Mark Zuckerberg is staking Meta’s future on Muse, a personal AI agent the company released to the general public last month. On Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call, he told investors he expects “billions” of people to use Muse, with their agents talking to and transacting with other people’s agents in what he called a “large-scale Muse network.”
The vision is ambitious, and the early numbers are modest. Zuckerberg said more than 10 million users in the United States and Canada have downloaded and set up the app, which he described as one of Meta’s “most successful launches ever.” He did not share specific retention figures. He did say that a quarter of people who downloaded Muse are using it every day.
Commerce is where Meta sees the biggest opportunity. Zuckerberg said a quarter of Muse users are shopping through the platform, spending an average of more than $200 per purchase. Meta earns a fee on every commercial transaction that takes place on Muse, and Zuckerberg suggested that agents could push the number of those transactions far higher, since software does not sleep and could search the internet, compare products and buy in real time.
Zuckerberg described the agents as “extremely capable” helpers that could assist with “improving your relationships, helping you save time, save money, build a business, create new things, or anything else.” He said the agents “can work with your friends and your families,” and that a customer buying something would not simply visit a store’s website but would instead be “talking to their agent.” He predicted that Muse would become “highly profitable” within a few years and that it would eventually generate more revenue per user than Instagram and Facebook, which together produce nearly all of Meta’s revenue today.
Meta did not explain how any of that will work in practice. Zuckerberg’s pitch also comes against a backdrop of privacy and safety questions. In September, a YouTuber said his Muse agent sent a stranger to his home in the middle of the night while arranging a Facebook Marketplace transaction for him. When Muse launched last month, Zuckerberg said it was “built for privacy and security from the ground up,” but there have been reports of agents leaking content from users’ private conversations. This week, a Canadian bank executive told Bloomberg the bank would consider blocking Muse from accessing its customers’ financial data.
Muse also depends on businesses being willing to participate. Meta says the app will likely stay free for consumers, while companies will be expected to cover transaction fees. An investor asked about “friction points” in getting businesses on board. Meta’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, responded, “Agents are going to be an important part of how reality evolves, and everyone is just going to have to adapt.” Zuckerberg said the company will “work with folks on the terms that make sense for them.”
The spending behind the plan is enormous. Meta expects to spend between $135 billion and $145 billion in 2026, roughly double what it spent last year. The company also owes New Mexico $25 billion after a jury found it violated the state’s consumer protection laws. Investors have been pressing Meta and other large technology companies to show that their AI spending will pay off.
Zuckerberg linked the limits on Muse’s growth to computing costs. He said the main constraint is that the service is compute-intensive, which is why Meta has not launched it globally. Running the graphics processors needed for a network of agents is expensive and energy-intensive, and Zuckerberg said Meta plans to “10x” the cost-efficiency of its compute next year. He did not say how the company intends to do that. Asked about the app’s growth, he said that a broader rollout would likely produce “significantly larger” download numbers than the current ones.
Muse’s prospects will also depend on consumers, who are not in a spending mood. New research from the University of Michigan shows consumer sentiment in the United States at an all-time low as gas prices and inflation continue to climb. Zuckerberg’s plan assumes that people will not only adopt agents that shop for them but will also pay more as a result.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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