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
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)
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
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.
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.
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
That’s already in production. Look for Apple 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.
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...
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.