Can Muse overcome Meta’s trust issues?

Meta’s new AI agent Muse took the spotlight at the company’s annual Connect event, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that Facebook’s parent company plans to push AI features everywhere.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed Meta’s AI announcements seemed to steal the spotlight during a week of new model launches from OpenAI and Anthropic.

With other big AI companies focused on coding and enterprise tools, it was a little surprising to see Meta move in the opposite direction, with a consumer focus and a cute, Tamagotchi-style AI device that Meta insists is for adults only. But as Kirsten noted, this could be playing to Meta’s strengths.

Sean tried Muse for himself, and while he was pleased that the agent actually found him some unclaimed money, he described the feature as more “a party-trick type thing,” rather than something that will drive ongoing usage. Plus, there’s the question of whether users can trust Meta’s AI with sensitive information.

“Meta’s business is to sell you ads,” Sean said. “And yes, they’ll make the argument that the more they know about you, the more accurate and interesting the ads will be — wake me up when we get to that fever dream.”

Keep reading for a preview of our full conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Kirsten Korosec: So how do you put Muse, which is this new personal AI agent that’s just been released by Meta and [is] clearly a bet on consumer — how does that fit into what you just described, at least with other frontier AI model companies seeing opportunity and business within enterprise? Because Meta Connect, which is their big annual event, just happened, and they are all-in on Muse, that is very clear.

Anthony Ha: That was definitely very head spinning for me, because it certainly feels like what we’ve been talking about has been this shift towards enterprise — not exclusively, but certainly that’s where the money, the attention is going.