Judging from the website, Muse seems to be too keen on making me buy things - Book Tickets, Buy a Stroller. Would this personal AI spam me with ads randomly like this?
having used it for a bit, yes, one of the first things it asked me for, unprompted, were things to set it up to buy stuff. i declined but it still consistently wants to spend money; research a trip? as soon as it has any results it prompts to start booking stuff. etc.
Of course it does! Really, though, what it really wants to do is make restaurant reservations. The primary concern of AI researchers has always been, and will always be, making restaurant reservations.
Parsing natural language and solving climate change are downstream of making restaurant reservations.
Universal Paperclips should have been about making restaurant reservations.
The Target marketing team famously could predict when a woman is pregnant but it was too creepy to, uh, Target them with only baby goods in dynamic marketing materials so they would mix in a few masculine things like lawn mowers into the catalog. No idea if that is what Meta is doing here but it's one explanation.
Instinct exists with the same features. It is quite good. I was thinking they were gonna get acquired by meta 100%, but looks like meta has a competitor.
I mean, Google and x.AI already have stuff like this. There's plenty of other options as well. And even outside of that, I've heard the promise of "let AI book your reservations!" since before LLMs became a thing.
None of this seems new. Maybe polished, but useless to anyone who is seriously using AI for anything important. I imagine this is effectively a toy for boomers who want to feel like they're keeping up with the latest tech by tapping a few buttons in Facebook.
And none of that even touches that fact that nobody should be OK with Meta having this kind of access to their life. But I'll leave that to others to harp on lol
He coded it himself? Oh I thought it was the XAI team who are all individual human beings with varied beliefs. Your black and white thinking is symptomatic of a mental issue.
Grok is my go-to LLM for research not because I care for Elon Musk but because it's really good. I'm not even sure if I'm paying for it? I have an X Premium account but I don't know if that's giving me more Grok usage or what. Either way, its research mode is very good and frequently pulls off tasks the competitors struggle with in my experience.
More because Spark is not good. Gemini Flash 3.8 is an awesome model! I use it all the time
Spark asks you for every single tool call, often forgets earlier parts of the conversation, is unable to use apps unless you explicitly tag them and and and
Google has great models, but their harnesses and products are just bad
Google definitely does not have good models and if it does, Gemini Flash series models are definitely not them. I use the Google Gemini app daily (for searches, research etc.), everyday, for some query, gemini flash 3.8 hallucinates, does not understand context etc. in quite short conversations. I switch back to 3.1 pro and it works fine.
Which brings me to why do they get good benchmark scores? Have never really understood this. They must be optimizing just for this.
Yeah. Codex and Cowork are full of papercuts when it comes to usability. Grok Bot is head and shoulders better and more pleasant to use. And Muse is similar to Grok Bot.
Same here. Facebook has a horrible experience when you're traveling or logging in from a new computer. I still have business Instagram accounts blocked with no way to login and no support. Wouldn't want to depend on anything from Facebook, especially not something with access to my email, calendar, and browser.
I have a hard time understanding, given the abundance of bad faith and predatory behavior Meta has displayed over entire span of its existence, why anyone would want to consult with its "personal AI" or grant it access to "all aspects of your life".
There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined, most people don't give a shit and are just trying to minimize cognitive effort. My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day because it would mean less planning.
>My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day
I guess a lot of the AI enthusiasts are already pushing the "I automated my daily life decisions to this awesome AI. I now have more time and more brain power left to be productive!" angle.
I think the phrasing is a little extreme. Rather than “tell them what to eat” I’d say something like “everyone wishes they had a personal assistant”.
I could do a lot better at meal planning than I do. I rotate between relatively few dishes. An AI that finds recipes and automatically adds the ingredients to my shopping could be interesting. Technically it’s “telling me what to eat” but it’s not like I’m taking orders from it.
No, it's more like society would have failed in raising me as a human being if I'm okay with completely ignoring the people that raised + provided for me where I purposely replace human connection with a chatbot.
> There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined
Is there tho? I have Facebook account but don't use it in any meaningful way. I'm certainly not feeding it any new data. I'm curious to know what percentage of that 3 billion are zombie accounts like mine.
There almost certainly is. I think on HN people aren’t really aware that they don’t represent the median internet user super well. I would wager if you were to tally every late millennial and zoomer across the west, Instagram usage would probably be near 90%. Facebook usage among older people is also still absolutely rampant, at least anecdotally. Not to mention WhatsApp usage which is huge everywhere but the US seemingly
The population of the west who fit into zoomer near millennials wouldn't even be close to 500m. Maybe if we add threads bots we could get closer. Most of the accounts are bots/fake/not used anymore.
90% of zoomers don't have an account, most rarely use it and don't add more than a few photos for social proof.
This. The metric is "monthly active users" but people prefer that other metric "I don't use it, I don't seen anyone using it in front of me, so nobody uses it".
Instagram seems like their most engaged property. FB seems to be devolving into groups + marketplace, and WhatsApp gets a lot of play but I don't think it's the best ad serving/bot surface. I don't think Insta alone can carry the company long term, and while I can see group moderation bots, marketplace agents and insta content assistants being popular, I don't think Meta has an entre into running people's lives the way Google does.
Almost everyone in south asia, Latam, and Africa with a smartphone uses whatsapp daily. I mean the penetration rate is actually crazy. In my latam country 92% of internet users are whatsapp users. In india, the figure is 97%.
So how many billions is that before throwing in IG and FB?
Who knows for sure, but Meta's own financial disclosures[1] report over 3.6 billion "Family Daily Actice People (DAP), which represents the de-duplicated number of people who log into at least one of Meta's core properties (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or WhatsApp) daily.
At even 1% of that figure, that's a heck of a lot of people.
I should clarify that what I mean is that it's very useful for buying and selling. Where I live, at least, it's more active than Kijiji or Craigslist ever were.
I’m sure there is a percentage of accounts that are zombie but there’s no doubt that Meta has an absolute shit-ton of daily users. All else aside, in most countries outside the US WhatsApp is the primary messaging medium.
There's something like 177 million facebook users in the US. Most probably have Facebook/instagram/etc installed on their phones, streaming their location data/etc, without a worry in the world. Most would probably very much enjoy the utility of this agent.
If you can't understand how the general population, the target customer for Meta, would think of using something like this, then it almost certainly means your entire social circle is within the same tech-aware bubble that you are in here. ;) I have a few non-tech people that I talk bounce this sort of thing off of, periodically, as a reality check.
Every single HN post about anything Meta-adjacent starts with a comment like this. Guys, we get it, the hive mind of HN doesn't like Meta/Facebook/Zuck. Fine. But can we actually comment on the technology and tools rather than the company for once?
This comes up a lot here! Your comment reads like a lot of similar HN "Can't we just talk about the pure technology? Why do you all always have to bring up ethics/politics of it all??" As if these things are separable. Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum. As soon as it touches society, it necessarily gets dirtied up with messy things like law, ethics, corporate responsibility, capitalism, profit-seeking, public good. The technology is never separate from the environment around the technology.
It's impossible (or at least dishonest) to try to simply discuss the pure technical aspects of The Torment Nexus.
The technology is an agent you name. You give it a face. Maybe tune the personality. And, it only gets useful as you grant it more and more access to your accounts.
The technology is produced by a public company. And, in this case, the company is useful context for this story since it has just recently agreed to pay about $18 billion to resolve a multistate lawsuit claiming it intentionally designed addictive platforms that harmed young people's mental health.
You cannot detach the technology from the company. It's definitely not a neutral artifact.
This is probably why they are launching now. There's no real other competitor right now in the nicely made managed openclaw space for personal use (or at least, very very early. Maybe Grokbot can be considered the lead competitor but afaik it did not gain mindshare). Instinct is supposed to come out soon and by not being associated with Meta it'd be really appealing just on that front vs this. But being first to market is a real reason to use it and chance to gain lasting market share.
You are right, sometimes the simplest answer is the right now. Don't trust Meta. Life is going to be much simpler. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me continuously for 20 years, shame on me.
I had that conversation several times with friends outside of tech. The universal reaction is just a shrug - "my life is boring, what do they care".
And yes, you can counter with a hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy. In practice, it's a trade-off most people are comfortable making because they can't think of any specific thing that some trillion-dollar tech company, or the FBI, or the FSB, would ever want to do to them specifically.
It's the same reason why the market share for Firefox is a rounding error.
I get this, and I’ve said similar things about privacy and security in the past, but Meta in particular has a history of intentionally using customer data and behavior to the detriment of those customers. Creating experiences designed to ensnare, addict, and ultimately harm their users. This goes beyond paranoia about security or privacy. It’s handing your drug dealer the keys to your house.
For a lot of companies, you can usually assume incompetence when they end up doing something terrible, but Meta is the strongest "Anti Hanlon's Razor" example. You have to always assume malice with those guys.
> hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy.
Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.
> Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.
The hypothetical part was not about them being able to do it, but about them caring to do anything with that information.
My mother is pretty much locked-in on fb/whatsapp/instagram. She travels internationally rather frequently, including to more "questionable" countries (where she just happens to have relatives that she wants to visit). She has never faced any issues related to her usage of meta products (or social media in general).
It boggles my mind how there are actual adults on HN, who straight up fail to comprehend that telling a normal person (e.g., my mom, who is imo in the majority of the kind of people using social media) something like "you shouldn't be doing it, because muh gubernment surveillance and unencrypted comms and you are being watched by the feds" is gonna just make you sound crazy.
And why wouldn't it? She has never faced any issues, and she has been actively using whatsapp+ig all the time, for over a decade. And the same holds true for everyone she knows as well. Not once did she face any issues ever, despite traveling multiple times a year every year, including to some countries that are on pretty adversarial terms with the US (we are talking "sanctioned" type of adversarial).
The thing is, she faces none of the hypothetical issues that could come from her usage of those services. Neither do any of the people she ever talked to, and that's the overwhelming majority of the users of those services. You are more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand (and it is at least partially true). I am just baffled and disappointed by how there is such a large contingent of HN users who straight up cannot even comprehend the mindset and experiences of an average adult user.
> "you shouldn't be doing it, because muh gubernment surveillance and unencrypted comms and you are being watched by the feds" is gonna just make you sound crazy.
Well yeah if that is how you choose to have that conversation then sure.
> more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand
I made no such claim.
You seem pretty committed to your strawmen so good day to you sir.
Because people are apathetic by nature until things become a real problem.
It's not just Meta, either. How often do we have people on here talking about how amazing Chinese models are when the list of security breaches involving the Chinese government is extensive?
People want something easy, quick, and free. Do those things and they'll let you get away with anything.
It’s the life of a parasite. You don’t care if it takes just a bit from you. And it eventually protects you from worse parasites. (Like the us blocking china)
Why are all the seemingly smart people on HN so narrow-minded to the point of speaking idiotic nonsense? What do you think their 3.6B MAU are, all bots?
So my country has somewhere between 100-200 million MAU for facebook ane.
Facebook marketplace is huge here.It's basically our craigslist. Hobby groups/communities are also huge. If I wanted to find the local jogging or chess club, I'd use Facebook.
Just remember that outside your bubble there's a whole wide world with billions of people living in it
And the thing is, network effects are killer. I'm on it because you're on it because Alice is on it because Bob is on it
But, Facebook has apparently been known to censor links to competition (I'm less clear on this). With Myspace they had a tool where you could import contacts into Facebook from Myspace, but not the other way around
Damn yeah why do people even use Facebook or WhatsApp or instagram? How does a company become a multi billion dollar company at all? Guess what.. it’s because people use it and don’t care.
That’s the godawful truth. The other thing you need to realize is not only do people don’t care, but people like you know exactly why meta makes billions. It’s obvious. You seriously expect me to believe you don’t know why a company like meta makes billions? Come on.
It’s sad but thats the way things are. I see someone pretend they don’t get it but if you take the time to think you’ll realize… We all get it. We just can’t face it.
Why is it fine in isolation? Should you not get exactly the pushback you'd expect from saying that? As a clear joke, maybe less. I don't think he was joking though
In 2015 Facebook (not yet renamed to Meta) launched a personal assistant that lived in Messenger and functioned remarkably like ChatGPT does today. At the time it was basically entirely humans on the backend, with the idea that they could replace humans incrementally as they collected data. Really ahead of its time. They shut it down in 2018, which seems shortsighted in hindsight. That data would have been invaluable just a few years later.
I’m sure general population won’t care but they’ve got me fucked up if they I’d ever use something like this. Glean my personal info and preferences the hard way! Through what insane videos I like on Instagram!
From the demo, it seems towards "buy buy buy", but I'm cheap, I always compare prices, even for repeat items (who knows, another seller might happen to be cheaper now?).
The best selling point is an end-to-end purchase flow that you don't have think about at all, it does the price comparisons for you. However, if you want to use it to just get the list of top candidates and compare and go make the final decision yourself I'm sure it can do that for you too. Either way I see a future where these claw-like agents can fit into everyday use cases.
Maybe... if run locally with full transparency into the prompts (including system etc) and independent benchmarks for the models (i.e. tests on how eager they are about selling me stuff)
But even in this hypothetical world I would still have a hard time teaching an LLM what I find important in a product. Not everything can be captured in easy to compare numbers. "Does the device creak under pressure?", "What's the one weirdly unergonomic thing about it you only notice after weeks of using?"... Stuff like that. Things which are easy to miss even if the model ingests all relevant reviews about the product, because it might not stand out, but might be important for me.
I asked it to by me concert tickets, it suggested ticket master for 90$ each, I asked it to find cheaper tickets and found something else 70$ each — I found it really convenient.
I asked it to check once a day for the next week and notify me of any price changes
Interesting how the first beat of the curiously-low-bitrate, kinda-ugly video presentation was admitting that the agent's highest priority is to get me to buy more stuff through its store front.
It's certainly honest.
Is this marketing to end-users or to stakeholders?
> A personal AI agent can help with everyday tasks like booking reservations, monitoring prices, managing reminders, creating documents, generating images, and researching topics.
Always the same thing. I wish product designers would have some modicum of imagination for how agents can actually help people.
Literally none of these examples are improved by this kind of personal AI agent; on the contrary, it means letting your agency be dictated by companies that do not have your interests in mind.
Out of curiosity, do you have other ideas or things you want it to do? It just seems like they always converge on the same set of executive tasks because they’re a nail that is exceptionally well suited to this particular hammer.
Take a picture of my son's printed basketball calendar and add it to my shared iCloud family calendar. Apple/Siri couldn't do it, Claude couldn't do it. Things STILL can't talk to each other, seemingly intentionally. My wife and tried over the summer. I told her Claude+Siri could do this in 30s, and she would try by hand. 20 minutes later she was done adding each event manually, and I still couldn't get beyond trying to convince Calendar on my iPhone to open an ics or whatever file. I was supposed to open the file from Apple Mail, which I don't use, and email it from gmail or something.
This example should be "Super Friendly AI Assistant!!" and it fails on the absolute most basic thing I could throw at it.
At what point did Claude fail with that, generating a list of events from the scan, or adding the events to the calendar?
I had a different AI (Grok) successfully take a prompt like "I live at this address and need to pick up my son from school at 2:30pm, and then we need to hit these three stores before heading back home. Find the path with the least driving and add all of these as discrete events to my calendar with their addresses embedded, and give me a google maps link with the full path so I can double-check". Did it correctly on the first try. I'd think other AIs could do that too. So I'm thinking it was the scanned image that gave it problems?
The failure is that the task was "can I take a picture of a printed calendar with Claude and have events added to my shared family calendar" and it is apparently not possible. The parsed file was fine, and maybe would have needed a few touchups, but Claude could not access the calendar directly, and Apple Calendar cannot read its own calendar format. So, failure, no partial credit given. My wife manually added the calendar in the time required it was taking me to debug this nonsense; I probably said "wait, no, it's almost done!" a half dozen times before throwing up my hands.
The added benefit of this failure is that by adding it by hand, we were much more familiar with the events on the calendar, and were ready for a few "outlier" events, e.g. a tournament 100 miles away that we knew about a month ahead instead of a few days.
If you had done this on a Mac, it would have worked just fine. The failure in your chain is iOS Calendar not being an intent handler for ICS files.
Another way you could have solved it would be to have the Google Workspace connection set up in the backend for Claude and it would write the parsed events to your account directly. Then in iOS you could move the events to the iCloud Family Calendar.
Or again, if you did this on a Real Computer, you could bulk-move them.
Yes, I know all of this. I have a Mac, and a PC, and an Arch Linux desktop, and an iPhone. None of this is "easy." The task was "take a picture of a printed calendar with my phone and get it in my Apple Calendar (with zero intermediate steps)." This is not possible.
fwiw, it’s likely not product designers making these decisions. More likely, designers and researchers planned to explore use cases people would actually use and benefit from, but were told to focus on the ones leadership deemed important
They tend to devolve to the lowest common denominator of what the decision-making chain can understand and resonate with on zero context.
If 1,000 people need to approve the User Journey, you get flights, reminders and docs... because that is what 1,000 big tech employees mutually share as easily understandable common problems within their own corporate zeitgeist.
Disclosure: I work for Meta, and run into this phenomenon daily, but I do not work on Muse.
that seems to be the same problem that most product people in tech have - ie they don't use their own app anywhere close to as much as their average user. all the features they champion happen in walled-garden microcosms loosely backed by heavily p-hacked 'voice of the customer' stats
it's like someone who has a personal chauffeur designing the driving experience of a car - you get educated guesses at best and just total crud at worst. actual epiphanies that happen over repeated use and idle thoughts just don't happen
My AI agent decided with the Ticketmaster agent that since I couldn't get the tickets to the show I really wanted, I'd instead attend a show they haven't sold very many tickets for as it's a bit of a drive. I forgot to charge my AI agent's loyalty this week and it fell below the threshold of trustworthiness so it struck this awful deal. It's stipulated that I attend or I risk even further matrix degradation of my agent in the agentweb. I even spent all last week providing my AI agent with RealTestimonials about various consumer products for the streams but apparently they want you to manually charge it every week and you have to have a full package of tokens, you can't partially charge your agent even just to break a threshold on its behavior matrix.
Meta's work on this has been known in the valley for some time now so all the VC's who invested in Instinct's recent huge raise would have known about it.
Ironically, one of the things I most want from an agent like Muse is to read Facebook and Instagram for me and present posts in a user-friendly and ad-free format.
Lol right? And the REAL irony is that this will likely just be a way to show you even MORE ads while collecting MORE data for MORE targeted advertising.
If Muse could actually just show me content that I want to see and cut out all of the other crap, I'd be willing to use it. Of course, there's no way Zucc will pay for an expensive AI service that will undercut his main revenue stream.
The features don't really matter here IMO; where does the PA function live? Whoever runs it sees intent streams. If that goes to a startup then the planning, coordination etc.. is ad free. I don't think Meta wants to live in that world.
Travel is such a huge play here because its inherently social; so "^n viral loop where N is travelers; odds are most will have some meta app so possibly lower friction here too. Not to mention the adjacent travel econ: e.g.: eat, sleep etc..
Amplified an order of magnitude for the e-mail piece given how badly Meta would like to have google's g-mail data.
The Agent Computer is super powerful, but by definition its easier than ever to build one yourself, and a the result is a personal and private computer.
I know most "normal" people wont want to build their own this but there are still a lot of options that don't involve giving Meta or Grok all your data.
After the release of Qwen 3.8 I've been dabbling with my "Agent Computer". That is, a secondary GPU on my home computer. Intel B70 with enough VRAM to run Q6 and some context on llama.cpp, plus a ComfyUI instance. Total yolo mode with full access to my PC, --tools=all and sudo NOPASSWD.
It can do file organizing and wrangling when needed, it has simple web access with the curl tool, it can analyze media file contents. It's analyzed my local data and written several little tools (cli, TUI, GUI) to manage it automatically or give comprehensive reports. I can create new media through ComfyUI and Krita AI.
Sure, it can't book a flight or organize the family calendar for the next month, but I don't have any need for those.
Exciting to finally see glimmers of Meta's vision for its massive LLM investment.
It's not a bad product idea, but adoption might be rough because of all the negative goodwill that Meta has accumulated over the years. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if someone (maybe one of the big AI labs) ran Meta's own playbook against them here by creating an imitator and aggressively funding adoption to try and win the market as a fast follower.
And on top of that, we've all seen how confidently LLM's get things wrong. I've seen them get better, but even the current SOTA models fumble. Why would you want to send a bot a message "sure, reschedule my flight" and have a bot potentially fumble that in all sorts of ways? I really really do not see the appeal. My calendar and my emails and my things to do are all things I want to be on top of. Not have it half-assed or potentially messed up by a chatbot made to harvest all your data.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 29.0 ms ] threadParsing natural language and solving climate change are downstream of making restaurant reservations.
Universal Paperclips should have been about making restaurant reservations.
I'm sure many others will criticize other aspects of Meta, and rightly so. But imagine using a Claw agent with zero tech support available
None of this seems new. Maybe polished, but useless to anyone who is seriously using AI for anything important. I imagine this is effectively a toy for boomers who want to feel like they're keeping up with the latest tech by tapping a few buttons in Facebook.
And none of that even touches that fact that nobody should be OK with Meta having this kind of access to their life. But I'll leave that to others to harp on lol
I use it every day now, having it look a few times a day for glitched pricing deals and hunting down useful directories to list my projects in.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Spark asks you for every single tool call, often forgets earlier parts of the conversation, is unable to use apps unless you explicitly tag them and and and
Google has great models, but their harnesses and products are just bad
Which brings me to why do they get good benchmark scores? Have never really understood this. They must be optimizing just for this.
I think Meta limiting factor for this product was lack of agentic capable models which they fixed now with aggressive RLHF focused data gathering.
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there is no logout or instruction whatsoever on email, so zero tech support definitely not true
They had the FAIR, and Yann Le Cun.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/06/0...
(Disclaimer: work at Microsoft, but not in the Scout team)
I guess a lot of the AI enthusiasts are already pushing the "I automated my daily life decisions to this awesome AI. I now have more time and more brain power left to be productive!" angle.
I could do a lot better at meal planning than I do. I rotate between relatively few dishes. An AI that finds recipes and automatically adds the ingredients to my shopping could be interesting. Technically it’s “telling me what to eat” but it’s not like I’m taking orders from it.
Is there tho? I have Facebook account but don't use it in any meaningful way. I'm certainly not feeding it any new data. I'm curious to know what percentage of that 3 billion are zombie accounts like mine.
90% of zoomers don't have an account, most rarely use it and don't add more than a few photos for social proof.
There are many people of all ages not in the west from very populous nations who use Insta, FB and WhatsApp.
I’ve learned that US usage patterns are not representative of rest of world.
More saliently, HN users’ conception of others’ usage patterns are absolutely not representative.
So how many billions is that before throwing in IG and FB?
Also WhatsApp is absolutely huge around the world and wherever I go it doesn't seem like it's slowing down.
At even 1% of that figure, that's a heck of a lot of people.
1. https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
Craigslist had no accounts or login wall. Postings were chronological with a map. Simple email for communication rather than FB messenger.
It's for real estate so you can't select age ranges.
The view count grouped by age (highest views to lowest) was:
- 65 to 75
- 55 to 65
- 45 to 55
And almost all women.
In other words, there are a LOT of older women on FB.
Yes.
> I'm curious to know what percentage
A fraction of one.
Same with most topics that HN considers sensitive, such as privacy concerns. >99% of people just don't give a shit.
https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
If you can't understand how the general population, the target customer for Meta, would think of using something like this, then it almost certainly means your entire social circle is within the same tech-aware bubble that you are in here. ;) I have a few non-tech people that I talk bounce this sort of thing off of, periodically, as a reality check.
It's impossible (or at least dishonest) to try to simply discuss the pure technical aspects of The Torment Nexus.
The technology is produced by a public company. And, in this case, the company is useful context for this story since it has just recently agreed to pay about $18 billion to resolve a multistate lawsuit claiming it intentionally designed addictive platforms that harmed young people's mental health.
You cannot detach the technology from the company. It's definitely not a neutral artifact.
And yes, you can counter with a hypothetical about a future totalitarian police state, or evil hackers, or whatever, but that makes you sound crazy. In practice, it's a trade-off most people are comfortable making because they can't think of any specific thing that some trillion-dollar tech company, or the FBI, or the FSB, would ever want to do to them specifically.
It's the same reason why the market share for Firefox is a rounding error.
Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.
The hypothetical part was not about them being able to do it, but about them caring to do anything with that information.
My mother is pretty much locked-in on fb/whatsapp/instagram. She travels internationally rather frequently, including to more "questionable" countries (where she just happens to have relatives that she wants to visit). She has never faced any issues related to her usage of meta products (or social media in general).
It boggles my mind how there are actual adults on HN, who straight up fail to comprehend that telling a normal person (e.g., my mom, who is imo in the majority of the kind of people using social media) something like "you shouldn't be doing it, because muh gubernment surveillance and unencrypted comms and you are being watched by the feds" is gonna just make you sound crazy.
And why wouldn't it? She has never faced any issues, and she has been actively using whatsapp+ig all the time, for over a decade. And the same holds true for everyone she knows as well. Not once did she face any issues ever, despite traveling multiple times a year every year, including to some countries that are on pretty adversarial terms with the US (we are talking "sanctioned" type of adversarial).
The thing is, she faces none of the hypothetical issues that could come from her usage of those services. Neither do any of the people she ever talked to, and that's the overwhelming majority of the users of those services. You are more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand (and it is at least partially true). I am just baffled and disappointed by how there is such a large contingent of HN users who straight up cannot even comprehend the mindset and experiences of an average adult user.
Well yeah if that is how you choose to have that conversation then sure.
> more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand
I made no such claim.
You seem pretty committed to your strawmen so good day to you sir.
It's not just Meta, either. How often do we have people on here talking about how amazing Chinese models are when the list of security breaches involving the Chinese government is extensive?
People want something easy, quick, and free. Do those things and they'll let you get away with anything.
Facebook marketplace is huge here.It's basically our craigslist. Hobby groups/communities are also huge. If I wanted to find the local jogging or chess club, I'd use Facebook.
Just remember that outside your bubble there's a whole wide world with billions of people living in it
And the thing is, network effects are killer. I'm on it because you're on it because Alice is on it because Bob is on it
But, Facebook has apparently been known to censor links to competition (I'm less clear on this). With Myspace they had a tool where you could import contacts into Facebook from Myspace, but not the other way around
That’s the godawful truth. The other thing you need to realize is not only do people don’t care, but people like you know exactly why meta makes billions. It’s obvious. You seriously expect me to believe you don’t know why a company like meta makes billions? Come on.
It’s sad but thats the way things are. I see someone pretend they don’t get it but if you take the time to think you’ll realize… We all get it. We just can’t face it.
I can't even begin to comprehend what kind of personal and PII data this thing will be scraping from its users. Caveat emptor!
How do you have that?
I dont know they trust me because they are stupid.
The fact that this conversation is public and anyone uses meta garbage is what's wrong with so many things
I don't get it. I think he meant exactly how it looks on paper
In 2015 Facebook (not yet renamed to Meta) launched a personal assistant that lived in Messenger and functioned remarkably like ChatGPT does today. At the time it was basically entirely humans on the backend, with the idea that they could replace humans incrementally as they collected data. Really ahead of its time. They shut it down in 2018, which seems shortsighted in hindsight. That data would have been invaluable just a few years later.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/14/152563/facebooks...
2015 story: https://www.wired.com/2015/02/magic-the-startup/
Thread seeking a follow-up in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34148402
Maybe I'm in the minority?
But even in this hypothetical world I would still have a hard time teaching an LLM what I find important in a product. Not everything can be captured in easy to compare numbers. "Does the device creak under pressure?", "What's the one weirdly unergonomic thing about it you only notice after weeks of using?"... Stuff like that. Things which are easy to miss even if the model ingests all relevant reviews about the product, because it might not stand out, but might be important for me.
I asked it to check once a day for the next week and notify me of any price changes
It's certainly honest.
Is this marketing to end-users or to stakeholders?
Always the same thing. I wish product designers would have some modicum of imagination for how agents can actually help people.
Literally none of these examples are improved by this kind of personal AI agent; on the contrary, it means letting your agency be dictated by companies that do not have your interests in mind.
This example should be "Super Friendly AI Assistant!!" and it fails on the absolute most basic thing I could throw at it.
I had a different AI (Grok) successfully take a prompt like "I live at this address and need to pick up my son from school at 2:30pm, and then we need to hit these three stores before heading back home. Find the path with the least driving and add all of these as discrete events to my calendar with their addresses embedded, and give me a google maps link with the full path so I can double-check". Did it correctly on the first try. I'd think other AIs could do that too. So I'm thinking it was the scanned image that gave it problems?
The added benefit of this failure is that by adding it by hand, we were much more familiar with the events on the calendar, and were ready for a few "outlier" events, e.g. a tournament 100 miles away that we knew about a month ahead instead of a few days.
Another way you could have solved it would be to have the Google Workspace connection set up in the backend for Claude and it would write the parsed events to your account directly. Then in iOS you could move the events to the iCloud Family Calendar.
Or again, if you did this on a Real Computer, you could bulk-move them.
If 1,000 people need to approve the User Journey, you get flights, reminders and docs... because that is what 1,000 big tech employees mutually share as easily understandable common problems within their own corporate zeitgeist.
Disclosure: I work for Meta, and run into this phenomenon daily, but I do not work on Muse.
it's like someone who has a personal chauffeur designing the driving experience of a car - you get educated guesses at best and just total crud at worst. actual epiphanies that happen over repeated use and idle thoughts just don't happen
If Muse could actually just show me content that I want to see and cut out all of the other crap, I'd be willing to use it. Of course, there's no way Zucc will pay for an expensive AI service that will undercut his main revenue stream.
Travel is such a huge play here because its inherently social; so "^n viral loop where N is travelers; odds are most will have some meta app so possibly lower friction here too. Not to mention the adjacent travel econ: e.g.: eat, sleep etc..
Amplified an order of magnitude for the e-mail piece given how badly Meta would like to have google's g-mail data.
Either way, interesting play IMO.
Note: Moved from dupe thread.
The Agent Computer is super powerful, but by definition its easier than ever to build one yourself, and a the result is a personal and private computer.
I know most "normal" people wont want to build their own this but there are still a lot of options that don't involve giving Meta or Grok all your data.
I put some notes on all this here: https://housecat.com/blog/agent-computer-101
It can do file organizing and wrangling when needed, it has simple web access with the curl tool, it can analyze media file contents. It's analyzed my local data and written several little tools (cli, TUI, GUI) to manage it automatically or give comprehensive reports. I can create new media through ComfyUI and Krita AI.
Sure, it can't book a flight or organize the family calendar for the next month, but I don't have any need for those.
why can't it do that? just run a VPS inside WSL or another container inside your PC. give the agent that sandbox.
It's not a bad product idea, but adoption might be rough because of all the negative goodwill that Meta has accumulated over the years. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if someone (maybe one of the big AI labs) ran Meta's own playbook against them here by creating an imitator and aggressively funding adoption to try and win the market as a fast follower.
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
Why would you give them access to your accounts, your email, your purchase habits, your preferences, your communication style and more.
How do they wash this stink off?
The schedule your tennis lessons and do your travel package list scenarios are of course rubbish.