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What Meta got right with Muse

138 points · 189 comments · young_mete

  1. egl2020 · · focus · HN ↗
    The privacy issue blocks me from adopting this or other personal assistants: do I want to give muse my identity data and access to my mail, calendar, and phone so it can do even basic tasks like make appointments or pay bills?

    It will be interesting to see if muse's privacy features can get users over this.

    1. mattbrewsbytes · · focus · HN ↗
      Meta's active user base doesn't care about privacy.

      Most personal tasks take trivial amounts of time these days. Does a 5th grade teacher or an auto mechanic need a personal assistant? Do we need to be able to book a trip faster? It feels very gimmicky to me, but I realize I'm not their target audience.

      Given that, I do think Meta will probably get the lions share of B2C AI and they have a proven track record of using personal data to serve ads and make a lot of profit. If they capture more of their user base's time, it keeps them engaged and away from a list of competitors. If Meta starts crushing it in this fashion I could see IPO's of OpenAI and Anthropic land like fart in church.

      1. rolosa · · focus · HN ↗
        I mean I just used muse to plan out my entire weekend trip to Vegas recently. I booked everything myself but I asked it to shortlist dining options for me given dietary restrictions, events given restrictions (with elderly family), etc. it basically handled all the stuff I would have normally just Google searched for. Plus it made a nice web app dashboard to display it all. It seems pretty useful for common use.

        It also handled payment splitting. I told it what person x spent for the group split 3 ways (it originally split by the total number of people, but I clarified that only me + x + y are paying) and it kept running totals. When I got an email from Venmo saying x sent me money, muse automatically updated the balance sheet.

        We saw some signs written in an unfamiliar language. Muse told me what language it was.

        1. chronogram · · focus · HN ↗
          Is that your first time using an LLM? I don't mean that in a snarky way, it just seems like things everything could do for years.
          1. rolosa · · focus · HN ↗
            Continuing my thought, talking to Muse and ChatGPT feel fundamentally different. The single thread chat Muse offers encourages you to talk to it like a person imo. But that's probably just me.
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