What Meta got right with Muse
metedata.substack.com
metedata.substack.com
Yes and the last thing I want to do is to integrate my life with best ad business in the world
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.
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.
oh this is cool. I would be very interested in a 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
I then linked my Facebook, IG and others to this new Meta account so that Muse can access them.
No problems whatsoever
You completed the circle!
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.
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.
In general though yeah X is probably less competent in the execution of manipulating you through insights from your data.
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.
xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, may dabble in ads but they are nowhere near Meta and Google.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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
Ayyy! You're one of the folks I wrote my comment [0] for!
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?
It will be interesting to see if muse's privacy features can get users over this.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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)
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.
That’s already in production. Look for Apple Private Cloud Compute
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
In practice, that means I at least stick around and watch when Claude tells me to curl | sudo bash something. :-P
Once you recognize and overcome that thinking, and learn to distinguish between those two things, you can see where things are going.
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!
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.
Agents talking to Agents talking to Agents, spending our money. That’s the future Meta wants.
I guess he was taking about their business partners, not the users.
Those other issues, while perhaps examples of bad corporate behavior, aren't really security lapses per se.
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.
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...
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)
Many times, UI/UX makes all the difference in user adoption & use.
Muse is:
- a single thread
- has avatars that you can name
- has approval cards
Now dots is similar in concept but that only launched a few days ago and Muse launched a month ago.
When it comes to being mainstream, an approachable UI sells
Meta is reducing the friction for your parents to run OpenClaw without any assistance.
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...
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.
Well I'm happy to know I'll have a job for a few years because this was incredibly weak.
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.
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.
How are you going to 100% stop this?
You of all people should know this.
Let people use what they want to use.
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.
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.
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.
I don't get it. Is Meta handing out big $ for everyone to make Muse happen?
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.
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.
?
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.
It’s boomers
Umm what? Having billions of hourly active users across YouTube, Google, Google Maps, and Chrome still doesn’t mean they have the product chops to build another consumer facing app/service? I think it’s inevitable that Muse will get crushed.
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.
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.
You listed products that have been around for ~20 years. Keeping up already entrenched products running doesn't correlate with being able to launch new products.
We should look to see how Shorts vs IG Reels have adapted to the short form video landscape for product chops in this area. IMO IG has adapted far better to the new era, and I very often get people sending me Reels (they used to send TikToks). I very rarely see anyone send Shorts but it still happens. I expect this trend to continue and IG to extend their lead here. And Muse certainly has first mover advantage in personalized AI apps, who knows when Google will finally release one.
bashrc, bash profile, cron, systemd, etc all get wiped clean the moment the VM resets
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...
Maybe you should be addressing this to a law firm instead of a public forum?