Meta has made a month-old AI assistant the centre of its future, after admitting that its last prediction — that everyone would spend their time in the metaverse — came from the same stage.
A decade ago, when bots were supposed to replace apps, Facebook opened a bot platform for Messenger. 1-800-FLOWERS and CNN built automated customer service on it. Two years later the platform was wound down, and the man who ran it left to launch a cryptocurrency, which also went nowhere.
The app that got promoted at one month old
At last week's developer conference, Zuckerberg put Muse at the centre of the company. It is an AI assistant that connects to your Google Workspace and bank accounts and fills in forms, grabs reservations, pays bills. Voice and VR integration are coming, along with a strapless smartwatch called the Muse Charm, due to ship this year.
He said 'millions' had tried Muse. The day before, a report put first-week usage at 500,000. For comparison, Threads reached 100 million users in five days, and Meta still has no hardware plan for it.
A hundred and forty billion needs a story
Meta will spend up to $145 billion this year on capital projects alone — more than the $85 billion it has lost on Reality Labs since 2021. Advertising pays so well that shareholders have been patient, but a year like this one needs a new story.
So the metaverse got a passing mention. Zuckerberg admitted he had expected it to go mainstream before AI, and switched course once AI arrived. That is probably right, but it steps around an expensive misjudgement — and he once used exactly this language to say billions would spend their time in the metaverse.
The actual engineering is in the glasses
The real thing from the same event was the Meta VR Glasses. One-sixth the weight of the Apple Vision Pro and about a third of the price, comfortable at 100 grams, with no overheating in an hour-long demo. They pack less than half the pixels of the Vision Pro and still look about the same.
The old questions remain: is it a console, a work machine or a cinema? Meta says all three, which has been its answer since the Oculus Quest, and it did not bring the metaverse to life.
In one line: the lessons learned from losing billions on hardware are real; the software promises can wait.
Why it matters
A giant's keynote promises are not worth betting on by themselves. Its capital spending is: $145 billion needs a story to tell the market, and which character gets cast usually follows the financial pressure first and the user numbers later.
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