Meta’s Muse personal AI agent, launched on Sept. 8, has been set up by more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada and is already seeing heavy use: about one-quarter of adopters use it daily, with shopping the most common activity and an average purchase size above $200. Early demand was so strong that Meta worked with payment processor Stripe to raise credit limits in Muse’s first week. Muse can browse the web, send emails and book travel on users’ behalf; consumer access is free unless users pay for extra tokens or higher-end models. Meta plans to begin monetizing sooner than with prior products by charging businesses a fee when Muse helps complete a sale, turning agent-driven commerce into a potential revenue stream on top of advertising income that already generates tens of billions per quarter.
Meta envisions a future where users’ personal agents interact directly with retailers’ agents via a proposed Personal Agent Protocol being developed with partners including Shopify and Walmart, shifting discovery and purchasing away from traditional websites. Retailers may resist ceding customer relationships, but Meta expects gradual adoption once safety and effectiveness are proven. Running Muse is compute-intensive: Meta spent nearly $35 billion on capital expenditures in Q3, reported a $2.1 billion negative free cash flow, and projects $135-145 billion in capex for the year. The company has limited Muse to North America while it pursues more than 10x cost-efficiency gains next year to scale toward a billion-plus users.
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A survey shows that only 13% of companies have achieved significant or transformational value from AI. Many organizations struggle to realize substantial returns from AI investments. (gartner.com)
Jev is a basic decision model that gained hype for its speed and low data requirements but lacks reasoning and multimodal features. Industry hype around Jev exposes the current stagnation and superficial innovation in AI after four years of incremental progress. (blog.alexewerlof.com)
China has invited the European Commission to join its artificial intelligence alliance. The offer aims to foster collaboration on AI development and standards. (rapporteur.com)
AI requests in Texas produce 8.5 times more CO2 emissions than in Sweden due to energy differences. This highlights the environmental impact of data centers depending on local energy sources. (berget.ai)
Meta is actively seeking significant investment to develop its artificial intelligence initiatives. This effort has caused tension and concern among investors on Wall Street. (wsj.com)
Q Labs Research introduces Noise, a pretraining method for neural networks that eliminates the need for backpropagation by perturbing activations instead of weights. This approach achieves comparable results to traditional methods and could scale better with increased compute, challenging the dominance of backpropagation in AI training. (qlabs.sh)
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