Meta Launches Muse, an AI Agent That Wants to Run Your Whole Life

It’s all about Zuckerberg and Musk this week.

Meta has dropped a new AI toy. It's called Muse, and it's already No. 2 on the US App Store charts.

Sounds impressive, until you read Muse has hit 83,000+ US downloads so far. Threads managed 4.3 million on day one.

Meta's pitch is that Muse is an AI that never switches off. Which is either the future of productivity, or the plotline for ‘The Social Network 3’.

But Zuck really wants you to trust Meta with this one.

He’s been doing the rounds on podcasts, including sitting down with Alex Heath, where he revealed he personally recruited Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike to build Muse's privacy architecture.

His words, not mine: "Even Meta cannot see the content that is in there." You pinky-promise, Zuck? 🙄

A company built on knowing everything about you, hiring the guy who built the app famous for knowing nothing about you.

Quite the pivot, two weeks after an $18 billion teen safety settlement highlighting Meta’s wild west approach to product safety.

Also this week….

There's a new Alex Gibney documentary about Elon Musk.

Unsurprisingly, he hates it. Roughly the reaction you'd expect from a man whose ex just told a journalist his biggest relationship problem is honesty.

You couldn't script this. 💀

On a personal note, a quick heads-up…

I’m taking a break next week. I’m jetting off to party at The Unexpected Hotel in Ibiza.

A completely unplanned last minute break booked after I got a bit click-happy after 3 glasses of Sauvignon Blanc.

I booked the "Anything Can Happen - Stage View" suite. Looks like it’s going to be banging 😆

Big thank you to The Unexpected Hotel, who gifted me a VIP table on Monday night for David Guetta. Epic people watching spot secured.

Geekout won't miss a beat though.

Geekout editor, Martin ‘SFP’ Bryant, will hold fort, while I empty my bank account and pickle my liver with overpriced vodka + Red Bull.

Keep your eyes peeled on my Instagram Stories to watch the carnage unfold next week.

Coming up in this week's Geekout:

Plus everything else social media teams need to know about this week.
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Your team runs on Slack and AI agents. Your creator marketing doesn't.

You're briefing creators in one tab, chasing approvals in another, and pulling performance out of a third.

Meanwhile everything else your team does happens in Slack.

Insense now plugs into the stack you already use.

…Campaign updates land in Slack.

…Ask Claude or ChatGPT who's waiting on your review, then message them all without opening anything.

…Performance connects straight to Ads Manager.

Underneath, the creator layer does the boring bits:

…Roughly 40 hours of work time. Saved. 🙏

↪ And the best bit… Book a free strategy call by 25 Sept and get $200 towards your first campaign. Nice! 👌

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Is this Meta’s biggest consumer product launch since Threads? I reckon so.

But Muse is a far bolder release than a Twitter clone. In fact, it’s a rare case of Meta going first into a rapidly emerging space.

Muse brings easy access for normal folk to something the bleeding-edge geeks in Silicon Valley have been doing for months - letting an AI agent handle your digital life.

Out now in early public testing in the US, Muse lets you hook up things like your calendar, email, bank accounts, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp. It can send emails, book travel, fill forms, negotiate bills and make purchases.

What’s more, Muse keeps working after you close the app, and can proactively suggest what you should do next.

Given how unpopular both AI and Meta are among the general population, the company has been keen to build trust around this product that must have access to your personal data to be useful.

Mark Zuckerberg published a video talking about how the platform has been designed to keep your private information away from prying eyes. Muse cannot directly see passwords or payment details, and Meta says your data from this app won’t feed its ad systems.

The PR push also included this interview with Alex Heath (well worth a watch!):

It’s showing signs of early success. And that’s understandable. Early adopters to Muse get a ridiculous amount of free AI compute - 100 million tokens every week to burn through.

One tester built games, music, animations and websites, yet used only 6% of their allowance. Even after building a fake browser-based Mac, usage had reached just 11%.

Don’t expect it to stay that way. Meta is going to have to make a profit on this once users are hooked. Muse is currently free to start, with $20 and $100 monthly plans if you need more compute and heavier usage.

The big question is… will it stick? Given AI models have a current habit of going rogue, it’s not a massive leap to imagine Meta having to deal with some embarrassing examples of Muse doing things its users really didn’t want.

Either way, it’s almost certain to make more of a bang than ‘M’ did in 2015. Meta’s first personal assistant app came from the days when the “AI” was simplistic, and humans often jumped in behind the scenes to carry out complex actions the software couldn’t handle.

Apps like M (there were a bunch of them from different companies) were a decade early. Now Meta’s going to find out if we’re finally ready to let AI take control of our lives.

I’m not sure I am… but I still really want to give it a go (hint-hint, Meta!).

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Threads is giving creators much smarter analytics, powered by Meta AI.

AI summaries explain why individual posts overperformed, underperformed or landed somewhere average.

In addition, new benchmarks label views and engagement as higher, typical or lower.

The new insights also reveal follower versus non-follower reach and the communities driving people to discover your posts.

Account insights can also surface stronger posting days, times and audience trends.

But… link-click data has disappeared from the Insights dashboard.

A spokesperson says Threads is “exploring” bringing the metric back.
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Also spotted this week…

An Apple event is always a good bet for creating some tech-focused memes…

And this week’s launch of the iPhone Duo was no exception.

Brands leapt all over the event. Not least Duolingo, and its owl mascot… Duo.

And Samsung, which has been doing folding phones for years, dropped this grenade on X to remind Apple of the fact…

And Samsung empathised with Duolingo…

But the Internet was left asking one question… Are aliens working at Apple?

The length of those fingers… 😆
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The US Open approved nearly 100 creators, roughly double last year’s total… but some disrupted matches with filming, selfie lights, and loud content creation 🙄

Critics say brands need clearer briefs explaining appropriate filming and behaviour.

The All English Club says it will take a stand at its own tournament next year.

It won’t introduce a dedicated accreditation category for influencers or content creators, while ring lights and other potentially disruptive equipment will potentially be confiscated

Influencers can still attend Wimbledon. They just won’t get the special VIP media treatment.

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More brand news and views:

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Also quoted this week:

“A hit piece that misses, and makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours.”

- Elon Musk is no fan of the new documentary about him

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“I would say he has a very difficult time with empathy, especially cognitive empathy, which is putting himself in the shoes of others… He seems incapable of doing that.”

- ‘Musk’ director Alex Gibney on why Elon is so cold

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“What ends up happening is the best way to get more reach is just to post more often and those who can afford to post the most often do and then therefore get the most reach. And it turns out your friends post a lot less than creators, who post a lot less than brands and companies.”

- Instagram boss Adam Mosseri on why people don’t like chronological feeds, even if they claim they do

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“There is a tremendous amount of AI and endless garbage being posted everyday and it’s been challenging to absorb or ignore.”

- Dolly Parton’s sister Stella speaks out about the amount of tasteless slop produced since Dolly’s death

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“If Ofcom is going to be the vehicle to protect our children… we need them to be getting ahead of the harms. And I don't think they have. So when I talk around the country to children, what's worrying them are things around AI, things around the nudifying apps… there are new harms, and we need Ofcom to be getting ahead of those. I don't think they are."

- England's Children's Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, says the Online Safety Act isn’t making the impact it needs to

The first teaser for Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk doc is out, ahead of the film’s theatrical release this autumn.

The 48-second trailer frames Musk as both visionary builder and deeply divisive figure.

One voice calls him “one of the greatest builders of all time.”

Another describes him as “manifestly cruel and selfish.”

The teaser also warns: “In a science fiction novel, he would not be the hero.”

Subtle, it is not.

The movie looks like a must-watch that really goes for the jugular… But you’ll need to sit comfortably. It’s almost 4-hours long! 😳

No matter your politics, there’s no denying the success of NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani on social media.

This article looks into some of how he does it, through a City Hall influencer network reaching 1,200+ creators

He’s not the only politician doing this kind of thing, but it’s interesting to see how it works.

Yikes! A mother discovered just how much Meta AI could piece together about her children.

Hint: a LOT.

Meta says it has fixed the prompts that surfaced her daughters’ details and a deep dive into her whole family!

Spotting AI images isn’t easy…

Instagram’s AI labels are flagging real photos while missing actual AI.

Users have reported original photos receiving AI labels after basic editing tools.

Canva’s Background Remover appears responsible for some incorrect AI classifications.

Meanwhile, fully AI-generated Gemini images escaped Instagram’s labels during testing.

Some unlabelled test images even contained C2PA and SynthID authenticity signals.

Predictably, Meta’s own AI-generated images were the only consistently detected content tested.

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More fails spotted:

Is Pinterest a big part of your marketing strategy?

Its latest guide could be a useful read…

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More social stats:

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Also spotted this week…

New features and tests:

As the Australian government turns against algorithms, a British journalist switched off Instagram’s algorithm for 24 hours.

Things quickly got boring…!

But for Australian regulators, maybe that’s the whole point.

Plug into this, baby…!

Meta’s new Muse AI has apparently taken rock band Muse’s social handles.

Meta’s new Muse AI now owns the coveted @muse handle on both Instagram and X, while the band has moved to @museband on Instagram and @musetheband on X.

Nobody has confirmed whether Meta bought, requested or simply claimed the handles.

Muse spent decades singing about dystopian technology. The punchline practically wrote itself.

Right… Time to get my ass away from this laptop, and starting packing for Ibiza.

The question is, what to pack?

Do I dress my actual age, or go full Ibiza Boss?

We’ll find out on my Instagram Story next week.

Goodbye, geeks!

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P.S. This newsletter is edited by Martin SFP Bryant