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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Nearly four years after ChatGPT triggered the chatbot boom, a new type of service with the potential to change how consumers use AI is starting to come into focus. To judge by the tremors that went through the stock market this week, it could also reverberate across the broader digital landscape, with knock-on effects for a wide range of consumer services.
The technology in question is the personal AI agent, a piece of software designed to carry out actions on behalf of a user. A dream since the dawn of the internet, digital assistants like this have become an intense focus in Silicon Valley. The question has been not simply whether the technology is ready for primetime, but whether anyone could package it into an easy-to-use form capable of striking a chord with a mass audience.
A spate of new agents has started to gain attention in recent weeks, including Meta’s Muse, Elon Musk’s Grok Bot and Instinct, a start-up that has been generating buzz in Silicon Valley.
It is too early to tell whether Muse will come to be seen as the breakthrough consumer moment for personal agents. But it has provided the first glimpse of how the technology might be turned into a mass-market product, and it has been the first to generate interest well beyond the tech world. Muse has become the most downloaded app on mobile app stores, earning it comparisons with the early viral success of ChatGPT.
For chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, Muse has come at an opportune moment. Only two months ago, Wall Street was growing distinctly restless over his company’s soaring data centre spending, as well as his decision to hoard excess AI capacity to use on putative new Meta services rather than make a quick return by selling it into a red-hot wholesale market. If Muse becomes a wider hit, he should have the infrastructure to support it.
Meta’s breakthrough has been to answer a deceptively simple-sounding question for consumers: What can this AI do for me?
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long bemoaned the fact that most people don’t understand how powerful his company’s technology is and only call on ChatGPT for a small fraction of its potential. In response, OpenAI has been working on a redesign to surface more of its capabilities, including its ability to act as an agent. With Muse, Zuckerberg has beaten Altman to the punch.
Muse saturates a user with suggestions, from filtering email to trying to save money by searching for unused subscriptions. Along the way, it constantly prompts the user to link it to a wider range of services and accounts, giving it increasing sway over that person’s online life.
If Meta has solved one part of the puzzle, it has yet to show it can instil the high level of trust most people will need to feel before delegating parts of their lives to an agent. The app comes with plenty of warnings that it may act in unexpected ways, and the company says it is using other agents to monitor Muse and alert a user if the app is about to do something, like hand over personal data or make a payment.
Also, Muse has been launched with only part of its planned privacy protections in place. That is surprising, given Meta’s need to reassure people who might be put off by its history of privacy violations. The company has promised to restrict the capacity of Meta to see personal data processed by Muse.
Equally unknown is whether enough people will reshape their digital behaviour around agents, using them as the starting point for everything from buying the groceries to planning their next vacation.
If they do, it could make Meta a new kind of gatekeeper and support a new business model, taking a cut for steering users to other digital services.
For some companies like online travel agents, agents like Muse could lead to disintermediation, reducing demand for their services. For others, like online retailers, agents pose a strategic dilemma, promising extra traffic but also undermining their relationships with customers. Amazon last weekend blocked Muse from making purchases, while Walmart forged a partnership to give the agent free access.
Muse’s early success even sent a ripple of concern through banks and other financial stocks, on worries that customers will use agents to optimise their financial lives by doing things like leaving less cash sitting in non-interest-bearing accounts. This reaction may or may not be justified but Muse’s early traction is a sign that the agent revolution has just come a big step closer.