What could possibly go wrong with Meta's Muse?

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast.

The personal agent that we shipped a few weeks ago, already helping millions of people with all kinds of different things. There are so many fun and novel parts of this experience. Uh, do you want to introduce yourself to everyone?

Hello, everyone. I'm Agrippa, and I'm here to brainstorm and get things done with you. What should we build?

Talking to your Muse, it, it's often the fastest way to get things done, and it is also just really fun and cute.

It's Mark Zuckerberg, big boss of Meta, who last month launched an AI agent called Muse. This is one of the most downloaded apps in Canada. It's supposed to be like a personal assistant, can track things like your spending, answer your emails, order your groceries. To do this, it requires a lot of your information. Who would turn their personal information over to Meta so that it could have its personal assistant run your life? Well, the Wall Street Journal's personal tech columnist, Nicole Nguyen, did just that. She's in San Francisco. Nicole, good morning.

Hello, good morning.

Describe-- I mean, I gave kind of the, the brief, uh, explanation, but describe what this is. What is Muse?

Muse is an AI agent, which is an artificial intelligence-powered technology that can operate software and click and type around the web for you. So unlike a standard chatbot that's, um, run by a large language model, uh, which can give you answers based on a corpus of data, so a training data set that's pretty static, an agent can, um, be dispatched out onto the internet to complete your to-do list.

People have said it's kind of like AI that has access to a computer in some ways.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yes.

I describe this as a personal assistant. What does that mean in that context?

It is like a personal assistant in that you give it tasks, um, like say you are planning a trip abroad and you don't know exactly where to go, and you have a certain budget, and also you have dietary constraints, and you're looking for restaurant reservations. You can dump all of that to your AI agent, and it can parse what it needs to do and go out into the digital space and, um, book those reservations, look up hotels, m- give you the prices, and if it has information like your credit card or your address, it can actually complete those tasks, uh, without needing to ping you.

So the promise is that it will do kind of the, the, the busy, boring parts o- of your life for you?

That administrative drudgery is how I think of, um, what AI agents are, are best at, so that you, you're freed up to go outside and, and touch grass.

[laughs]

[laughs]

Which is what we all want, uh, in this life. You-

Yes

... you got