“... everyone is just going to have to adapt,” Meta’s chief financial officer Susan Li said during the third-quarter earnings call.
“... everyone is just going to have to adapt,” Meta’s chief financial officer Susan Li said during the third-quarter earnings call.
Mark Zuckerberg is barrelling toward a future in which an autonomous network of AI agents will run our lives — shopping for us, working for us, talking to other people’s AI agents for us. Are humans ready for this very specific and unrelenting vision of a life in which we communicate primarily through bot proxies? Actually, don’t answer that. The more urgent question coming off Meta’s quarterly earnings call Wednesday night is more likely to be: “Is he?”
Zuckerberg is staking Meta’s future on Muse, the personal AI agent it released to the general public last month. It’s early days, but Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday’s call that he sees a future where “billions” of people are using Muse, and those people’s Muses are talking to and transacting with other people’s Muses in a “large-scale Muse network.”
The Muses will be “extremely capable” personal agents that will help us achieve our goals and improve our lives in “whatever ways you want,” Zuckerberg said, “whether that’s improving your relationships, helping you save time, save money, build a business, create new things, or anything else that you can dream of.” By this logic, Zuckerberg says, we’ll all be so hooked on Muse that it will eventually generate more revenue per user for Meta than Instagram and Facebook, which as of today, bring in pretty much all of the money Meta makes.
This ecosystem of personal AI agents “can work with your friends and your families, and if you want to buy something, it’s not just navigating to that business’s website; it’s talking to their agent,” Zuckerberg said. “I think that getting that all to work well together is going to unlock tremendous value at scale.”
Zuckerberg predicts that Muse will be “highly profitable” in just a few years.
All of this should sound great — if not a little freaky — to investors, who probably tuned into Meta’s call hoping Zuckerberg would have some justification for the hundreds of billions of dollars his company is currently spending on AI data centers. But, if anyone was hoping for more than a concept of a plan, they didn’t get one.
To be fair to Muse, Zuckerberg shared a few promising data points. To date, the app has been downloaded and set up by more than 10 million users in the US and Canada, making it one of Meta’s “most successful launches ever,” according to Zuckerberg. He did not share specific retention numbers, but said that a quarter of people who downloaded Muse initially are using it daily. He sees the biggest opportunity in commerce. A quarter of Muse users are shopping through the platform, Zuckerberg said, and are spending on average more than $200 per purchase.
Meta earns a fee for every commercial transaction that takes place on Muse. Zuckerberg’s thinking seems to be that if AI agents are doing the shopping, the potential number of transactions that could take place on the platform is, essentially, unlimited. Unlike the average consumer, AI agents don’t sleep. In theory, they’re available 24/7 to scrape the Internet, generate product recommendations, and buy things, constantly, in real time.
Meta didn’t offer any details as to how all of this will actually work in practice, which makes sense given the very legitimate concerns about how the company handles data privacy. In September, a YouTuber said his Muse agent sent a stranger to his home in the middle of the night while arranging a Facebook Marketplace transaction on his behalf. When Muse launched last month, Zuckerberg claimed it was “built for privacy and security from the ground up,” but there have been reports of agents leaking content from users’ private conversations. A Canadian bank executive told Bloomberg earlier this week that it would consider blocking Muse from accessing its customers’ financial data.
Zuckerberg seems to think if people get on board with Muse, enterprise will have to follow. But, what if people don’t want to? What if they can’t afford to? Someone has to pay for all the stuff the bots are buying in this fever dream of a never-ending, Supermarket Sweep episode taking place inside our phones — or Muse Charms, if you’d rather. New research from the University of Michigan shows that consumer sentiment in the US is at an all-time low as gas prices and inflation continue to creep up.
If Meta knows that all of this sounds dystopian and a little bizarre, it does not care.
“Agents are going to be an important part of how reality evolves, and everyone is just going to have to adapt,” Meta’s chief financial officer Susan Li said when one investor on the call asked about potential “friction points” in getting businesses on board with the Muse plan. After all, Meta says Muse will likely remain free for consumers, while businesses will be expected to cover the transaction fees.
Meta really does need Muse to work. The company’s capex is through the roof, and other financial obligations are piling up. It plans to spend between $135 billion and $145 billion in 2026, double what it spent last year. As of yesterday, it owes New Mexico $25 billion after a jury found it had violated the state’s consumer protection laws. Meta, and the rest of Big Tech for that matter, is under increasing pressure to show that its AI investments will be worth it.
Forget consumers — it’s not clear if Meta itself can afford its plans. Zuckerberg stated clearly on the call that the reason it hasn’t launched Muse internationally is because of compute efficiency.
It’s incredibly expensive and energy-intensive to run GPUs at the level that a network of Muses would require, and Meta seems to have reached the limit of what it can achieve with its current data center operations. Zuckerberg told investors the plan is to “10x” the cost-efficiency of its compute next year. He didn’t explain how the company plans to do this. Luckily for him — and possibly the rest of us — there is already research on how data centers can maximize compute capacity with energy use strategies that also reduce strain on the electric grid. Maybe he’ll read it.
Ultimately, Muse won’t be profitable and won’t succeed if Meta can’t figure out how to get its compute costs down. Zuckerberg said it himself.
“One of the biggest constraints so far is that because this is a compute-intensive service to run, we haven’t launched it globally,” Zuckerberg told an investor who asked about the “limiting factors” he sees in growing Muse’s user base.
Muse’s 10 million downloads since launch are even more impressive considering they came only from the US and Canada, Zuckerberg said. “If we actually did roll it out more broadly, then you would expect that number to be significantly larger than what we’re seeing today.”
Zuckerberg at least seems to understand that some people — and, probably more importantly for him, some businesses — won’t immediately “get” Muse. That’s okay, he said. “We’ll work with folks on the terms that make sense for them,” he said. “I do think that over time, this is going to be quite valuable for everyone.”
Then again, this is the same guy who brought you the Metaverse. We’ll see what happens.
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