Muse is the Pied Piper Silicon Valley warned us about
Meta's new agent model is going to be free to use, which is nice of them, until you remember that almost 98% of Meta's money comes from advertising and whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
If you watched Silicon Valley, and all the subsequent meme's it has spawned, you may remember Hendricks sat in front of Congress promising Pied Piper would never collect its users' data, then finding out his own team already was and letting it carry on because the product didn't really work without it.1 In 2019 that was supposed to be satire.
This week Meta released Muse Wonder,2 the model that's going to power Muse, their very helpful personal agent that remembers everything about you and, good news, has a free tier.3
Free is lovely, except advertising made up almost 98% of Meta's revenue last quarter ($59.4bn of $60.8bn)4 so somebody is paying, and it definitely isn't you, at least in cash terms. Right now the feed decides what you see, pretty soon your agent decides what you buy, what gets booked and what turns up at your door, and when the company that owns it makes almost every dollar from people paying to get in front of you I think it's fair to ask who exactly it's working for.
Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, and we all know who pays Meta's piper.
The Pied Piper in the original story was charming, very good with a tune and brilliant at getting a whole town's worth of children to follow him straight out of it. Muse could turn out to be the best Pied Piper yet, always on, always helpful and only too happy to lead you off to wherever the highest bidder wants you to go.
A personal agent should have one job, which is to act for you. That's the whole point of what we're building at VIA, your agent says what you actually want and the sellers compete on what they're offering you rather than on how much they've spent on ads, and since nobody pays to be put in front of you there isn't really a tune for anybody to call.
