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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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)

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.

> 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 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.

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.

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.

It’s also not free.

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?

I don't understand C, couldn't assembly already do all this?

Difference being they're already largely similar so the analogy would be between C# and Java.

But chatgpt is still user friendly or claude I think also do these kinda of things

And dropbox is just rsync and some UI

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

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.

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.

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.

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