BREAKING: Muse Growth Slows as Downloads Fall

Based on Hunterbrook Media’s reporting, at the time of publication Hunterbrook Capital is short $META. Positions may change at any time. This article is not investment advice or any recommendation. See full disclosures below.

The headline that rattled the AI trade yesterday: “OpenAI annualised revenues $20bn less than previously signalled.”

As you may be able to tell from the spelling of “annualised,” the article was published by The Financial Times. And it broke the story that OpenAI’s run-rate annual revenue was $50 billion last month, below the $70 billion previously reported. AI stocks got rocked.

For subscribers to TickerTrends, the smaller number wasn’t news.

At the end of September, the upstart alternative-data firm had put OpenAI’s annualized revenue at $50.44 billion in a public estimate. Its estimate was much closer to the figure the FT reported yesterday than the one circulating among investors a week earlier, presented as a scoop by Axios. The discrepancy, it turned out, was due to OpenAI and Anthropic calculating revenue received through cloud partners differently, according to the Financial Times.

“It was a massive validation and relief,” Adrien Navarre, TickerTrends’ founder, told Hunterbrook, which has no financial relationship with TickerTrends other than being fans from afar.

Navarre built the business while studying computer science in college and working at a robotics company. He’d been spending late nights trying to figure out if something was broken in his model. Clients had been asking why his data was off by $20 billion.

“Those questions are hard to answer,” Navarre said, calling it a “perplexing” moment.

But after reexamining its inputs, TickerTrends stood by its estimate. “I focused on identifying the source of the discrepancy and looking for evidence that could reconcile the reported acceleration with our data. After reviewing it, we did not find that evidence,” Navarre said.

He was right: OpenAI’s ARR was indeed $50 billion, not $70 billion. (Though, of course, importantly: None of this fits the standard definition of ARR! These companies aren’t reporting annual revenue; they are sharing a weekly, daily, or monthly number, multiplied by 52 or 365 or 12. And it’s not recurring either: It is based on consumption, which may not repeat.)

Now TickerTrends data reviewed by Hunterbrook Media points to another AI story where the excitement may be outrunning the evidence: Meta’s Muse.

Meta introduced Muse last month as a personal AI agent that could do things for users — send email, book travel, and shop — using its own computer and browser in the cloud. The promise was an assistant that could keep working even after someone closed the app.

The launch brought more than five million U.S. downloads in 22 days, according to Sensor Tower estimates reported by Forbes.

At Meta’s signature event last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “The centerpiece of our vision for what we’re building is Muse.” Alexandr Wang, who runs Meta AI, has called the launch a “banger.”

And at first, it was: Muse hit No. 1 on both the U.S. iPhone App Store and Google Play free-app charts, according to Appfigures. Meta added around $200 billion of market cap on the heels of the app’s early success.

But TickerTrends’ numbers suggest the initial surge has cooled: Downloads have fallen, and the growth in daily active users has slowed.

Muse recorded around 170,000 downloads on October 6, down 21.1% from the series’ peak of around 215,000 on September 24. That decline also shows up in weekly averages: downloads averaged around 165,000 a day in the final seven days, down 8.1% from roughly 180,000 in the preceding week. Daily downloads remained below the peak for the next 12 days.

‍

App-review volume has fallen, too. TickerTrends’ tracker counted 4,716 Android and iOS reviews in the seven days through October 7, down 11.6% from 5,336 in the preceding week. The iOS decline was 22.5%, compared with 7.7% on Android. The final daily count of 664 was 17.2% below the combined peak of 802 on October 1.

Daily usage is still growing. TickerTrends’ worldwide estimate reached 2,730,919 daily active users on October 6, the series’ highest reading.

But Hunterbrook’s calculations from the firm’s daily estimates show that growth has slowed.

Over the seven days from September 15 to September 22, DAUs rose by 1,385,592 — an average net increase of about 198,000 a day. That fell to 608,918, or about 87,000 a day, over the following seven days, then to 520,765, or about 74,000 a day, in the seven days through October 6. The latest pace was 14.5% slower than the preceding week and 62.4% slower than the earlier surge.

This is coming as Muse still has far fewer users than Meta’s X competitor, Threads, had at this point in its launch. Though Threads saw a much steeper deterioration in users after initial adoption, and its release was global instead of focused on the United States.

‍

‍

One possible obstacle for Muse is basic: an assistant that promises to act across the internet still needs websites to let it in.

TickerTrends has compiled a register of sites and services reported by users to have blocked or restricted Muse, including Amazon, Costco and Netflix. The entries cover different kinds of restrictions, and some may no longer apply. (Hunterbrook was able to access several of these sites through Muse.)

Amazon told the press in September that it had blocked Muse from shopping on customers’ behalf after unsuccessfully asking Meta to exclude its store.

Hunterbrook found concerns of its own with Muse.

Last month, Hunterbrook found that the agent could compile dossiers on people it identified as members of vulnerable groups, including undocumented immigrants, transgender teachers, poll workers, and women who said they had ordered abortion pills in states with bans. In some cases, Muse connected pseudonymous accounts to real identities and employers. Privacy experts warned that those capabilities could enable doxxing and physical harm. Hunterbrook withheld the identifying details and shared its findings with Meta, which requested more information but had not answered repeated requests for comment when the story was published.

Other reporting has documented Muse exposing private information about its own users and people close to them. The Guardian reported that Muse gave out a user’s home address without permission. Reuters wrote about Muse uploading sensitive information without permission and exposing personal iCloud photos. Another report said Muse read personal messages without asking. Yet another warned of Muse collecting detailed information on the friends and family of users.

Funny enough, Muse does still have at least one passionate user: TickerTrends’ chief business officer, Marshall Mentz, who has previously consulted with Hunterbrook. On the side, he started a site called Mind Loft, with daily quizzes and daily puzzles, from crosswords and chess to sudoku and checkers.

The site has no ad budget and no marketing staff. So Mentz has delegated promotion to Muse, which posts to social media every 30 minutes. That works out to 48 posts a day per platform, all without anyone touching it.

The surprising part is the bill, or the lack of one. Mentz says Muse keeps reporting that it is out of credits, and then keeps working anyway. There is no credit card linked to the account and no charges are building up. Every half hour the agent warns that the money has run out, and every half hour it posts again.

For now, a one-person hobby site is getting an around-the-clock, multi-platform social media operation for free.

Authors

Sam Koppelman is a New York Times best-selling author who has written books with former United States Attorney General Eric Holder and former United States Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal. Sam has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Time Magazine, and other outlets. He has a BA in Government from Harvard, where he was named a John Harvard Scholar and wrote op-eds like “Shut Down Harvard Football,” which he tells us were great for his social life. Sam is based in New York City.

Michelle Cera is a sociologist specializing in digital ethnography and media. She completed her PhD in Sociology at New York University, building on her Bachelor of Arts degree with Highest Honors from the University of California, Berkeley. Michelle is based on Brooklyn.

Editors

Vikas Kumar joined Hunterbrook from The Capitol Forum, where he led the corporate investigations team for a decade as a senior editor. He was previously an attorney at Gordon Feinblatt, a trial attorney for the Department of Justice, and a law clerk for a federal judge. He has a J.D. from University of Virginia School of Law and a bachelor's from Emory University. Vikas is based in Maryland.