Meta is betting its future on Muse, a personal AI agent less than a month old, which chief executive Mark Zuckerberg placed at the center of the company's vision at its annual Connect developer event this week.
"The centerpiece of our vision for what we're building is Muse," Zuckerberg said. "In the coming years, I expect that Muse is going to grow into the personal superintelligence that billions of people around the world are going to use to accomplish their goals and improve their lives."
Muse is a more consumer-friendly version of OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent. Users who connect it to their Google Workspace, bank accounts and other online services can ask it to fill out forms, grab reservations and pay bills for free. Zuckerberg said users will soon be able to chat with Muse using their voice, and it will be integrated into the operating system for Meta's virtual reality products.
Meta is also racing to release the Muse Charm, a strapless smartwatch with a screen that lets users see and interact with their animated agent. The Charm is scheduled to ship later this year; pricing has not been released, though Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the plans, that it would be priced like a smartwatch.
Zuckerberg said on stage that "millions" had tried Muse, a day after The Information reported week-one usage at more than 500,000 people. By contrast, Meta's Threads app hit 100 million users in five days.
The focus on Muse comes in a year when Meta plans to spend up to $145 billion on infrastructure and other capital expenditures. Meta has lost more than $85 billion on its Reality Labs division since 2021, and this year's capital spending alone is set to exceed those cumulative losses.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that he originally thought virtual reality and the metaverse would become mass-market phenomena before AI did, but that the company changed course once AI arrived. AI, he said, "will be much bigger and more important. So we have shifted our focus to building the best devices for personal superintelligence."
Meta also announced the Meta VR Glasses, which shrink the Apple Vision Pro into a device one-sixth the weight and roughly one-third the price. The glasses weigh just 100 grams, and most computing takes place in an attached puck that can be plugged in to extend the promised three-hour battery life indefinitely. Meta calls the display 5K, with a little under half the pixels of the Vision Pro.
In a roughly hour-long demo, the glasses stayed comfortable and never overheated, with crisp images during segments of a Billie Eilish concert and highlights of an NBA Finals game, plus quick rounds of Beat Saber and Forza Horizon 6. Meta's "surface keyboard" paints a full keyboard on the surface in front of users when they place their hands on it palms down.
Questions about VR's use cases remain, and final judgment should wait until the glasses can be tested outside demo conditions.