He looks like a CoComelon character who grew up and mated with an E. coli microbe.

But don’t let looks fool you. Under the hood, Meta’s new Muse agentic AI platform is incredibly powerful—and potentially incredibly risky.

I’ve been testing Muse since Meta launched him on September 8. He’s a clever little bastard, provided you’re willing to tell him basically everything about your life.

For years, Meta has seemed inexcusably late to the AI party. While flashy startups like OpenAI and Anthropic were winning trillion-dollar valuations, Nvidia was getting fat on its success as a shovel-seller, and Google was slowly replacing its core product with AI, Meta seemed stuck in the past.

The company encouraged AI slop on its platforms, only to change its tune. It did legitimate research in open-weight models, but also took some hilariously wrong-headed steps, like releasing AI chatbots that mimic celebrities without their permission.

It was tempting to write Meta off as an also-ran. Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg was still gun-shy from the abject failure of the Metaverse, and was going to sit this particular revolution out.

Almost overnight, the platform was stealing market share from Meta’s competitors, and growing shockingly fast. Less than a month post-launch, Muse had wracked up 6.6 million downloads, and an even-more-impressive 1.8 million daily active users. Citi thinks it could generate $27 billion in revenue in fairly short order.

Meta, in other words, was late to the party—but now that it’s arrived, the company’s tech is all anyone can talk about.

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