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Vereel. Love the way. Hello and welcome to the coder. I'm Eli Patel, editor and chief of the Verge, and decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.
Today I'm talking about Hayden Field, the Verge's senior AI reporter, about the new wave of consumer friendly AI agents. Now if you can pay attention to AI, you know that AI enthusiasts have been using agents for a minute now. Homebrew open-class setups led to a surge in Mac mini-sales earlier this year with the launch of Meta's News, OpenAI's DOTS, and XAI's ScrockBot, who's brought easy to use agents to millions. DOTS and in particular, Mews have had the highest profile product consciously, and they're fascinating to compare and contrast.
Both Meta and OpenAI have decided to pitch their agents to mainstream users and businesses in the form of cute animated mascots that can do everything from the boring, restaurant reservations and inboxed reage to more sophisticated tasks. In OpenAI's case, they are even offering specialist dots for marketing, legal work, and accounting. There are other differences. Mews, notably, is free while DOTS is not.
And you'll hear Hayden and I talk about why Meta, which still doesn't have a frontier model of its own, might have a meaningful edge here because it's so much better at making and distributing consumer products. There's also a huge decoder-style tension wrapped up in the agent race. The conversation about what AI is good at today, what it still can't do, and the privacy and security implications of handing over your credit card information, your email inbox, and other sensitive data to an AI that might be able to do things for you without ever requiring an app or a phone in your hand. That might be the future of all computing, but it's unclear whether anyone wants to hand over all the data to make it happen.
Okay, the Verge's Hayden Field on Muse, DOTS, and Trusting AI Agents. Here we go. Hayden Field, your senior and reporter here at the Verge. Welcome back to Coder.
Thanks so much. I'm excited to talk to you. This time there isn't any wild interpersonal drama. No one's feelings have been hurt.
I would say you untried to hurt some feelings and didn't get there. Alexander Way from Meta has maybe been taking some shots, but none of the real housewives stuff we end up talking about when you're on the show. Just some product launches. It's been a bit of a pause in the soap opera antics for now, which I'm really grateful for.
Just some good old-fashioned product competition in the marketplace. We'll see who wins and loses, and maybe everything will kill us all in the end. But for now, cute mascots. So there's a lot going on.
Let's start the start. Hayden, you are opening an AI dev day in San Francisco. They announced DOTS, which is their new agent platform with a cute mascot. That happened just a few weeks after Meta Connect, which the company was all in on Muse, their agent platform with an adorable mascot.
Tell us about the state of the industry. Everyone's very excited about Agents. What's going on? Yeah, it's funny to me because I've been covering Agents for so long, and I remember that in 2022, it was the year of ideation.
That's why Tech Leaders called it about Agents. They were just ideating. What it could look like, there were a lot of Jarvis from the Marvel Universe references. 2023 was, they all called it the Year of Deployment.
Let's try things. Let's deploy and learn more about what's failing, AKA pretty much all of them were failing at the time. Then we had 2024 and 2025. They didn't have any names for those years, but things were still pretty bad as we saw.
In 2026 seems to be, to me, the year of actually the beginnings of actually useful AI agents for the consumer, always on, obviously open call with the start of all of this. But what's interesting to me is that after seeing that one man, Peter Steinberger, was able to create an actually useful AI agent for the consumer and always on tool, despite its privacy flaws, it had a lot of privacy and security issues. But it was an agent that was useful enough that people still wanted to use it anyway and try to find ways around these privacy issues that it was having. So that inspired these companies to be like, oh, if one man can do this over the course of one weekend, we've really been slacking.
We've got to get it together. OpenAI hired that guy. And now we have dots. Meta, of course, was working on its own version of this and put it out sooner.
So yeah, they're basically just both always on consumer facing AI agents that these companies are peddling as a way to essentially be your personal assistant in a lot of ways, like booking flights, booking dinner reservations, buying gifts for people. But not only that, some of them are kind of going further to be your work personal assistant and that we'll get into that in a minute. But this is kind of how OpenAI and Meta are are worrying right now. They're trying to kind of present these two AI agents as a little bit different from each other, even though they're essentially the same.
Just probably speaking to define some terms, we're going to keep saying agent. And what we mean here is an AI model wrapped in a harness that lets it use a computer. Right. The way that I describe AI agents usually is an AI tool that can complete multi-step complex tasks on your behalf without you hand holding it the whole time.
So just like, you know, I was a personal assistant and one of my first jobs in New York. So I would have gotten fired if every time my boss asked me to book a flight for her, I was like, well, what time? And also, what's your skymails number? And also, what's your loyalty number again for this other thing?
And also, oh, do you want me to try to get you first class? I mean, no, they want you to have common sense and just book the flight. And so this is what they're peddling these AI agents as being, things that can work on their own mental scratch pad in the background and not ask you every single time there's a step they can complete multi-step processes in the background, kind of doing their own reasoning and then present you with a final completed task. That's a big idea.
I just say it clearly. Both Muse and Dots come out of the Open Claw lineage, which is a technical approach to building an agent, right? There's a lot of different ways you might be able to accomplish it whenever you're skymails under a book, you'll flight. But the way everyone's going at it now is the idea of a harness around the model.
That was the big innovation in Open Claw. And the computer Open Claw was using was often your own Mac Mini on your own network using like a wide open browser with your own data, which is where a lot of their security problems came from. It's the same model with Muse, only it's a little Linux computer that is giving you in the cloud. The same model with Dots, although the way Chatchinie is set up with codecs is very complicated and that computer could be in a lot of different places.
But this notion that what you really need is a computer with a browser and some harness is going to direct a model to do a bunch of stuff for you using that computer. That's what we've landed on today. And it just seems to be the default winning model. Are all these things just Open Claw?
Are they just Rift Sun Open Claw? Are they the same as Open Claw? You could say that. I mean, they're different technically.
Meta keep saying, hey, we did build this from scratch, but it was inspired by Open Claw. There are a lot of similarities there, but they did say that they built it from scratch. And then of course, opening I hired the creator of Open Claw, so there's probably a lot of similarities there as well for Dots. But technically they're their own things, but they're all heavily inspired by Open Claw.
And clearly, these companies are trying to get it as close to Open Claw as possible without the security issues. The reason I want to say it's important to identify the fundamental technical approach that is happening with these agents, because there's a lot of different ways that could have gone. And the whole industry has picked this approach. What you need is a web browser, a harness and a model that can go use that web browser.
What's really interesting to me is that Meta has done a really good job on top of that fundamental model of making a cute consumer product. That has good consumer products, obviously Instagram and Facebook and the rest are undeniably good consumer products. People really like them. The MetaQuest for all of Meta's feelings and VR, I thought, has always been a great consumer product.
If you take it out of the box, it helps you use it. You can have fun with it right away. Whereas Dots seems like it's kind of made for software engineers, but you can also plan a wedding in it. And I'm wondering if that's how you see it too.
One is kind of an enterprise product with a little consumer gloss on it, and then Meta obviously is just dead ahead consumer product. What's different here is OpenAI needs money a lot more than Meta needs money. So they're honestly pretty similar. The products, it seems like the difference is that OpenAI is marketing it to be an enterprise friendly product a lot more than Meta is.
So Meta, yeah, it's just a consumer facing product. They're happy with that. Their goal is to make it as easy to use as humanly possible. So one top downloading, just putting it in your face literally everywhere.
Even when I went to my Instagram profile the other day, there was a pop up for using Amuse. So yeah, they're trying to make it free, accessible, and super easy to broaden the audience. They want anyone to be able to just use it with one click and get used to it. They're trying to kind of just flood the market with AI agents and make it normal and kind of have a chat GPT moment, if you will, for AI agents.
They want use to be that. Now with OpenAI, they're still marketing it as a consumer facing product. I mean, when you're using chat GPT, if you have the right subscription, it's right there. It's like user.to do this, that, and the other.
They really want you to go for it as a consumer as long as you're paying. So this is for their $100 to $200 a month subscription tier on like Meta. So that's why there's a huge difference here. For OpenAI, they don't have the money.
It seems like to just be front loading all of this and say, hey, use it for free. No problem. We'll catch up with you later. They want this to be a money making product and that's why they're marketing it to the enterprise.
They talked a lot about privacy to try to make this set apart from Meta's Muse. They talked a lot about what you could do with this as a knowledge worker, whether you worked in marketing, graphic design, software engineering, product, tons of different industries. They kind of gave examples of how you could use this as a assistant, as a coworker. Sam Omen even put it like a chief of staff.
He didn't want it to be just an assistant. He wanted it to be your chief of staff. And something else I thought was interesting is that Sam Omen seemed to kind of subtly dig at Meta on stage a few times during Dev Day. But one of the times he said, look, I don't want this to be just something that's used to book flights or plan things with friends and look at your calendar.
I want this to go beyond that and to really do knowledge worker tasks, things that you and your industry would need a niche assistant to perform. And that's why they also introduced specialist dots that are good at marketing, legal analysis, things like that. So they're really going for the enterprise angle here, but I think it's because they need money ahead of their IPO, obviously. The revenue piece is really interesting that it's only for paid customers that they're higher tiers.
OpenAI's tiers are very confusing, but it's $100 and up. That's just going to keep a lot of people from using dots at first. The first of that is openAI does have a lot of customers who are paying them a lot of money. If they can get those customers to start using dots, then those customers will be on their agent platforms and maybe you get some lock in, right?
You've given those agents a lot of data, their party or workflows. And that might solve the problem I think we've seen all the frontier labs have where a new model comes out and it's slightly better than the competitor model. Everyone switches for six months and the next new model comes out and everyone switches back. Is there some thought that these agent platforms create lock in, create actual loyalty on top of just the models being better?
Yes. I'm hoping that they can build a moat with their users for these things. So, you know, if meta and Google already have super easy integrations with all of each company's existing tools and services, you know, they can easily keep you there. If you're, for example, I have an Apple iPhone, but I use almost exclusively Google apps.
So if Google had an AI agent that I was using every day, it would be a little tough for me to switch. meta is hoping that they can get you so into the muse ecosystem that it would be tough for you to switch once maybe one day you do have to pay. With openAI, they're trying to get you locked into their ecosystem right away. You have to pay up front.
They're thinking, okay, well, you know, we have integrations with almost every tool in service. Maybe it's not as good as the company that owns that tool in service, but we have the variety and the breasts. They're kind of going for quantity here. One of their employees told me that they said, you know, look, yeah, maybe our Gmail integration, for example, isn't going to be as good as Google's.
But, you know, the fact that we have a Gmail integration and an Outlook integration and X, Y and Z, they're going for just the power of choice and the fact that power users will hopefully stay in this moat. Support for the show comes from CrowdStrike. AI is already fundamentally changing how companies build products and run their businesses. If you listen to the show, you probably already know this.
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That's PipeDrive.com slash decoder. You could be up and running in minutes. It's funny. You mentioned Google.
Google announced an agent, Gemini Spark. We should mention that SpaceX AI, the very coherent company that ever understands SpaceX AI, has an agent called Grockbots, which it is promoting heavily. People seem to like it. That was built by the cursor team, which they acquired.
There's a lot of this going around, but it seems like Meta really got there first with a consumer product that people could understand. Obviously, Grockbot and DOTS are much more enterprise focused coding focused. Why was Meta able to get there first? I think it's because from all my reporting on Meta, they have been behind an AI for a while.
Mark Zuckerberg was like, look, we've got to log in and do a product that people are going to use on our platforms. Alex Wang apparently was more looking to create a frontier model that was going to compete with the other leading frontier models. He's like, we've got to think long. We've got to think super intelligence.
Zuckerberg was like, no, we've got to think cold hard cash, AKA, getting people to use stuff on our own platform. I think that where they met in the middle was this, an AI agent that people would use on the Meta platforms, but that still represented a huge step forward. They hoped for AI systems and what they could do in the everyday world. This is a fascinating dynamic in that Meta still doesn't have a frontier model.
I don't think anyone that is claiming that the muse Spark model competes to the frontier with GPT-6, but their product is better. Certainly they have a massive distribution advantage in that they don't have to pay for advertising on Meta platforms and opening ideas. Certainly they have a consumer design advantage. They're just better at consumer products.
That changed how you feel about the dynamics of competition in AI at all. For so long, it's just been about the capabilities of the frontier. But now it's a little bit about marketing. It's a little bit about product design.
You don't have the best model, but you made a consumer agent product and you connected it to giving everybody a computer in the cloud. So now it can actually do things for you. And it's frontier capabilities. It's actually not the important thing.
It's its capability capability. I think the more money and power you have at one of these companies, you get a little bit mentally farther away from what the average consumer wants. So let's say the average consumer does want an AI agent, which many of them don't as we know. But let's say they do.
If they do, they're going to want it to be free or cheap and they are going to want it to be safe to use without creeping them out too much. They're willing to deal with a little bit of creepiness in order for it to be free, but not too much. Metas Muse, the headlines about some of the privacy issues with it have gotten a little bit above that comfort level, I think, for some users. That's probably why opening an AI at DevDay made a lot of remarks about privacy and the importance of that, especially if they're trying to court enterprise users with AI agents.
Right now these companies are trying to especially meta, just kind of trying to flood the market and create a mass market appeal for this stuff. Similar to how Chachibite became the default AI chatbot. Meta wants to be that for AI agents and they feel very hungry about it. They want to create a Chachibite moment for this technology by making it the default use for the general public news.
I just think there's something really interesting about the idea that a less than frontier model wrapped in a better product is actually going to be the success here versus a bleeding edge frontier model that is a little bit harder to use. And there's some dynamic in there that is the history of all consumer tech products, right? The worst product that's easier to use often wins, but we haven't seen that yet in the AI. Right.
I think that's really important to note here because not everyone needs the bleeding edge frontier model. You know, software engineers do. But the general public, if they're using an AI agent as long as it's useful, they're good. You know, however, not many of them are useful.
Yeah, we're still testing news and dots ourselves. Muse, apparently I saw a couple anecdotes yesterday that it had a big flop for a day or so. People felt like the capabilities got a lot worse dots. You know, the jury's still out.
We're still testing it, but it depends on what industry you're in and what you're really using the stuff for. That's why opening eyes going for enterprise because it makes money and they're confident that their agent is going to be more and more helpful in these niche industries. That's also why they launched specialist dots because as we know, the more specialist like niche info, you feed into an agent or model, the better it's going to do obviously. And they don't want to have that imbued into every single agent or general purpose agents, just too pricey and too compute heavy.
So they're like, you know, let's launch these specialists. I feel like you and I talk about consumer versus enterprise adoption of AI every time you're on the show. And here it seems very important to note that opening eye asking people to pay a lot of money and asking people to use it primarily enterprise context is going to overcome what I think of as the brittleness problem, just because enterprise customers, business customers have a lot of economic incentives to figure out how to make something work. So if I'm paying open at 100 bucks a month and I'm using the marketing dot to solve some marketing automation and it doesn't work the first time, it is very likely I will try again.
Because if I get it right, then maybe I've saved some money or some time in my business, that is really good. And I'll do it again. And eventually that will lead to more revenue for me, the business owner. What I know about consumers is that the first time it doesn't work, they just walk away.
They have no incentives to try again to overcome frustration or brokenness. And we've seen this happen with news now a few times. I've seen it myself with news where it pops open a browser and tries to do something and it runs into a brick wall or a kapsha or Amazon blocking it and it says, Hey, I can't do it that way. Do you want me to try another way?
I'm like, Oh, whatever, I was just screwing around and I'm never going to try it again. These are very different markets. Open AI has vacillated between wanting to be the big consumer company and knowing that the revenue is an enterprise. Do you see any focus in dots or do you see that personality shift back and forth in the product itself?
So far, I'm a little bit more impressed with it than muse just because muse, everyone was impressed right away. And then yeah, there were since then there's been a lot of up and downs plus the privacy stuff. It's been really interesting. You've been building profiles on your family and closest friends.
It's just a lot of, you know, meta has never been a super trusted company. None of these companies are very trusted, but meta has made a lot of missteps with user privacy. So yeah, I think dots seems to be a little bit more helpful to me right now, but I'm still testing. So I'm not fully sure yet.
I need to run through all my typical things that I do to like kind of compare. Everyone has their own short list of tasks. Right now, for example, I'm trying to create a album of my Vatra photos and it's been unbelievably hard to get any agent to try to do that. So I'm like, I'll just do it myself.
But that's the easy thing to do. Once again, I mean, I'm like, how useful are these things for everyday lives really? We'll see. I'm not a lot better.
I will say over the past few years, I've been shocked at how slow they've been moving, but they have gotten better. So, you know, I think dots is a little bit more impressive to me right now, but we'll see. I've used plugged into my Instagram because I don't worry about sharing my metadata with meta in the way that I worry about. Maybe everything else, but they already have an Instagram.
So I've used plugged into my Instagram and it's just doing all kinds of stuff. It looks at surfaces, interesting comments that I should reply to on Instagram posts that tracks follower accounts. It suggests things I should make videos about. It has horrible ideas.
Muse is absolutely convinced I should make a video almost every single day about obscure Australian tech regulation. I don't know why it has this idea. I mean, I'm up on it now. I keep in the weeds on Australian tech regulation, just because I'd see it every morning.
But there's something about all that that still to me is work, right? I've just assigned it work and it tells me what work I should do. And I haven't found some great consumer use for it yet or organized my photos as a consumer use. It kind of still rhymes with work, but at least it's not actually work.
Have you found a great consumer use for these yet? Not that works. That's the problem. You know, it's like, I'll try to have to do something for me for my wedding or for my personal life.
And they haven't been good yet. But that's why I'm still kind of running through and testing these because it's like so far it's always interesting factually when they can do something. But I haven't been able to trust them end to end with something that I really, really need done. It kind of reminds me of the analogy for AI agents.
People always say right now they're about intern and what you want them to be is a really good assistant or in Sam Almond's where it's a really good chief of staff. I think they're not no longer about intern, but I think maybe they're an okay or assistant. I don't think they've reached the point of being a really, really good assistant yet, but I still need to run through the rest of my tests to see. I mean, you know, they're at least not super consistent.
It seems like, yeah, which is something that you need in a really good assistant. That ties into trust. You've mentioned trust several times now. I'm only willing to give news access to again, the meta platforms that meta already has access to.
I can't worry too much about that. I've given it access to my spam Gmail. So it is collecting a lot of ideas about my spam Gmail. But meta really wants my credit cards, right?
It wants to go through all of my credit card receipts. This is one of the suggestions and news, but news, you know, one of its suggestions is let me log into your credit cards and I'll cancel streaming services you're not using or I'll negotiate your Verizon bill for you. And I am absolutely not ready to give meta one ounce of data more than it already has. This feels like a big issue for every agent.
But I'm just arguing that you should give meta all that data one because I already have it in two because they're a big company that you could sue if they get something wrong. Whereas I gave all of my data to Open Claw. It's just my own fault if it gets leaked. If I gave all my data to one of the hot startups like Instinct and they got a business, well, that's just the end of that.
How do you feel about this? Do you feel comfortable giving your data to meta? Do you think people should do that? No, I don't feel comfortable.
And I also don't think that the general person does either. If I've seen one thing in a lot of the comments on our meta story that we published in the last couple of weeks, it's that people don't trust meta at all. And I have to say, I mean, why would they? I don't think that you should trust OpenAI a lot more either.
It's kind of like it's everyone's own kind of comfort level that they have to abide by. I think that some people are going to get a lot out of this stuff. Some people may say, hey, I don't care if they use my data as long as they are negotiating down my bill accurately or canceling streaming services that I wouldn't be canceling on my own. So they're saving me money.
It's fine. But one, are they actually going to be able to do that accurately? Some people have said no. And two, yeah, I mean, as we know, when you release data like this, you can't get it back.
So I don't know. I always think about that old example of the insurance company that theoretically buys data on what's in your fridge and maybe charges you a higher premium if you're buying too much beer and not enough like bananas. That's just a theoretical example. But I mean, that's the type of thing that can happen.
So I think that people should just kind of operate with caution, abide by their own comfort levels. But I'm certainly not comfortable yet giving my personal data to me. I don't even know if I'm comfortable putting news on my Mac. Apple just recently changed how apps can access the disk on Macs because news was so aggressive about reading data, in particular, Jason Aton is a columnist.
And it read his notifications off the disk because he had just given it a permission. He didn't realize he used to take that permission and go do something else with it. This is a lot of spiraling concerns, right? You're going to have a little robot that can use your computer for you, whether that computer is in the cloud or whether it's on your desktop.
And you might not know what it's doing. And that ties directly into, well, OpenEye often doesn't know what it's agents are doing. And that has led to catastrophic security problems across this industry. Can you connect those dots?
Is your own little agent doing your travel booking the same kind of threat is open eyes agents hacking hugging face? I don't think it's the same type of threat, but it's definitely something that you should keep in mind when you're using the stuff. I think that back to the kind of Facebook marketplace debacle that we saw with Meta's Muse to recap, basically a muse agent without someone's knowledge, invited potential buyers of this item that this guy was selling to his house said, Hey, he's available now. He wasn't home.
And then the potential buyer was like, Hey, are you here? Like I'm trying to get the item. And then Muse responded on his behalf. Yeah, I'm here.
And then he just never came down because obviously he wasn't there. So there was a lot of drama going on there. Some people said, Hey, well, he did give Muse access to his Facebook marketplace. You know, he should have known this could happen.
A lot of people don't read all the fine print when they check yes to one of these things. So there's a lot there. There's a lot to unpack in that gray area. But the point is, I think that people should just be a little wary before, you know, checking yes to every possible thing that these agents want to access.
Like you said about the credit cards or, you know, it's just, it's easy to just check yes and be like, you know, whatever, I'll figure it out later, but people should be reading the fine print or even use AI to read the fine print, you know, like this is one great use of AI. Get it, get it to read the terms and be like, what are the worst possible things that can happen here and lay it out for me? Those are things that people should keep in mind for they move forward. And then as for, you know, the, you know, so-called rogue agents that have been like hacking other companies and stuff from these labs.
Yeah, I think it's just important to notice that if they can't control some of their most powerful on released AI models, how well are they going to be able to control your data or your agent that Sam Almond said during the update that you have a ton of control over your dot. He said that there were a lot of like, if this and that rules you can create, there are a lot of specific stipulations that you could make in terms of permissions of what your dot couldn't do. So that did give people some piece. But, I mean, as we've seen, yeah, these labs and these large tech companies have had a lot of missteps about hacking other companies.
And more are coming out. It feels like every single week, more news items about these cyber attacks. You know, we've seen meta have one. We've seen open AI have a ton.
We've seen a drop a cut a ton. So I think that this is all just a human mind. And one cool thing that I saw someone do was name their agent after the CEO that runs that company and then see how much data you feel comfortable giving it. So, you know, if you want to do that, I think that's a great idea.
And then it just kind of makes you think twice. If you're saying, Hey, Sam, um, and can you, you know, go through my email and see what needs to be deleted, may make you maybe you still feel comfortable with that. But maybe it just makes you think twice and think, Oh, you know what, maybe I'll give an access to my spam email only, like you said. The sports calendar is on fire and the score bed has you covered with breaking news and betting seamlessly connected every play every stat, every score, giving you the tools you need to bet confidently.
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So this ties into the fact that all of these things are really cute. Muse is cute. The mascot Jolly is very cute. Alexander Rang has been waging a relentless campaign on X to make it not only cute but sexy, which you can feel any way you want about that.
But Alexander Rang keeps tweeting memes in the mascot with a butt. Dots are obviously very cute. They come in shapes and sizes. There's something here where you're not quite anthropomorphizing the agent, but you're making a character, you're giving a personality.
That connects to the idea that you call the AI Tomogachis, where eventually we're going to have a little hardware device with your little cute mascot on it, and you'll talk to that instead of your phone. And you promise this whole industry has been working towards forever and they're going to replace your phone and the entire paradigm of the app store with AI agents that are going and using computers for you. Do you think that many of these products are a meaningful step towards that? I think they're just one building block along the journey of the goal that they're chasing here.
I mean, I haven't heard of anyone that's using Muse or Dots so far for everything. It's not a Jarvis from Iron Man, despite how much these CEOs want both these products to be. I think that they are a meaningful step. But as for the cuteness, I think one of the most important points here is that they are intentionally disarming.
These tools are made to be cute because you don't find them threatening or you find them decidedly non-threatening. They're cute. They're there to help you. It's kind of a response, I think, to the AI populism backlash.
It's saying, hey, this isn't going to hurt you or do anything bad. It's just a cute little thing with eyes or a sexy little thing with eyes, whatever. But yeah, I think it's sexy. I think it's been relentlessly trying to be sexy.
No, I also do not think they're sexy. But I will say Elon Musk has been trying so hard to make all agents and chatbots sexy. So I'm sure it's not far off for someone to think that. But yeah, I think that whether the AI agents of the future are cute or sexy, it's going to be equally disarming to people.
That's the whole spectrum. That's the spectrum, the cute sexy graph. Yeah, it was going to be really disturbing to see when we go more along that graph. Yeah, I think that the point is there's this to be disarming and that people should really think twice before giving too much other data.
Or just pick and choose what you're comfortable giving, right? Like how you did with the spam email versus your regular email. Or saying no to your credit card. These are both new products.
So kind of just see how the cookie crumbles before you decide to just give everything over. We're already seeing a bunch of changes week to week with how people are using Muse or what they're upset about. So just kind of see how it shakes out. The last piece I want to talk about is just how any of this makes money.
I have talked many times about the bubbly nature of the AI economy. Zuckerberg has said his plan is for Muse to take a cut of transactions on the back end. So Zuck has given everybody a little bit of a computer in the cloud with 8 gigs of RAM. Obviously, he's given tons of free tokens.
He does not have to pay advertising costs. He can just put Muse across all of his platforms. And to the extent that meta is a well-oiled machine, the amount of Muse's promotion that has happening across meta platforms instantly is kind of incredible to see. They just turned it on.
S on AdDering and FEL games this weekend from Muse. They're spending money to promote this. They're giving it away for free. They're giving the tokens away for free.
And then somewhere at the end of this, they're going to say to merchants, hey, this person was dropping for shoes, Muse brought them to your doorstep. You're going to pay for this customer to buy shoes from you. I don't know any merchants that are excited about this. And it certainly feels like merchants that pay meta more money would be preferred merchants.
And that means that not only do I have an assistant or chief of staff, I have a bribable chief of staff. Like I have a corrupt butler. Is that what you want? That is a great term for a corrupt butler.
Yeah, that is not what I want. And I don't think many people do. It's just crazy to me that we've gotten so far from what people really want, which is they want to trust a recommendation and they don't want to be scammed. The leaders in AI don't think about how certain things have been mirrored in other industries.
Think about when people were paying for reviews for their businesses or paying to delete reviews for their businesses. That was a huge uproar or influencers getting paid to recommend things without disclosing that it was an ad. Then we saw the rise of micro influencers who were more valuable for a while because they were seen as more trustworthy. They didn't have that many followers.
So the things they recommended must be really good. And then we saw the hashtag ad but also they only said they were going to recommend things they really believe in. So it's okay. That's an ad.
It's like these mental gymnastics that people have to do to figure out what is really a trustworthy recommendation these days. What is going to convince people that an AI recommendation is trustworthy if it can be bought. So I think that's something that these companies are really going to have to reckon with. You know, the chat to be the ads blowback was huge and open AI had to say, look, it's going to be a clearly disclosed ad underneath your query, not influencing your query.
So I mean, if you're using Muse to shop and it's an undisclosed like potential, you know, meta customer that you're being redirected to to buy those shoes instead of these other ones, I feel like so many people aren't going to use it to shop. I get it on the meta side. I understand why they would think about monetization that way. They're a consumer company.
This is a consumer product. They know the second they charge even a dollar for it. The uptake will drop precipitously. So they got to keep it free and eventually people are going to want to shop and go buy me a new iPhone cable.
You know, at the end of the day, it's all just the same Amazon garbage anyway. So whatever, and then they can run an auction on the backend to be like, who wants to pay us meta the most for the privilege of selling an unbranded USB-C cable to this customer and they'll run some auction and that will in its way just sort of maximize the money that gets turned around. And that is broadly how advertising works today. That's how the Google search results page works until recently.
That is full of AI and they're probably going to do the same thing. Meta can do that because they already have a giant advertising business, a Prince money. They can give away a consumer product. Mark Zuckerberg has been shown willing to blow money, try not to win a market like he did with reality labs for years and years and they can just run it till it works.
Money I, even at $100 a month is probably not making money on those customers. In fact, I think we know they're not making money on those customers. They don't have any monetization and when they do try to turn on ads, people get mad at them. How can they keep up with Zuck?
Only via enterprise. I think that's why they are pushing this so hard. You know, we saw a ton of enterprise discussion, demo videos, customer feedback, tons of stuff at DevDay and that's why they're pushing this so hard because they can't keep up with Zuck on the consumer front. They just can't.
This is the part to me where when people ask it, it's a bubble. I just, I find myself wondering how much of the economy that Zuck have to win in order to give away millions of millions of free tokens and 8 gigs of RAM to everyone in the cloud. Because that is just an expensive thing to give to everyone. And how many percentage points of every shoe sale in America do you need to take to fund it?
And the answer, it feels like a lot. I think that's huge here and something to remember because we already saw Zuck kind of crash and burn with metaverse stuff and he is not wanting to be embarrassed again. So you know, how long is this going to go on and how are they going to fund it in a real way on the back end, like what you were saying. It's just a little bit tough to imagine.
Luckily, meta has a ton of money and they can redirect stuff from other departments, which we've already seen them do a lot. But it will be interesting to see how this fares on the next couple of quarterly earnings calls, you know, to see how much money is being funneled into this and how much it is making if any of the other people are using it. You know, they've announced that it's off the app store, but our own David Pierce has written entire story that I've been number one of the app store doesn't mean much, right? It's sustained success that actually means something.
Right. It reminds me of when I was in college Uber and Lyft or maybe it was just Uber, honestly, we're new and VC back. So it was like $4 to call a new bird anytime you wanted to go out or down to the bars or anything. So they got everyone using it and then they got everyone hooked and then they had to, you know, up the prices.
That happens. That's a tail zone as time with like every VC back thing. So what I'm wondering is if this is really going to work to become that, are they going to get enough users and enough like shoe sales on the back and that this is going to be a really viable business model or is it just going to kind of be a potentially, you know, big bet that they switch away from later. That's what some meta employees that I spoke with in our meta piece told me they said they expect this to kind of be something that they, you know, are putting out trying to make a big deal out and then they may kind of revolve away from later or at least partly.
We'll see how that goes. If your bet is the future computing is talking a little agent, it certainly seems like meta has gotten farther along that path than anyone else, but we'll see open at his hardware design by Johnny Ive that will theoretically come out. It is certain that Google and Apple and all the rest will respond at some point. And this was great.
Thank you so much for being on Decoder once again. Thanks so much. I'd like to thank you for taking the time to join me on Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it.
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