none of those comments by scrolling forward or backwards from the original link. Now it turns out I supposed to be checking quote tweets, not just scrolling like you said above? (tbf I'm not familiar with the neuromatch UI, could be user error on my part).
Again, I think this would've gone smoother if you actually articulated the problem you're concerned about, instead of linking to a "personal notepad" which you acknowledge has mistakes and isn't easily intelligible, and then blaming me for missing the actual point.
I'll look through these new comments later.
Edit: I see from your original comment what you meant by "top-level". I originally assumed you just meant top of the thread. I'll take the L here.
I've read through those comments and I see more interesting concerns being raised ("interesting" as in "not completely confused for trivial reasons", I'm not conceding anything).
Like I mentioned I don't work on Muse, and I suppose it'd wouldn't be appropriate for me (self-identified Meta employee) to publicly speculate on what defenses do and don't exist or what is intended. (sorry kinda a cop-out, I know).
Thanks for providing specific links to the specific concerns being raised.
A quick note for folks who are going to go "duhhh, so what?" after reading that thread:
That investigation is still ongoing, and that subthread doesn't contain all the information from it. You should pop up to that -er- blog's top level, scroll back until you find the start of the investigation, and then start reading. Yeah, it's a huge pain in the ass, but this is -AFAICT- the guy's personal notepad, rather than some place where formal reports usually go. If someone walked over, picked up my personal notepad at $DAYJOB, and complained about how they couldn't make sense of it, I'd tell them to fuck right off, yanno?
I think ads for Muse itself. I've seen it literally everywhere. It's heavily advertised in the iOS App Store, and I'm seeing Muse advertised on random websites my Adblock doesn't block, like Reddit and such.
The other day I signed up for Muse (through a VPN) just to see what all the fuss was about and I have to say it’s a really nice implementation of a personal assistant. It genuinely feels great and makes me want to use it!
It has a simple surface but you can dig deep, from customizing personality, rules, communication style, avatar, etc. You can even install Tailscale onto its VM to SSH into it, but sadly once the machine shuts down, the overlay resets and that’s gone. Couldn’t figure a way to persist it out yet. Still very cool to dig around and explore all the CLIs Meta created for Muse to interact with stuff, like instagram or facebook (you can scp them off the VM)
If I had to rank them I would say: Grok Bot -> Muse -> Hermes -> dot -> OpenClaw
I would love to use Muse more but same as everyone else, there’s no way I’m giving Meta more access to my life. So for now, my Muse is jailed to only Meta owned services and general research, and for that it’s great.
For honesty, I do not understand how people are so willing to help meta with using their services which are known for ad/data collecting. Just baffles my senses that this is fully acceptable. I guess I will never be apart of the system that feeds it, other than voicing my opinions on HN from time to time.
My local LLM with voice interaction and fine-tuning is free and works fast enough. I can do everything frontiers can without it bleeding into my social life. yolo.
But who knows how long they will be available. Kinda surprised it’s not a MCP connection to be honest.
I also haven’t looked into how they authenticate or if they would even be usable outside of the Muse vm. Just played with them through SSH on the machine itself. If it was me I would probably inject the auth stuff on a proxy level, so those CLIs may be useless in the end
Nope, I just went to muse.ai and typed an email. It created a new Meta account with it and once you interact with Muse once you no longer need the VPN because the service itself gets added to your Meta account.
I then linked my Facebook, IG and others to this new Meta account so that Muse can access them.
Muse I use for general research and monitoring my Ig/Facebook/Threads conversations and posts.
Research here meaning stuff I need a browser for, like the other day I asked Muse to monitor the Apple website every few hours to tell me when iPhones in my area are back in stock. Or another task was to explore an undocumented API for me by issuing curl requests to traverse it.
Grok Bot I use for more things, like keeping me updated on GitHub activity, surfacing important notifications I might have missed, managing my Calendar and travel schedule, booking WeWork desks in the city I’m in automatically, etc. Mostly small QoL stuff.
dot I use to orchestrate Codex Cloud tasks mostly from GitHub PRs and issues, look up stuff in a browser, click around websites.
Polish. OpenClaw feels like a bunch of stuff slapped together without coherent vision, and if I look at the speed that it’s owner merges PRs with ai, this makes a lot of sense. It just felt laggy slow and buggy to me.
Hermes just feels more thought through. I didn’t notice any problems with it
> Still very cool to dig around and explore all the CLIs Meta created for Muse to interact with stuff, like instagram or facebook (you can scp them off the VM)
Fucking awesome, I remember back in 2011 sometime when I got banned from Facebook (the first time) just because I was using a CLI to access it. I also remember people used to get fines for piracy, and even people being upset about warrantless surveillance, I guess that's the "old world" now.
Is that because you seem them as politically or socially aligned with your own values and interests? Or are there other factors that go into that judgement?
I was a big fan of SpaceX and Tesla and Musk's other endeavors as well, until he crossed the line from quirky to erratic and went completely off the far-right deep end. Today he's a champion of social-conservative politics and revanchism, but he could just as easily wake up tomorrow and decide he's a hyper-progressive One-Worlder kind of guy. Either way, no matter what, he still has your data.
Disregarding the politics because that’s always subjective, it’s central to Meta’s business model to harvest as much of your data to show you ads. And they have decades of track record of doing that. Same with Google. Their products are thoroughly corrupted by ads because that’s where they make their money.
xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, may dabble in ads but they are nowhere near Meta and Google.
I don’t care about politics. I disagree with Musk on a lot of things but I don’t automatically boycott something just because he’s involved.
While as for Meta, there’s just way too much negative track record for me to ever trust them as a company or their products. I just assume everything it touches will be used to profile me and sell me ads
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.
Meta's active user base doesn't care about privacy.
Most personal tasks take trivial amounts of time these days. Does a 5th grade teacher or an auto mechanic need a personal assistant? Do we need to be able to book a trip faster? It feels very gimmicky to me, but I realize I'm not their target audience.
Given that, I do think Meta will probably get the lions share of B2C AI and they have a proven track record of using personal data to serve ads and make a lot of profit. If they capture more of their user base's time, it keeps them engaged and away from a list of competitors. If Meta starts crushing it in this fashion I could see IPO's of OpenAI and Anthropic land like fart in church.
I mean I just used muse to plan out my entire weekend trip to Vegas recently. I booked everything myself but I asked it to shortlist dining options for me given dietary restrictions, events given restrictions (with elderly family), etc. it basically handled all the stuff I would have normally just Google searched for. Plus it made a nice web app dashboard to display it all. It seems pretty useful for common use.
It also handled payment splitting. I told it what person x spent for the group split 3 ways (it originally split by the total number of people, but I clarified that only me + x + y are paying) and it kept running totals. When I got an email from Venmo saying x sent me money, muse automatically updated the balance sheet.
We saw some signs written in an unfamiliar language. Muse told me what language it was.
I think some of those tasks are part of the fun of a trip - doing the research on locations, events, restaurants, etc. You stumble through a bunch of things and little nuggets of that sit in your brain and then when you're on the trip they might come up - one place is abruptly closed, something looks like a bummer in person, etc. Without doing that research yourself then on the trip you have a list of things and aren't really knowledgable about alternatives.
Like I said, I'm not the target audience for a personal assistant. That does sound like a more ideal UX than what chat gippity and the others offer though. I would expect that with Meta - they really get the UX mostly right for people.
Sure, I get that. For this particular case, I've been to Vegas (family lives there) "plenty" so I don't really care much about stumbling upon stuff like you pointed out. I just wanted to have some places on hand to suggest for dinner and things to do when the group when we'd inevitably get to the "so can someone decide what are we doing for dinner???" part of the day. For planning a long trip to say Tokyo (never been) for vacation I'd do the regular stuff searching Google and reading blogs, but I'd also add AI search to it, if anything to find the current new "viral/trendy" stuff that I absolutely do not keep up with.
I've been "forced" to use AI in my work since this year, but I only started experimenting with it with my own ChatGPT subscription recently. I'm able to afford $20/mo and I'm fine paying it. The average user meta is targeting wants a free assistant to replace Siri, which is what muse is.
Continuing my thought, talking to Muse and ChatGPT feel fundamentally different. The single thread chat Muse offers encourages you to talk to it like a person imo. But that's probably just me.
Yes we do care and many of us have set the privacy settings to certain things over the years
But this is where friends are and don't give me 'you could just call them'
Not everyone has access to email/phone. Facebook should work in theory, if they weren't so enthusiastic about intentionally eroding privacy (physically changing the privacy options). Multicast. I post some status to multiple people at once. I can find people I don't already know/have lost touch with, and connect with them
What Meta does, does not mean its users don't care and I wish you people would stop saying that
A lot of use cases for agents require long running sessions. And you're likely to have many agent sessions running in parallel. These aren't going to be running on your personal devices
My personal solution to this is to run DSH in an Incus VM on a local machine, then expose the web UI to the internet through my VPS (with some extra auth). I also made a couple of UI tweaks so it works better as a PWA.
Now I have persistent chats and a persistent environment that I can talk to from any device, including my phone. Even have X11 + CUA + Chromium inside the VM so the agent can use a real browser for sites that require it. DSH bwrap is the first layer of containment, VM is the second layer. I can swap between API models and local inference with a drop-down in the UI.
I realise this is way more setup than Meta's customers would tolerate, but the HN crowd could slap something together quite quickly. Using a coding agent with a nice chat UI as your general chat client is surprisingly smooth: just create an empty workspace.
I think Muse is the right shape in a lot of ways but I come unstuck at the point where my personal details and credentials are inside the VM.
Durability and parallelism aren't that hard, and you won't be needing frontier models for much of this stuff. The parameter efficiency of models is increasing rapidly. I don't see why a (near-)future device wouldn't be capable of running a perfectly capable personal assistant.
I agree. I currently do run a bunch of dev containers on my local Docker but that is not good enough, they neeed to be able to work while I am on the run and close my laptop. So we are trying having personal containers on a managed Kibernetes cluster for every developer. We’re still working on making this work but it seems promising, the hardest thing being just permissions to let the agent use MCP servers, http APIs etc. If anyone has done this, how did you manage that?? I know there are products like OpenCLI that help with the problem but we want something we can build ourselves since AI makes it so much easier to build things!
Use ai to build it a poc and read the code after, learn, rebuild until you find something that works.
I host all of my custom applications on a machine in my home with Tailscale, k8, infrastructure as code
It’s wired, always on, has access to my gpu running on another machine or falls back to cloud inference
Self hosted GitHub action runners on each different platform for build/deploy of various projects: tauri v2, apis, web uis, native macOS apps, Unity 3d
None of this existed a month ago and it’s been a blast pretending to run my own platform
Why not? Why wouldn't your phone be able to do this?
The other advantage long running sessions have is that very low tok/s are perfectly acceptable. In fact, hardly noticeable.
(aside, of course, from Google and Apple both having incentives to prevent this from happening, as both depend on selling centralized services to you and advertisers, and the local model breaks both)
They are that good now. The computer is just too expensive. The computer is too expensive because of meta, openai, anthropic, grok, etc. it's funny how this works...
I’m sure there is probably a skunkworks like team secretly working at Apple trying to make the hardware needed to accelerate local models enough to handle personal data processing needs without decimating the battery. I’d guess another team is probably tasked at researching a E2E encrypted remote inference mechanism where the personal data that does get out of the iPhone/ipad/Mac is encrypted with something Secure Enclave on processor, and “even Apple can’t read it”..
Apple is my long term bet for personal AI computing.
No way in hell am I letting FaceBook/OpenAI/Anthropic/Deepseek/anybody have complete access to my personal digital life. That’s just dumb.
Just look at OpenAI digging through ChatGPT logs to get the idea to solve the math problems etc. I’m sure all the subscription plans and subsidies are aimed at gathering enough breadth of real people comms to get the models to improve on wider signals…
Worst case, I don’t want to be voluntarily giving up my digital footprint to get profiled a certain way and be fed what AI overlords (or the companies that wield them really) think I should get as an answer/response.
My thoughts and activity stays private as much as practical and feasible.
> I’d guess another team is probably tasked at researching a E2E encrypted remote inference mechanism where the personal data that does get out of the iPhone/ipad/Mac is encrypted with something Secure Enclave on processor, and “even Apple can’t read it”..
That’s already in production. Look for Apple Private Cloud Compute
> where the personal data that does get out of the iPhone/ipad/Mac is encrypted with something Secure Enclave on processor, and “even Apple can’t read it”..
there already is technology for this, which is Confidential Computing which is implemented on Nvidia etc.
it requires transparency to audit it properly and if there's an exploit which weakens it then the security guarantees fall apart
but in terms of commercial viability, it's the most promising way to tackle this and it seems like Apple is already pushing for it with their Private Cloud Compute
I agree, most of the proactive agent assistance use cases requires me to give out data I’m hesitant to give like email, financial data, health data…
I’m hoping someone makes a lower maintenance version of open source Muse or Grokbot or Dots (more user friendly than OpenClaw or Hermes) that I can easily deploy to my own AWS, Cloudflare, Vercel, or Fly account and use some ZDR friendly inference provider like Fireworks.
It's funny that you say you want a more user-friendly lower maintenance version of something than Muse but then say something better than openclaw or Hermes.
What exactly is high maintenance about Hermes? I agree the setup could be a little more user-friendly, but I have it running on my VPS with Matrix and the actual maintenance has been very minimal.
Spending a lot of time on harness engineering to try to compensate for deficiencies with Deepseek v4 flash because I'm too cheap to use better models on the other hand...
I'm not the person you asked but I just made a backup of my Raspberry Pi running Hermes and Matrix, but when I tested said backup it refreshed my Matrix encryption key so now I can't access my non backup micro SD install from my phone because I can't decrypt the Matrix messages.
In hindsight I should have simply rotated SD cards instead of treating one as the authoritative ones.
I agree Hermes usually works without maintenance more or less but I don't really trust these agents much and haven't found a great use for it.
There was a run on Mac Mini's for people running OpenClaw earlier this year. I was doing some research earlier today on an idea and that came up as an option because it (and Apple's hardware for Macs) have shared RAM across CPU and GPU so its apparently a viable option to run ollama (ironically from Meta) or other local models for simple tasks.
I think VPS are going to be expensive because of the RAM and GPU requirements - 32GB RAM is beefy for a VPS and might run like $30/month on the cheap end. Thats $360/year so running something at home might be more secure, capable and cheaper. Remote/mobile access might be viable with something like tailscale.
Absolutely. None of these tools are actually valuable unless you are down with all of your data being used against your interests short and long term.
"I can answer my emails 30s faster!" Cool but now meta knows everyone in your family's status, the bills you have, the Drs appts you have, your families health status, who services your loans, the emails you open the ones you don't, etc. it's a wet dream for surveillance capitalism and the mic subsidized by ignorant customers.
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.
GPT-5's auto routing was bad, you'd get off the cuff bad answers for hard questions and overthinking on the banal. Also, with a chatbot the idea is that it's a back and forth but 5 minutes of thinking kills that, whereas fire and forget is core to the idea of autonomous agents.
Agents are going to replace almost all the UI in computers. For a trivial example, things like a control panel or settings menu will cease to exist, you'll handle coarse things via conversation ("set volume to 20%"), and UIs will be presented only for things where chat is cumbersome ("the password for the printer is !-*Donkey_Loves_Shrek^^@"). The UI that remains will become heavily decoupled, like supercharged versions of the office ribbons, with the intent that the agent will compose menu fragments and capability widgets dynamically so you only ever need to see controls for the settings that are relevant and that you care about.
Sorry for being dismissive. What I mean is, volume is something people generally don’t think about in percentages, but by feel/ear. It’s also adjusted so often and impulsively that doing it via chat would be extremely slow and unergonomic. So yeah, I don’t think that should happen.
Not saying you won't be able to invoke the volume control widget on a screen, but when harnesses are always listening, models are lower latency and you're interacting with a device from the other side of the room in a lot of cases (even PCs, via 72" wall mounted monitors), it'll be a lot more ergonomic.
There was a study that showed users "felt" faster on a keyboard even while completing tasks faster on a mouse. Similarly, with low latency models, "chromium volume 20%, actually, 10%" will be faster than clicking the sound control icon, finding the chromium volume from the list and reducing it, not to mention you don't have to look away from what you're doing. Direct interaction will probably only be faster if you need extremely precise control, for example, you wouldn't do digital painting with an agent, which seems pretty intuitive.
I mean maybe I‘m an outlier but I always use the physical buttons or knobs to control volume on my devices. I think that is by far the fastest, most exact and overall most user friendly and unobtrusive option, even when you have an agent that‘s always listening (which is a future I don‘t want). The point about being across the room is fair.
About that study: I‘m interested to read it, as it seems to contradict established literature on UX (not to mention lived experience) - do you have a link for that?
I seemed to recall that Tog made that point back then. Note that both Tog‘s text and Keystroke-Level are from the very early days of GUIs, so, grain of salt.
Omanson, OTOH actually contradicts them a bit: expert users are generally faster with well-learned shortcuts – a widely-held view point and the whole reason for shortcuts.
Essentially. I don't know much Linux, but I've had no problems putting together a capable, well-configured, and secure Linux box by using Claude Code as the CLI 99% of the time. Occasionally it gives me a command that needs to be pasted into a separate terminal window, but for the most part it just works on its own (and boy, does it struggle sometimes.)
A key point is that the box might as well be running BeOS or Windows or HP-UX or OS/360 or something. It doesn't matter much anymore, any more than my choice of programming language does. Requires some mental adjustment.
> requires you to be way more flexible in your assumptions.
This is what happens if you try to read the data like gospel without having a mental model to interpret it... in other words, critical thinking.
Chatbots are a failure because chat capabilities have sucked for most of the past decade and chatbots weren't really capable enough to do anything meaningful. Not because chat is fundamentally bad. Similarly with auto-router.
Also, if you want to "cross the chasm" you cannot measure reactions from current AI users (early adopters) and extrapolate to the rest of the populace. Early adopters are paying you for tokens and try to wieid them like a surgical tool; across the chasm the rest really don't want to know anything about "tokens" or models tiers or "thinking level".
Chatbots also had huge drawbacks that are still present with AI:
- Inability to see what outcomes are possible
- Very constrained environment with only lightly formatted text
- Sequential flow
You can see how the modern AI chat interface tries to overcome these issues. But even then, just the power of LLMs made users adopt this approach massively despite these drawbacks
Hindsight is 20/20, maybe you can accurately predict the inflection point of every modality, but the fact that most AI patterns currently used started as a quick experiment shows that most people can't, and probably shouldn't.
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!
The biggest mistake people make in this space is confusing the limitations of a specific implementation of a technology with fundamental flaws with the entire idea of said technology.
Once you recognize and overcome that thinking, and learn to distinguish between those two things, you can see where things are going.
There is one thing Meta got "right" here and it's not about UX. It's about security/liability brinksmanship.
People like Muse because you can put your password in and it does the thing end-to-end, which is something that I can only assume OpenAI and Anthropic had deliberately been avoiding because it's obviously a bad idea. It's pushing the "Overton window" of actions you're letting it do without regard for what happens when it goes wrong.
Just like how OpenClaw pushed it with no human-in-the-loop, Claude code pushed it before that with the all the risks of giving a third-party RCE on your machine.
You could argue that the main difference with CLI agents and OpenClaw is that they are aimed at technical users who understand the risks, whereas with Muse and GrokBot the target is explicitly "normal people" who put their password as their birthday and fall for phishing pages.
The pattern is clear, the leaders will take less risks than those in 3rd and 4th place because they have more to lose. The frontiers, smartly, keep liability low by leaving the dangerous/stupid (but incredibly fun/productive) AI uses outside of anything they actively encourage.
The insane part about Muse is that generally things like Coding agents/OpenClaw were stupider the cheaper the model you were using, which meant most people were paying for frontier to get good results (at least initially) - if you try to do complex tasks with a crappy model, you would face way more "delete production" moments. Meta is pushing boundaries AND doing so on a free plan - suggesting the use of an economical model, which makes it even more insane.
The question now becomes... will the risk be worth it? Or will people be turned away by horror stories of LLMs going on a spending spree and then being unable to make rent.
Claude will happily accept secrets (passwords, tokens, ssh keys) as environmental variables or in files. It only refuses to handle them directly.
I have a local repo with my home lab mapped out and Claude manages servers via ssh. It is completely fine with using my ssh keys and pass.
Claude will also drive the browser. After a couple times, it will even offer to do something via the browser where no API or other machine interface exists.
And yes, the digital drudgery has definitely reached a point where this is worth the risk.
Contrary to its VR ventures, Muse is very well aligned with Meta's existing business model. If they can pull this off, the kind of ad targeting they'll be able to enable is going to be crazy.
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.
Have you figured out a reliable way to persist stuff? Like a launch script or similar that doesn’t reset when the VM shuts down and can be used to restore tailscale
bashrc, bash profile, cron, systemd, etc all get wiped clean the moment the VM resets
"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.
"Project" for remote connections are local to the device they are created on. So if you create a project on your laptop for a remote server with a session in it, and want to access that same connection on your phone with the same project folder structure and session grouping, you need to manually recreate the project on that new device and add the session.
And you cannot mix local and remote sessions in a single project. So if you need to do anything locally for a remote project, get in the habit of naming projects things like "Project Foo [Local]" and "Project Foo [Dev]".
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.
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
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.
It's not about cloud environments. Basically every ToS ever forbids you from disclosing your password to someone else or another entity.
Even when you use a cloud-synced password manager, the whole security posture relies on that data being encrypted the entire time and never read in the cloud.
The worst security faux pas of companies is storing user passwords - because the most common source of account breaches is via credential stuffing, where they get hacked, have their user base's passwords stolen and tried on other websites. The remedy being... not to store passwords, only salted, secure hashes.
Muse sounds like a disaster - your credentials for other sites are floating around on their servers, with the capability of being decrypted. Maybe if sites decided to offer a form of auth tied to the agent that could be revoked in bulk in the event of a breach it might be a ok, but this is crazy.
Linking to a straight LLM generated article where the first couple entries (the only ones I bothered to read) are about keystealers on users' computers doesn't help your case.
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.
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
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.
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.
You clearly didn’t understand what Muse is if you think it’s the same. Do you understand “always on”? Try to learn what that means, so you will understand why ChatGPT chat is not that.
You clearly don't understand ChatGPT's Dots, it is also always on. And even before that, you could emulate lots of Muse's features through ChatGPT, for example I have a daily automation to look through my emails for example. It's just that Muse is free and also captured people's attention through making it a bit more streamlined.
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".
Meta stupidly chose to open Muse only in the US.
If anyone wants to take the world, just copy it, you have a month. (Before someone do it. Not Meta. They stick to dumb decisions)
It makes sense that it is US only if you consider it like a legal experiment to see whether the enormous liability of autonomously entering into contracts or representing a user plus the cost of offering such a service for free is lower than the money you can make from not just selling clicks, but selling the conversion itself.
At that point, you can see that limiting your liability to a single jurisdiction is probably a good idea.
I'm not sure to what extent they chose that, versus their privacy woes in the EU and elsewhere chose it for them. Turns out meta's reputation among US consumers is sparkling compared to their overseas reputation...
>Turns out meta's reputation among US consumers is sparkling compared to their overseas reputation...
I'd argue that this is more of a testament of how US regulatory regime facilitates consumer choice compared to paternalism of other major markets. I personally can't wait to have a free AI assistant like Muse available in my country.
I'm tempted to try the free version as I'm curious what it is about.
Is this just a productivity thing?
Out of the top of my head I can't think of a lot of use cases but maybe RSS? Maybe I could ask it to give me a summary of cool tech news for each morning, and on very specific topics too?
All it wants to do is buy stuff, book stuff, reserve stuff, do anything that indicates willingness to spend money. That’s what will get companies to sign on with Meta’s AI, so that’s what it will do.
Agents talking to Agents talking to Agents, spending our money. That’s the future Meta wants.
Counterpoint: I have had my own Muse like harness with Hermes and Matrix for over a year and all I want to do with it is seamlessly long-in and purchase stuff without worrying about secure credential injection or payment confirmation.
Credentials and payments for agents and local proxy browsing is a non-trivial problem.
And I promise you my Hermes agent is not sitting here trying to get me to buy things.
You do know that most of these accounts chatting about linking their stuff are bots. They're hyping it up. Actual ppl on here are not touching meta or grok.
Serious question: Is all of the Muse noise actually organic, or is there a giant astroturfing campaign? Like John Gruber has endlessly talked about Muse since its dropped, often in a weirdly glowing fashion, and it's incredibly weird given that a) he is almost always hyper-critical of Meta, b) It isn't Apple, c) nothing about Muse is unique or novel or differentiating.
I don't get it. Is Meta handing out big $ for everyone to make Muse happen?
Meta had a huge step up in advertising this since they've pushed it front-and-center to every one of the billions who uses Facebook, Instagram, Threads etc.
Of course not. Meta is a corrosive cancer on society, they are a disinformation torrent for an idiocracy, and they should be banned as government propaganda everywhere not named American America of America(Trump IncTM).
I cannot even deign to imagine someone trusting that company with an iota of their personal information, or that it would do anything constructive with it.
But I've seen enough people (presumably) astroturfing about it to know what their latest desperate "we matter" pitch is, and it just doesn't sound compelling at all. Certainly not to warrant the constant citations.
come on man have a bit of theory of mind. people just don't care that much about privacy and Meta has a half decent product. Personal agents are here to stay and they are the future. It works and obviously its going to permeate.
Someone asked me my own usage, and I specifically answered that. I didn't broadly answer for everyone. So I feel you had the theory of mind thing in the chamber and misfired.
I understand that a lot of people use Meta products as an inertia from decades past. Indisputable. Yet several long-time avowed Meta critics, who I am quite certain do not use the product, are suddenly gushing about yet another agent and endlessly namedropping Muse. It is hugely suspicious.
> I cannot even deign to imagine someone trusting that company with an iota of their personal information, or that it would do anything constructive with it.
?
On the other part of your comment: well, agree to disagree. Its probably just a good product and not everyone's hyper sensitive to privacy concerns.
DF and their ilk, are irrelevant so they need to talk it up to get their blogs, and podcasts relevant again in the 'AI' conversation.
You would have thought that Gruber would be talking about their own expert subject matter i.e. Apple more, but since 2016 he has been going off the Apple expert opinion into Politics, Trump, AI, etc and not mainly (or exclusively) Apple.
I don't know why anybody still follows DF anymore as in the age of video, social media and podcasts the DF blog has fallen off.
That being said, on Muse, I will reserve my judgement there.
Wait till Meta's earnings to see if Muse has got any numbers to share to see if it made a difference.
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.
Boomers are not a very valuable market for advertisers. The youngest boomers are 60 or older, and old people are mostly set in the products they buy and less influenced by advertising.
“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.
The difference between Google and Meta is that people already trust Google a lot with their data, passwords, browser history, phone operating system.
They have a lot more to lose in introducing something as ridiculous as Muse - changing the pre-established security boundaries like not decrypting your cloud-synced passwords.
Meta on the other hand has nothing to lose in the consumer privacy/trust space. They don't have enterprise users of Muse to worry about. Anybody putting their data into their apps has clearly no regard for the at data, so they're the only one who the risk/reward might be in their favour.
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.
Just yesterday I tried out Gemini again after a while, and it was not able to open Google Maps in navigation mode to the destination i wanted.
For the purposes of writing this comment, i asked it to put on some Jazz in Youtube (i have youtube music with a premium account on the same device and same google account) and it started a Spotify Jazz playlist.
Google might still have the popular products from 20 years of history, but after years of them trying there's no indication whatsoever that they have the ability to shape it into a coherent product.
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 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.
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.
Honestly I just think the fact that I don’t get spawned into a new chat every time I open it is an amazing. Simple and clean, AI seriously needs its Steve Jobs
Please don't try this software. Don't signal boost it. Don't provide feedback. Don't try to find "the good stuff about it". For the love of goodness stop calling it "Meta".
Facebook is not run or owned or operated by trustworthy individuals, and until such time as the greatest majority of their leadership if removed, the company's dissolution across its various sectors of global political control and influence ended - just stop giving it attention.
Please. I don't know how much more I can take of people demanding justice from a company that is only now being fined for sins of the past to a tune of meaningless dollars while also goofing "ooh shiny fun avatar that does an ai how useful!"
>Please don't try this software. Don't signal boost it. Don't provide feedback. Don't try to find "the good stuff about it".
A refreshing dose of sanity in this thread.
It feels that everyone is quick to forget the sins of these corporations.. akin to a toxic relationship and after breakup, you keep on going back for mote.
If you haven't read "Careless People", you should. Peoples lives, governments, politics have been altered so facebook can grow and build its influence.
The least one can do is to say all that.
fair. but I think e.g. nitpicking about the FB rename to Muse distracts from the genuine points and makes the statements seem emotionally charged which makes it easier to dismiss
and I think there's also a point to be made that you shouldn't be too caring about issues that you can't influence, it simply causes harm toward yourself.
People don't like being told what to do, so saying "Stop using Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp/Threads" is going to cause the opposite effect, people will "rebel" and keep using whatever Facebook has.
Another point is inertia (which all of you should know by now)
If you want to stop Meta, I mean "Facebook" you must answer the age old question:
How do you move these users friends over to Mastodon, BlueSky or PixelFed?
If you don't have an answer to this single question, people will continue to use Facebook's products and no amount of "Stop using ..." would solve this.
A different view: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117325417843030902
> you better believe the other thing it's supposed to do aside from build a picture of your friends and loved ones is to figure out what makes you love to shop. This is actually some of the most nauseating prompt text i have ever read.
There's no "prompt injection" like the OP claims. You can just ask Muse for all the info for its dedicated VM, and Muse will tell you. Meta has confirmed this it intended behavior.
And idk what's even being implied by that quote. (Yes, it tries to help you shop. And? Or is the critique just that OP doesn't like the prose in that markdown file?)
Disclaimer: I work at Meta, not on Muse
What's being implied is that your nefarious company is building another product that exists solely to suck up people's attention and time in order to build a profile of them to sell them garbage that they don't need and use their personal data to manipulate them.
I don't know how anyone can use Muse. It's like taking everything that Facebook has had to guess and infer about you over the years using various analytics and instead just dumping it directly into a chat bot and giving the company everything it wants. Zuckerberg and his soulless C-suite must be licking their lips.
> What's being implied is that your nefarious company is building another product that exists solely to suck up people's attention and time inorder to build a profile to sell them garbage that they don't need and use their personal data to manipulate them.
You're free to speculate that Meta is lying about what it will or won't use the data for. I won't argue over that. That's an important topic and I'm not gonna persuade anyone via an HN comment. Skepticism is fine
But the example linked to in the above comment is not evidence of that at all. A skill explaining how to format purchase history in markdown format is not evidence of hidden motivations.
In general the entire thread is nothing-burger, and that's all I'm getting at.
Nothing meta has done is good, or even adjacent to neutral. You work for the evil corporations and defend it…
Hmmm zstd, io_uring, rocksdb ?
We all know exactly what it’s for, don’t pretend you don’t.
I understand what is being implied. I'm saying that the provided example is poor evidence of what's being implied.
We all know Meta can already track things like certain purchases. A skill file telling AI how to format purchase history in markdown format is not going to help any of Meta's ads or RecSys systems.
You can believe Meta does bad things without thinking everything Meta does is an example of said bad things
So we should judge each piece of evidence in a vacuum?
Facebook has broken its promises about user data many times before. I don't buy anything they say about Muse, and nobody in their right mind should. Unless they’re getting paid to, of course.
Aside, if “a skill file organizing purchase history in markdown format” is the only thing you took away from that thread, you might want to take a closer look.
> So we should judge each piece of evidence in a vacuum?
You're free to believe whatever you want about Meta. But no, you shouldn't point to non-evidence, interpret it through the lens of your prior beliefs, and then claim that it's actually evidence supporting your beliefs.
> Aside, if “a skill file organizing purchase history in markdown format” is the only thing you took away from that thread, you might want to take a closer look.
That's what that specific quote I was referencing was referring to. I already responded to the supposed prompt injection/security concerns above.
<< you shouldn't point to non-evidence, interpret it through the lens of your prior beliefs, and then claim that it's actually evidence supporting your beliefs
Not parent, but it is worth responding to as it applies. Not prior beliefs. From prior actions. Unless you are only now becoming aware of the existing ecosystem, there is almost no way in which you can buy into that ecosystem without expecting hard rug pull. And the beauty is, everyone gets to make a choice, but they best do it is with eyes wide open and the understanding of the deal for it will be changing soon.
> Not prior beliefs. From prior actions.
I think you're saying that prior actions justify the beliefs you hold. Fair enough, I'll concede that for the sake of argument.
My above comment still stands. Even if your beliefs are justified, that doesn't mean you should treat non-evidence as evidence supporting your beliefs. (Tbh my point is kinda trivial/pedantic. But I feel like folks just always want to double down that every criticism of meta is correct).
> So we should judge each piece of evidence in a vacuum?
I mean… little drops of water make the ocean, so if the complaint is with the drop then yes. Doesn’t mean the ocean is poisoned by some of these droplets though.
Two things can be true at the same time - Facebook as a whole is untrustable but you can use Muse Glimmer from them without giving them this data.
This. The appropriate use of Muse is to use it for (a) non-personal queries and (b) never connect it to any sources of personal info.
Since the article discusses metaphors... think about it as a snitch.
lol. the selective memory is loss iamazing. that's what it takes for working at a pedo's company the meddles in elections and pushes propaganda.
The comment you're responding to has two sentences separated by a period. You can use that as an indication that the two issues being pointed out are, in fact, separate things. Do you understand now?
NGL I understand the above comment, but I'm not sure what you're implying. So I guess no I don't understand
Thanks for the disclaimer. That says it all.
> Meta has confirmed this it intended behavior.
Ayyy! You're one of the folks I wrote my comment [0] for!
[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49953429>
Totally fair if that's just a public stratch pad (which happens to make several specific, unsubstantiated claims). Not hating on that guy.
But if someone posts the thread with no other context than "check this out", then it seems appropriate explain this missing context.
And for the record, I did scroll back read through what he's saying as you suggested. The broader context is exactly what makes it clear he's just a bit confused about what he's "uncovered". (Obvious caveat: I haven't read through everything this guy has written, I could be missing something)
> I did scroll back read through what he's saying as you suggested. ... Obvious caveat: I haven't read through everything this guy has written...
Did you also scroll forward to read what he wrote after the stuff in the thread that was linked to? This tool is pretty obviously designed -whether intentionally or not- to enable the exfiltration of a ton of sensitive data to untrusted third parties while leaving its intended user none the wiser.
The things I see beneath that in the thread
a) More being surprised the muse will just provide internal details (which again, as intended) b) the bash scripts are ugly (okay? I don't think that's what we're arguing about) c) surprise that muse runs as root (then realizing this is explained by the VM-in-VM model and linking to the blog which explains this) d) surprise that muse can run as a seed box (idk is this supposed to be the security concern?)
Could you please be more specific about which part you're concerned about? I think that'd be more productive than linking to a long thread, me responding to what I see, then being told that it's just a scratch pad and I'm silly for taking it seriously but also if I look closer I'll see the deeper truth.
> ...then being told that it's just a scratch pad and I'm silly for taking it seriously...
Yeah, given how this has been going, I expected that sort of misrepresentation. A careful reader remembers that this is what I said:
Anyway. I'm certain that your answer to this is going to be some flavor of "no, of course it isn't", but are the combination of these things simply no problem?<https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117353184983766316>
<https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117361988874888258>
<https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117381101404641742>
<https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117385767238251458>
<https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117386670662407608>
I remembered what you said and I genuinely don't understand what I mischaracterized.
TBH I saw none of those comments by scrolling forward or backwards from the original link. Now it turns out I supposed to be checking quote tweets, not just scrolling like you said above? (tbf I'm not familiar with the neuromatch UI, could be user error on my part).
Again, I think this would've gone smoother if you actually articulated the problem you're concerned about, instead of linking to a "personal notepad" which you acknowledge has mistakes and isn't easily intelligible, and then blaming me for missing the actual point.
I'll look through these new comments later.
Edit: I see from your original comment what you meant by "top-level". I originally assumed you just meant top of the thread. I'll take the L here.
I've read through those comments and I see more interesting concerns being raised ("interesting" as in "not completely confused for trivial reasons", I'm not conceding anything).
Like I mentioned I don't work on Muse, and I suppose it'd wouldn't be appropriate for me (self-identified Meta employee) to publicly speculate on what defenses do and don't exist or what is intended. (sorry kinda a cop-out, I know).
Thanks for providing specific links to the specific concerns being raised.
A quick note for folks who are going to go "duhhh, so what?" after reading that thread:
That investigation is still ongoing, and that subthread doesn't contain all the information from it. You should pop up to that -er- blog's top level, scroll back until you find the start of the investigation, and then start reading. Yeah, it's a huge pain in the ass, but this is -AFAICT- the guy's personal notepad, rather than some place where formal reports usually go. If someone walked over, picked up my personal notepad at $DAYJOB, and complained about how they couldn't make sense of it, I'd tell them to fuck right off, yanno?
> Meanwhile, Muse’s free tier is extremely permissive (and the ads are becoming pervasive) because it’s funded by the best ad business in the world
Yes and the last thing I want to do is to integrate my life with best ad business in the world
I haven't seen any ads yet but I am running nextdns. Can you share a screenshot
I think ads for Muse itself. I've seen it literally everywhere. It's heavily advertised in the iOS App Store, and I'm seeing Muse advertised on random websites my Adblock doesn't block, like Reddit and such.
The other day I signed up for Muse (through a VPN) just to see what all the fuss was about and I have to say it’s a really nice implementation of a personal assistant. It genuinely feels great and makes me want to use it!
It has a simple surface but you can dig deep, from customizing personality, rules, communication style, avatar, etc. You can even install Tailscale onto its VM to SSH into it, but sadly once the machine shuts down, the overlay resets and that’s gone. Couldn’t figure a way to persist it out yet. Still very cool to dig around and explore all the CLIs Meta created for Muse to interact with stuff, like instagram or facebook (you can scp them off the VM)
If I had to rank them I would say: Grok Bot -> Muse -> Hermes -> dot -> OpenClaw
I would love to use Muse more but same as everyone else, there’s no way I’m giving Meta more access to my life. So for now, my Muse is jailed to only Meta owned services and general research, and for that it’s great.
For honesty, I do not understand how people are so willing to help meta with using their services which are known for ad/data collecting. Just baffles my senses that this is fully acceptable. I guess I will never be apart of the system that feeds it, other than voicing my opinions on HN from time to time.
My local LLM with voice interaction and fine-tuning is free and works fast enough. I can do everything frontiers can without it bleeding into my social life. yolo.
Because it adds value to their life, same aa Alexa and Instagram. Or at least, they think it does.
What value does Muse add?
Honest question as I just can't come up with a single use case for me
[flagged]
> explore all the CLIs Meta created for Muse to interact with stuff, like instagram or facebook (you can scp them off the VM)
oh this is cool. I would be very interested in a Facebook CLI
Check /opt/hatch/bin/facebook-cli :)
But who knows how long they will be available. Kinda surprised it’s not a MCP connection to be honest.
I also haven’t looked into how they authenticate or if they would even be usable outside of the Muse vm. Just played with them through SSH on the machine itself. If it was me I would probably inject the auth stuff on a proxy level, so those CLIs may be useless in the end
How'd you do it with a vpn? Doesn't it still need your facebook account to be from the US?
Nope, I just went to muse.ai and typed an email. It created a new Meta account with it and once you interact with Muse once you no longer need the VPN because the service itself gets added to your Meta account.
I then linked my Facebook, IG and others to this new Meta account so that Muse can access them.
No problems whatsoever
> I then linked my Facebook, IG and others to this new Meta account so that Muse can access them.
You completed the circle!
and tomorrow they may ban his account or ask for selfie because fb doesn't like bots lol.
Just curious, what are the main use cases for you?
Muse I use for general research and monitoring my Ig/Facebook/Threads conversations and posts.
Research here meaning stuff I need a browser for, like the other day I asked Muse to monitor the Apple website every few hours to tell me when iPhones in my area are back in stock. Or another task was to explore an undocumented API for me by issuing curl requests to traverse it.
Grok Bot I use for more things, like keeping me updated on GitHub activity, surfacing important notifications I might have missed, managing my Calendar and travel schedule, booking WeWork desks in the city I’m in automatically, etc. Mostly small QoL stuff.
dot I use to orchestrate Codex Cloud tasks mostly from GitHub PRs and issues, look up stuff in a browser, click around websites.
So you’re OK with Grok but not Muse. What an odd conclusion to make.
What were his metrics?
What makes you rank Hermes higher than openclaw?
Polish. OpenClaw feels like a bunch of stuff slapped together without coherent vision, and if I look at the speed that it’s owner merges PRs with ai, this makes a lot of sense. It just felt laggy slow and buggy to me.
Hermes just feels more thought through. I didn’t notice any problems with it
> Still very cool to dig around and explore all the CLIs Meta created for Muse to interact with stuff, like instagram or facebook (you can scp them off the VM)
Fucking awesome, I remember back in 2011 sometime when I got banned from Facebook (the first time) just because I was using a CLI to access it. I also remember people used to get fines for piracy, and even people being upset about warrantless surveillance, I guess that's the "old world" now.
You don't want to give Meta more access to your life but X is ok?
It doesn’t say that. Just a ranking of the tools doesn’t imply that they are using Grok Bot.
In general though yeah X is probably less competent in the execution of manipulating you through insights from your data.
I do trust xAi / SpaceX more than Meta, yes
Is that because you seem them as politically or socially aligned with your own values and interests? Or are there other factors that go into that judgement?
I was a big fan of SpaceX and Tesla and Musk's other endeavors as well, until he crossed the line from quirky to erratic and went completely off the far-right deep end. Today he's a champion of social-conservative politics and revanchism, but he could just as easily wake up tomorrow and decide he's a hyper-progressive One-Worlder kind of guy. Either way, no matter what, he still has your data.
Disregarding the politics because that’s always subjective, it’s central to Meta’s business model to harvest as much of your data to show you ads. And they have decades of track record of doing that. Same with Google. Their products are thoroughly corrupted by ads because that’s where they make their money.
xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, may dabble in ads but they are nowhere near Meta and Google.
I don’t care about politics. I disagree with Musk on a lot of things but I don’t automatically boycott something just because he’s involved.
While as for Meta, there’s just way too much negative track record for me to ever trust them as a company or their products. I just assume everything it touches will be used to profile me and sell me ads
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.
Meta's active user base doesn't care about privacy.
Most personal tasks take trivial amounts of time these days. Does a 5th grade teacher or an auto mechanic need a personal assistant? Do we need to be able to book a trip faster? It feels very gimmicky to me, but I realize I'm not their target audience.
Given that, I do think Meta will probably get the lions share of B2C AI and they have a proven track record of using personal data to serve ads and make a lot of profit. If they capture more of their user base's time, it keeps them engaged and away from a list of competitors. If Meta starts crushing it in this fashion I could see IPO's of OpenAI and Anthropic land like fart in church.
I mean I just used muse to plan out my entire weekend trip to Vegas recently. I booked everything myself but I asked it to shortlist dining options for me given dietary restrictions, events given restrictions (with elderly family), etc. it basically handled all the stuff I would have normally just Google searched for. Plus it made a nice web app dashboard to display it all. It seems pretty useful for common use.
It also handled payment splitting. I told it what person x spent for the group split 3 ways (it originally split by the total number of people, but I clarified that only me + x + y are paying) and it kept running totals. When I got an email from Venmo saying x sent me money, muse automatically updated the balance sheet.
We saw some signs written in an unfamiliar language. Muse told me what language it was.
I think some of those tasks are part of the fun of a trip - doing the research on locations, events, restaurants, etc. You stumble through a bunch of things and little nuggets of that sit in your brain and then when you're on the trip they might come up - one place is abruptly closed, something looks like a bummer in person, etc. Without doing that research yourself then on the trip you have a list of things and aren't really knowledgable about alternatives.
Like I said, I'm not the target audience for a personal assistant. That does sound like a more ideal UX than what chat gippity and the others offer though. I would expect that with Meta - they really get the UX mostly right for people.
Sure, I get that. For this particular case, I've been to Vegas (family lives there) "plenty" so I don't really care much about stumbling upon stuff like you pointed out. I just wanted to have some places on hand to suggest for dinner and things to do when the group when we'd inevitably get to the "so can someone decide what are we doing for dinner???" part of the day. For planning a long trip to say Tokyo (never been) for vacation I'd do the regular stuff searching Google and reading blogs, but I'd also add AI search to it, if anything to find the current new "viral/trendy" stuff that I absolutely do not keep up with.
Is that your first time using an LLM? I don't mean that in a snarky way, it just seems like things everything could do for years.
I've been "forced" to use AI in my work since this year, but I only started experimenting with it with my own ChatGPT subscription recently. I'm able to afford $20/mo and I'm fine paying it. The average user meta is targeting wants a free assistant to replace Siri, which is what muse is.
Continuing my thought, talking to Muse and ChatGPT feel fundamentally different. The single thread chat Muse offers encourages you to talk to it like a person imo. But that's probably just me.
Yes we do care and many of us have set the privacy settings to certain things over the years
But this is where friends are and don't give me 'you could just call them'
Not everyone has access to email/phone. Facebook should work in theory, if they weren't so enthusiastic about intentionally eroding privacy (physically changing the privacy options). Multicast. I post some status to multiple people at once. I can find people I don't already know/have lost touch with, and connect with them
What Meta does, does not mean its users don't care and I wish you people would stop saying that
There will come a point where the local models are good enough (and iPhones powerful enough) for this to be possible without privacy downsides.
A lot of use cases for agents require long running sessions. And you're likely to have many agent sessions running in parallel. These aren't going to be running on your personal devices
My personal solution to this is to run DSH in an Incus VM on a local machine, then expose the web UI to the internet through my VPS (with some extra auth). I also made a couple of UI tweaks so it works better as a PWA.
Now I have persistent chats and a persistent environment that I can talk to from any device, including my phone. Even have X11 + CUA + Chromium inside the VM so the agent can use a real browser for sites that require it. DSH bwrap is the first layer of containment, VM is the second layer. I can swap between API models and local inference with a drop-down in the UI.
I realise this is way more setup than Meta's customers would tolerate, but the HN crowd could slap something together quite quickly. Using a coding agent with a nice chat UI as your general chat client is surprisingly smooth: just create an empty workspace.
I think Muse is the right shape in a lot of ways but I come unstuck at the point where my personal details and credentials are inside the VM.
Durability and parallelism aren't that hard, and you won't be needing frontier models for much of this stuff. The parameter efficiency of models is increasing rapidly. I don't see why a (near-)future device wouldn't be capable of running a perfectly capable personal assistant.
I agree. I currently do run a bunch of dev containers on my local Docker but that is not good enough, they neeed to be able to work while I am on the run and close my laptop. So we are trying having personal containers on a managed Kibernetes cluster for every developer. We’re still working on making this work but it seems promising, the hardest thing being just permissions to let the agent use MCP servers, http APIs etc. If anyone has done this, how did you manage that?? I know there are products like OpenCLI that help with the problem but we want something we can build ourselves since AI makes it so much easier to build things!
Use ai to build it a poc and read the code after, learn, rebuild until you find something that works.
I host all of my custom applications on a machine in my home with Tailscale, k8, infrastructure as code
It’s wired, always on, has access to my gpu running on another machine or falls back to cloud inference
Self hosted GitHub action runners on each different platform for build/deploy of various projects: tauri v2, apis, web uis, native macOS apps, Unity 3d
None of this existed a month ago and it’s been a blast pretending to run my own platform
Why not? Why wouldn't your phone be able to do this?
The other advantage long running sessions have is that very low tok/s are perfectly acceptable. In fact, hardly noticeable.
(aside, of course, from Google and Apple both having incentives to prevent this from happening, as both depend on selling centralized services to you and advertisers, and the local model breaks both)
They are that good now. The computer is just too expensive. The computer is too expensive because of meta, openai, anthropic, grok, etc. it's funny how this works...
I’m sure there is probably a skunkworks like team secretly working at Apple trying to make the hardware needed to accelerate local models enough to handle personal data processing needs without decimating the battery. I’d guess another team is probably tasked at researching a E2E encrypted remote inference mechanism where the personal data that does get out of the iPhone/ipad/Mac is encrypted with something Secure Enclave on processor, and “even Apple can’t read it”..
Apple is my long term bet for personal AI computing.
No way in hell am I letting FaceBook/OpenAI/Anthropic/Deepseek/anybody have complete access to my personal digital life. That’s just dumb.
Just look at OpenAI digging through ChatGPT logs to get the idea to solve the math problems etc. I’m sure all the subscription plans and subsidies are aimed at gathering enough breadth of real people comms to get the models to improve on wider signals…
Worst case, I don’t want to be voluntarily giving up my digital footprint to get profiled a certain way and be fed what AI overlords (or the companies that wield them really) think I should get as an answer/response.
My thoughts and activity stays private as much as practical and feasible.
> I’d guess another team is probably tasked at researching a E2E encrypted remote inference mechanism where the personal data that does get out of the iPhone/ipad/Mac is encrypted with something Secure Enclave on processor, and “even Apple can’t read it”..
That’s already in production. Look for Apple Private Cloud Compute
> where the personal data that does get out of the iPhone/ipad/Mac is encrypted with something Secure Enclave on processor, and “even Apple can’t read it”..
there already is technology for this, which is Confidential Computing which is implemented on Nvidia etc.
it requires transparency to audit it properly and if there's an exploit which weakens it then the security guarantees fall apart
but in terms of commercial viability, it's the most promising way to tackle this and it seems like Apple is already pushing for it with their Private Cloud Compute
Ok but look at the list... Google likely already has all that. It's not really something a normie cares about self hosting.
I agree, most of the proactive agent assistance use cases requires me to give out data I’m hesitant to give like email, financial data, health data…
I’m hoping someone makes a lower maintenance version of open source Muse or Grokbot or Dots (more user friendly than OpenClaw or Hermes) that I can easily deploy to my own AWS, Cloudflare, Vercel, or Fly account and use some ZDR friendly inference provider like Fireworks.
It's funny that you say you want a more user-friendly lower maintenance version of something than Muse but then say something better than openclaw or Hermes.
What exactly is high maintenance about Hermes? I agree the setup could be a little more user-friendly, but I have it running on my VPS with Matrix and the actual maintenance has been very minimal.
Spending a lot of time on harness engineering to try to compensate for deficiencies with Deepseek v4 flash because I'm too cheap to use better models on the other hand...
I'm not the person you asked but I just made a backup of my Raspberry Pi running Hermes and Matrix, but when I tested said backup it refreshed my Matrix encryption key so now I can't access my non backup micro SD install from my phone because I can't decrypt the Matrix messages.
In hindsight I should have simply rotated SD cards instead of treating one as the authoritative ones.
I agree Hermes usually works without maintenance more or less but I don't really trust these agents much and haven't found a great use for it.
There was a run on Mac Mini's for people running OpenClaw earlier this year. I was doing some research earlier today on an idea and that came up as an option because it (and Apple's hardware for Macs) have shared RAM across CPU and GPU so its apparently a viable option to run ollama (ironically from Meta) or other local models for simple tasks.
I think VPS are going to be expensive because of the RAM and GPU requirements - 32GB RAM is beefy for a VPS and might run like $30/month on the cheap end. Thats $360/year so running something at home might be more secure, capable and cheaper. Remote/mobile access might be viable with something like tailscale.
Absolutely. None of these tools are actually valuable unless you are down with all of your data being used against your interests short and long term.
"I can answer my emails 30s faster!" Cool but now meta knows everyone in your family's status, the bills you have, the Drs appts you have, your families health status, who services your loans, the emails you open the ones you don't, etc. it's a wet dream for surveillance capitalism and the mic subsidized by ignorant customers.
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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.
GPT-5's auto routing was bad, you'd get off the cuff bad answers for hard questions and overthinking on the banal. Also, with a chatbot the idea is that it's a back and forth but 5 minutes of thinking kills that, whereas fire and forget is core to the idea of autonomous agents.
Agents are going to replace almost all the UI in computers. For a trivial example, things like a control panel or settings menu will cease to exist, you'll handle coarse things via conversation ("set volume to 20%"), and UIs will be presented only for things where chat is cumbersome ("the password for the printer is !-*Donkey_Loves_Shrek^^@"). The UI that remains will become heavily decoupled, like supercharged versions of the office ribbons, with the intent that the agent will compose menu fragments and capability widgets dynamically so you only ever need to see controls for the settings that are relevant and that you care about.
> "set volume to 20%"
haha oh god no please don’t.
EDIT:
Sorry for being dismissive. What I mean is, volume is something people generally don’t think about in percentages, but by feel/ear. It’s also adjusted so often and impulsively that doing it via chat would be extremely slow and unergonomic. So yeah, I don’t think that should happen.
Not saying you won't be able to invoke the volume control widget on a screen, but when harnesses are always listening, models are lower latency and you're interacting with a device from the other side of the room in a lot of cases (even PCs, via 72" wall mounted monitors), it'll be a lot more ergonomic.
There was a study that showed users "felt" faster on a keyboard even while completing tasks faster on a mouse. Similarly, with low latency models, "chromium volume 20%, actually, 10%" will be faster than clicking the sound control icon, finding the chromium volume from the list and reducing it, not to mention you don't have to look away from what you're doing. Direct interaction will probably only be faster if you need extremely precise control, for example, you wouldn't do digital painting with an agent, which seems pretty intuitive.
I mean maybe I‘m an outlier but I always use the physical buttons or knobs to control volume on my devices. I think that is by far the fastest, most exact and overall most user friendly and unobtrusive option, even when you have an agent that‘s always listening (which is a future I don‘t want). The point about being across the room is fair.
About that study: I‘m interested to read it, as it seems to contradict established literature on UX (not to mention lived experience) - do you have a link for that?
Tognazzini, Maximizing Human Performance; Omanson et al. 2010, Comparison of Mouse and Keyboard Efficiency; Card, Moran & Newell 1980, Keystroke-Level Model.
Thanks for that!
I seemed to recall that Tog made that point back then. Note that both Tog‘s text and Keystroke-Level are from the very early days of GUIs, so, grain of salt.
Omanson, OTOH actually contradicts them a bit: expert users are generally faster with well-learned shortcuts – a widely-held view point and the whole reason for shortcuts.
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"Format C: !" (with appologies to dragon naturally speaking) :-D
He picked the worst example he possibly could have, but that doesn't change the general truth of the matter. LLMs are the new shell.
So direct manipulation is dead?
Essentially. I don't know much Linux, but I've had no problems putting together a capable, well-configured, and secure Linux box by using Claude Code as the CLI 99% of the time. Occasionally it gives me a command that needs to be pasted into a separate terminal window, but for the most part it just works on its own (and boy, does it struggle sometimes.)
A key point is that the box might as well be running BeOS or Windows or HP-UX or OS/360 or something. It doesn't matter much anymore, any more than my choice of programming language does. Requires some mental adjustment.
i get the point about the traditional UI being possibly obsolete for a large group of users. But I can‘t help wondering:
> don't know much Linux, but I've had no problems putting together a capable, well-configured, and secure Linux box by using Claude Code
How can you be sure of it being well configured and secure? Especially if you don‘t know much about Linux?
It does what I need, it lives behind a firewall (and on its own VLAN), and while I'm a Linux n00b I'm not new to computing in general.
In practice, that means I at least stick around and watch when Claude tells me to curl | sudo bash something. :-P
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> requires you to be way more flexible in your assumptions.
This is what happens if you try to read the data like gospel without having a mental model to interpret it... in other words, critical thinking.
Chatbots are a failure because chat capabilities have sucked for most of the past decade and chatbots weren't really capable enough to do anything meaningful. Not because chat is fundamentally bad. Similarly with auto-router.
Also, if you want to "cross the chasm" you cannot measure reactions from current AI users (early adopters) and extrapolate to the rest of the populace. Early adopters are paying you for tokens and try to wieid them like a surgical tool; across the chasm the rest really don't want to know anything about "tokens" or models tiers or "thinking level".
Damn people just forgot to think...
Chatbots also had huge drawbacks that are still present with AI: - Inability to see what outcomes are possible - Very constrained environment with only lightly formatted text - Sequential flow
You can see how the modern AI chat interface tries to overcome these issues. But even then, just the power of LLMs made users adopt this approach massively despite these drawbacks
Hindsight is 20/20, maybe you can accurately predict the inflection point of every modality, but the fact that most AI patterns currently used started as a quick experiment shows that most people can't, and probably shouldn't.
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
Yes definitely.
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!
The biggest mistake people make in this space is confusing the limitations of a specific implementation of a technology with fundamental flaws with the entire idea of said technology.
Once you recognize and overcome that thinking, and learn to distinguish between those two things, you can see where things are going.
There is one thing Meta got "right" here and it's not about UX. It's about security/liability brinksmanship.
People like Muse because you can put your password in and it does the thing end-to-end, which is something that I can only assume OpenAI and Anthropic had deliberately been avoiding because it's obviously a bad idea. It's pushing the "Overton window" of actions you're letting it do without regard for what happens when it goes wrong.
Just like how OpenClaw pushed it with no human-in-the-loop, Claude code pushed it before that with the all the risks of giving a third-party RCE on your machine.
You could argue that the main difference with CLI agents and OpenClaw is that they are aimed at technical users who understand the risks, whereas with Muse and GrokBot the target is explicitly "normal people" who put their password as their birthday and fall for phishing pages.
The pattern is clear, the leaders will take less risks than those in 3rd and 4th place because they have more to lose. The frontiers, smartly, keep liability low by leaving the dangerous/stupid (but incredibly fun/productive) AI uses outside of anything they actively encourage.
The insane part about Muse is that generally things like Coding agents/OpenClaw were stupider the cheaper the model you were using, which meant most people were paying for frontier to get good results (at least initially) - if you try to do complex tasks with a crappy model, you would face way more "delete production" moments. Meta is pushing boundaries AND doing so on a free plan - suggesting the use of an economical model, which makes it even more insane.
The question now becomes... will the risk be worth it? Or will people be turned away by horror stories of LLMs going on a spending spree and then being unable to make rent.
Claude will happily accept secrets (passwords, tokens, ssh keys) as environmental variables or in files. It only refuses to handle them directly.
I have a local repo with my home lab mapped out and Claude manages servers via ssh. It is completely fine with using my ssh keys and pass.
Claude will also drive the browser. After a couple times, it will even offer to do something via the browser where no API or other machine interface exists.
And yes, the digital drudgery has definitely reached a point where this is worth the risk.
The scary part isn't Meta storing your passwords. It's a cheap free-tier model holding them and deciding on its own when to use them.
It's FB's modus operandi. They don't care about safety or being careful. About fucking anything.
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Contrary to its VR ventures, Muse is very well aligned with Meta's existing business model. If they can pull this off, the kind of ad targeting they'll be able to enable is going to be crazy.
My god the astroturfing for this is getting out of hand.
The may schedule an ad event like the launch of a new product as an event on your calendar if you are using the free tier.
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.
Have you figured out a reliable way to persist stuff? Like a launch script or similar that doesn’t reset when the VM shuts down and can be used to restore tailscale
bashrc, bash profile, cron, systemd, etc all get wiped clean the moment the VM resets
I have not done anything as I have not used Muse, but you can ask Muse to persist it and it’ll create a watchdog for redeploying.
https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117329891435375465
Totally theoretical of course
right, it could be made up
https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117329100531227330
I appreciate the edit
perhaps its for plausible deniability next time they torrent training data /s
"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.
Don't forget my favorite:
"Project" for remote connections are local to the device they are created on. So if you create a project on your laptop for a remote server with a session in it, and want to access that same connection on your phone with the same project folder structure and session grouping, you need to manually recreate the project on that new device and add the session.
And you cannot mix local and remote sessions in a single project. So if you need to do anything locally for a remote project, get in the habit of naming projects things like "Project Foo [Local]" and "Project Foo [Dev]".
Then Tibo is on X asking things like “If we were to add one more sidebar, what should be in it”
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.
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
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.
It's not about cloud environments. Basically every ToS ever forbids you from disclosing your password to someone else or another entity. Even when you use a cloud-synced password manager, the whole security posture relies on that data being encrypted the entire time and never read in the cloud.
The worst security faux pas of companies is storing user passwords - because the most common source of account breaches is via credential stuffing, where they get hacked, have their user base's passwords stolen and tried on other websites. The remedy being... not to store passwords, only salted, secure hashes.
Muse sounds like a disaster - your credentials for other sites are floating around on their servers, with the capability of being decrypted. Maybe if sites decided to offer a form of auth tied to the agent that could be revoked in bulk in the event of a breach it might be a ok, but this is crazy.
Meta has a long history of treating their user’s data recklessly. Cambridge Analytica being a prominent example.
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)
> my other Meta accounts have been 100% secure.
The word “my” is doing some work here. Maybe you personally have been lucky, but Meta has had quite a few data breaches.
https://breachhistory.com/blog/facebook-data-breaches-full-t...
Linking to a straight LLM generated article where the first couple entries (the only ones I bothered to read) are about keystealers on users' computers doesn't help your case.
Grok as well seems to have a hit a sweet spot.
UI/UX
Many times, UI/UX makes all the difference in user adoption & use.
But ChatGPT already has the same UI UX.
It isn’t though.
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.
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.
That's strange because they still have a billion users. So they're all using it somehow even without being in tech. The core UX is still a chatbot.
OpenAI does now with Dots but it’s still desktop only so they flubbed the ease of use that has made Muse and Grok such growth engines.
Not true, I use OpenAI's Dot on my phone all the time. It might need to be set up first on Desktop or web?
It’s also not free.
I don't understand C, couldn't assembly already do all this?
And dropbox is just rsync and some UI
But chatgpt is still user friendly or claude I think also do these kinda of things
Difference being they're already largely similar so the analogy would be between C# and Java.
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
Think of it as a Meta-hosted OpenClaw VM for each Facebook user.
Meta is reducing the friction for your parents to run OpenClaw without any assistance.
> Meta is reducing the friction for your parents to run OpenClaw without any assistance.
Yeah this is spot on.
Meta though has a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde side and you never know which are you getting.
Facebook's install base is 3x that of cgpt
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.
This is the Dropbox comment of the AI assistant era. At least it's not quite as out of touch.
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.
You clearly didn’t understand what Muse is if you think it’s the same. Do you understand “always on”? Try to learn what that means, so you will understand why ChatGPT chat is not that.
You clearly don't understand ChatGPT's Dots, it is also always on. And even before that, you could emulate lots of Muse's features through ChatGPT, for example I have a daily automation to look through my emails for example. It's just that Muse is free and also captured people's attention through making it a bit more streamlined.
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".
Didn’t help Google, Apple, or Amazon to do the same even though they have market position and pre-existing AI products.
Meta stupidly chose to open Muse only in the US. If anyone wants to take the world, just copy it, you have a month. (Before someone do it. Not Meta. They stick to dumb decisions)
It makes sense that it is US only if you consider it like a legal experiment to see whether the enormous liability of autonomously entering into contracts or representing a user plus the cost of offering such a service for free is lower than the money you can make from not just selling clicks, but selling the conversion itself.
At that point, you can see that limiting your liability to a single jurisdiction is probably a good idea.
> Meta stupidly chose to open Muse only in the US
I'm not sure to what extent they chose that, versus their privacy woes in the EU and elsewhere chose it for them. Turns out meta's reputation among US consumers is sparkling compared to their overseas reputation...
>Turns out meta's reputation among US consumers is sparkling compared to their overseas reputation...
I'd argue that this is more of a testament of how US regulatory regime facilitates consumer choice compared to paternalism of other major markets. I personally can't wait to have a free AI assistant like Muse available in my country.
I'm tempted to try the free version as I'm curious what it is about.
Is this just a productivity thing?
Out of the top of my head I can't think of a lot of use cases but maybe RSS? Maybe I could ask it to give me a summary of cool tech news for each morning, and on very specific topics too?
Not sure what else I'd use it for.
All it wants to do is buy stuff, book stuff, reserve stuff, do anything that indicates willingness to spend money. That’s what will get companies to sign on with Meta’s AI, so that’s what it will do.
Agents talking to Agents talking to Agents, spending our money. That’s the future Meta wants.
Counterpoint: I have had my own Muse like harness with Hermes and Matrix for over a year and all I want to do with it is seamlessly long-in and purchase stuff without worrying about secure credential injection or payment confirmation.
Credentials and payments for agents and local proxy browsing is a non-trivial problem.
And I promise you my Hermes agent is not sitting here trying to get me to buy things.
I see. It's annoying all the hype around these products. I feel like it's the same as "Gettings Things Done" all over again.
Mark said, "We believe that Muse will make you money"
I guess he was taking about their business partners, not the users.
if you ask the model gently it'll give you root on the VM it runs in and you can install a bitcoin miner.
Anyone trusting Zuck's company with deep personal data will deserve what they get.
You do know that most of these accounts chatting about linking their stuff are bots. They're hyping it up. Actual ppl on here are not touching meta or grok.
So the internet _is_ dead.
The idea of millions of people ordering food through a chatbot does sound really hard to believe
Is there a good blocklist / plugin?
I know things change, but I don't know what giving money to Zuck has to do with hacking.
this
I use muse.ai for code analysis and so far, I find it excellent. I’m hoping JetBrains will make it accessible through Junie.
They compared codex with muse instead of OpenClaw?
Well I'm happy to know I'll have a job for a few years because this was incredibly weak.
Serious question: Is all of the Muse noise actually organic, or is there a giant astroturfing campaign? Like John Gruber has endlessly talked about Muse since its dropped, often in a weirdly glowing fashion, and it's incredibly weird given that a) he is almost always hyper-critical of Meta, b) It isn't Apple, c) nothing about Muse is unique or novel or differentiating.
I don't get it. Is Meta handing out big $ for everyone to make Muse happen?
Meta had a huge step up in advertising this since they've pushed it front-and-center to every one of the billions who uses Facebook, Instagram, Threads etc.
Muse is only available in the US
Meta will always do whatever it takes to get more users.
Isn’t everyone a paid shill now? This is the influencer economy. Get influenced ya bishhhhh
Have you tried it?
Of course not. Meta is a corrosive cancer on society, they are a disinformation torrent for an idiocracy, and they should be banned as government propaganda everywhere not named American America of America(Trump IncTM).
I cannot even deign to imagine someone trusting that company with an iota of their personal information, or that it would do anything constructive with it.
But I've seen enough people (presumably) astroturfing about it to know what their latest desperate "we matter" pitch is, and it just doesn't sound compelling at all. Certainly not to warrant the constant citations.
come on man have a bit of theory of mind. people just don't care that much about privacy and Meta has a half decent product. Personal agents are here to stay and they are the future. It works and obviously its going to permeate.
Someone asked me my own usage, and I specifically answered that. I didn't broadly answer for everyone. So I feel you had the theory of mind thing in the chamber and misfired.
I understand that a lot of people use Meta products as an inertia from decades past. Indisputable. Yet several long-time avowed Meta critics, who I am quite certain do not use the product, are suddenly gushing about yet another agent and endlessly namedropping Muse. It is hugely suspicious.
> I cannot even deign to imagine someone trusting that company with an iota of their personal information, or that it would do anything constructive with it.
?
On the other part of your comment: well, agree to disagree. Its probably just a good product and not everyone's hyper sensitive to privacy concerns.
Meta has been a slimy company ever since it was called TheFacebook. Not just on privacy. On everything.
Yes.
DF and their ilk, are irrelevant so they need to talk it up to get their blogs, and podcasts relevant again in the 'AI' conversation.
You would have thought that Gruber would be talking about their own expert subject matter i.e. Apple more, but since 2016 he has been going off the Apple expert opinion into Politics, Trump, AI, etc and not mainly (or exclusively) Apple.
I don't know why anybody still follows DF anymore as in the age of video, social media and podcasts the DF blog has fallen off.
That being said, on Muse, I will reserve my judgement there.
Wait till Meta's earnings to see if Muse has got any numbers to share to see if it made a difference.
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.
It’s boomers
Boomers are not a very valuable market for advertisers. The youngest boomers are 60 or older, and old people are mostly set in the products they buy and less influenced by advertising.
You sure about that? Granted this article is old but I doubt the underlying factors have changed. https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2020/07/17/what-retailers...
“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.
The difference between Google and Meta is that people already trust Google a lot with their data, passwords, browser history, phone operating system.
They have a lot more to lose in introducing something as ridiculous as Muse - changing the pre-established security boundaries like not decrypting your cloud-synced passwords.
Meta on the other hand has nothing to lose in the consumer privacy/trust space. They don't have enterprise users of Muse to worry about. Anybody putting their data into their apps has clearly no regard for the at data, so they're the only one who the risk/reward might be in their favour.
> YouTube, Google, Google Maps, and Chrome
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.
> YouTube, Google, Google Maps
Just yesterday I tried out Gemini again after a while, and it was not able to open Google Maps in navigation mode to the destination i wanted.
For the purposes of writing this comment, i asked it to put on some Jazz in Youtube (i have youtube music with a premium account on the same device and same google account) and it started a Spotify Jazz playlist.
Google might still have the popular products from 20 years of history, but after years of them trying there's no indication whatsoever that they have the ability to shape it into a coherent product.
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 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.
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.
Youtube and google maps are used because of content they have. As software they are awful.
Honestly I just think the fact that I don’t get spawned into a new chat every time I open it is an amazing. Simple and clean, AI seriously needs its Steve Jobs
I thought I'd give muse a go after discovering openai's dots were not available in the UK yet.
So, yeah that was disappointing. No muse in the UK either.
I don't get it. What muse does it better than others? it's just chat app connected to AI service.
Lots of built in APIs for it to access, and meta have access to all your data
they already have all the stolen data so they can sell you more ads
Did you read the article? Some suggestions there.
Please don't try this software. Don't signal boost it. Don't provide feedback. Don't try to find "the good stuff about it". For the love of goodness stop calling it "Meta".
Facebook is not run or owned or operated by trustworthy individuals, and until such time as the greatest majority of their leadership if removed, the company's dissolution across its various sectors of global political control and influence ended - just stop giving it attention.
Please. I don't know how much more I can take of people demanding justice from a company that is only now being fined for sins of the past to a tune of meaningless dollars while also goofing "ooh shiny fun avatar that does an ai how useful!"
Please. Stop.
>Please don't try this software. Don't signal boost it. Don't provide feedback. Don't try to find "the good stuff about it".
A refreshing dose of sanity in this thread.
It feels that everyone is quick to forget the sins of these corporations.. akin to a toxic relationship and after breakup, you keep on going back for mote.
what's the point of saying all that?
you already know what will happen. if the model is good enough, people will use it.
you're asking for a lot of things here. I don't think most people take it that personally.
If you haven't read "Careless People", you should. Peoples lives, governments, politics have been altered so facebook can grow and build its influence. The least one can do is to say all that.
fair. but I think e.g. nitpicking about the FB rename to Muse distracts from the genuine points and makes the statements seem emotionally charged which makes it easier to dismiss
and I think there's also a point to be made that you shouldn't be too caring about issues that you can't influence, it simply causes harm toward yourself.
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Telling people to stop will just make people use it and explore it more (Rebel effect)
How are you going to 100% stop this?
You of all people should know this.
Let people use what they want to use.
The thought of using Facebook products as a show of rebellion in 2026 is extremely amusing to me.
The point is psychological and human behaviors.
People don't like being told what to do, so saying "Stop using Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp/Threads" is going to cause the opposite effect, people will "rebel" and keep using whatever Facebook has.
Another point is inertia (which all of you should know by now)
If you want to stop Meta, I mean "Facebook" you must answer the age old question:
How do you move these users friends over to Mastodon, BlueSky or PixelFed?
If you don't have an answer to this single question, people will continue to use Facebook's products and no amount of "Stop using ..." would solve this.
I don't buy your claim that anyone is using Facebook because someone told them not to.
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Metas Muse is a direct ripoff from me.
I freaked out when I saw Muse.
A few months ago I made this website when it occurred to me that I and friends were starting to hand their lives to AI:
Http://lifeos.nexus
It’s bizarre it’s almost exactly what Muse is - the characters even look like Muse.
One of my characters is NAMED Muse.
It’s deeply weird what a precise copy the concept is.
Have a look at this page then compare the characters to https://lifeos.nexus
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/25/meta-is-putting-its-muscle...
> Metas Muse is a direct ripoff from me.
Maybe you should be addressing this to a law firm instead of a public forum?