In Meta’s version of the future, I’ll have my Muse call your Muse

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 during 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 during the call, “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 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.”

All of this should sound great — if not a little freaky — to investors, who probably tuned in to 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.