Following the expanded launch of its Muse agents last week, Meta has also invited users to apply for early access to coming Muse features, as the company looks for more ways to make its AI agents a valuable complement to daily life.
The company is keen to demonstrate the utility of artificial intelligence for general users, in order to drive more interest, and eventually, more revenue opportunities. This has become a key task for Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, with the company hoping that Muse will help to deliver on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to make “personal superintelligence” accessible to everyone.
It’s not clear what advanced features Meta is working on as yet, but Wang did publish an article on X late last week which outlines his vision for Muse development.
As per Wang: “Most people never say what they want. It’s not because we don’t want. We want fiercely and constantly. It happens in the moments before falling asleep or while daydreaming on the car ride home. We want to spend more time with our families, overcome social anxiety, eat healthier food, open a bakery, build an app, or just find a few more moments of calm in a hectic life. But rarely do we get to even express these dreams, and even more rarely do they ever come true.”
Wang’s hope is that Muse can help to make these wants a reality, by providing users with “a second mind” that can undertake tasks on their behalf, and thereby enable more opportunity for exploration.
“This might not be a genie in a bottle, but it can be someone that says, ‘This is the thing you’ve been dreaming of your whole life. Let’s go get it. Here’s how.’ And then builds a plan. Sends the email. Makes the phone call. Finds the funding. Keeps you on schedule. Clears the way and solves all the problems it can until the human part, the wanting and the dreaming, is all that’s left,” Wang said.
This Utopian vision for AI overlooks a lot of potential risk, and inflates the capacity of such tools to facilitate opportunity. But conceptually, this is what Meta’s hoping to achieve.
Meta said that demand for Muse has exceeded their expectations, with the Muse app reaching almost 3 million downloads within its first two weeks of availability, as per reporting from Reuters.
Indeed, TechCrunch reported that in its initial launch stages, Muse downloads are outpacing ChatGPT, while it’s also seeing more daily active users than ChatGPT did at the same point.
As Muse continues to advance, that will continue to provide more opportunities, and facilitate more use cases to align with the company’s vision.
