Meta’s Muse Moment

Meta’s new AI agent, Muse, is having a moment.

Its app, which Meta launched earlier this month, has been downloaded more than 3.4 million times and has spent the past week at No. 1 on Apple’s U.S. App Store. And on Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage at the company’s annual developer conference to announce even more ways for users to access their Muses in the future.

Soon, he said, people will be able to talk to their agents live and access them via Meta smartglasses and an upcoming hand-held device called Muse Charm. More broadly, the billionaire boss painted a vision of a future in which the AI agent becomes increasingly intertwined in our lives.

Meta’s stock was up over 10% this past week on the prospect, but we’re not there just yet.

To succeed, Muse will have to overcome a few hurdles—namely, getting people to trust it enough to hand over access to their email, bank and other online accounts. (Only 8% of people feel comfortable enough to do that, according to a recent Oppenheimer & Co. survey.)

Meta will also have to figure out how to work with online websites to let its agents complete purchases for their users. Amazon decided to block Muse. Walmart, Sephora and Best Buy, on the other hand, cut deals with Meta.

And finally, who knows when competitors are going to release their own agents and try to steal Meta’s thunder? I, for one, will be closely watching what OpenAI launches at its own developer day on Tuesday.

—Meghan is a San Francisco-based tech reporter who covers Meta.

AI use among more than 2,300 middle-school students is increasing rapidly—and any AI use is associated with higher social anxiety and depressive symptoms, according to researchers. The more often the students use AI, the more anxious and lonely they become.

Almost from the start of the AI boom, a steady chorus of bears has warned that it’s destined to end in tears, like the original dot-com bubble more than a quarter-century ago and the housing bubble of the mid-2000s. Nearly four years after the public launch of ChatGPT, the AI boom is still going, the bulls are still dancing, and investors are listening for any sign that the music is about to stop playing.

Inside Berkeley’s tallest office building, a small community of AI researchers has been mobilizing to save the world from apocalypse.

The resignation this month of an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, woke up the American public to the shocking notion that runaway AI development could end humanity. But there are stalwarts who have spent more than a decade obsessing over it.

Andreessen Horowitz has a message for up-and-coming tech talent: Don’t drop out of school to start a company; come do school with us instead. The storied VC firm is investing $35 million in an unaccredited San Francisco-based two-year alternative to traditional college for students ages 16 to 22.

Gearing Up: Amazon, already one of the world’s biggest robot makers, is scaling up production as it automates more of the work inside its warehouses.

Sizing Down: Startups have lately been trying to stay as lean as possible when it comes to head count. Now some are actually shrinking thanks to AI.

Hell or High Water: Oracle’s “Project Jupiter” is mired in challenges over power supply and permitting and is fast becoming a prime example of the risks in the tech giant’s sprawling and expensive AI gambit.

Group Chat: A club of Western presidents and prime ministers is leading a new push for global controls on AI, echoing the nuclear arms treaties that took root during the first decades of the Atomic Era.

…when AI-generated food ads are making would-be customers feel 🤢 instead of 😋.

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