TechAIMetaIn Meta\u2019s version of the future, I\u2019ll have my Muse call your Muse\u201c… everyone is just going to have to adapt,\u201d Meta\u2019s chief financial officer Susan Li said during the third-quarter earnings call.\ufeff\u201c… everyone is just going to have to adapt,\u201d Meta\u2019s chief financial officer Susan Li said during the third-quarter earnings call.\ufeffby Ellen ThomasOct 22, 2026, 6:15 PM UTCShareGiftImage: The Verge, Getty Images, MetaMark Zuckerberg is barrelling toward a future in which an autonomous network of AI agents will run our lives \u2014 shopping for us, working for us, talking to other people\u2019s AI agents for us. Are humans ready for this very specific and unrelenting vision of a life in which we communicate primarily through bot proxies? Actually, don\u2019t answer that. The more urgent question coming off Meta\u2019s quarterly earnings call Wednesday night is more likely to be: \u201cIs he?\u201dZuckerberg is staking Meta\u2019s future on Muse, the personal AI agent it released to the general public last month.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s early days, but Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday\u2019s call that he sees a future where \u201cbillions\u201d of people are using Muse, and those people\u2019s Muses are talking to and transacting with other people\u2019s Muses in a \u201clarge-scale Muse network.\u201dRelatedAI agents are ready to shop. Some retailers are waryMeta says it would\u2019ve made over $22 billion if it didn\u2019t have to pay a child safety settlementMeta to create a new class of shares to fund AI pushThe Muses will be \u201cextremely capable\u201d personal agents that will help us achieve our goals and improve our lives in \u201cwhatever ways you want,\u201d Zuckerberg said, \u201cwhether that\u2019s improving your relationships, helping you save time, save money, build a business, create new things, or anything else that you can dream of.\u201d By this logic, Zuckerberg says, we\u2019ll all be so hooked on Muse that it will eventually generate more revenue per user for Meta than Instagram and Facebook, which as of today, bring in pretty much all of the money Meta makes.This ecosystem of personal AI agents \u201ccan work with your friends and your families, and if you want to buy something, it\u2019s not just navigating to that business\u2019s website; it\u2019s talking to their agent,\u201d Zuckerberg said. \u201cI think that getting that all to work well together is going to unlock tremendous value at scale.\u201dZuckerberg predicts that Muse will be \u201chighly profitable\u201d in just a few years.All of this should sound great \u2014 if not a little freaky \u2014 to investors, who probably tuned into Meta\u2019s call hoping Zuckerberg would have some justification for the hundreds of billions of dollars his company is currently spending on AI data centers. But, if anyone was hoping for more than a concept of a plan, they didn\u2019t get one.To be fair to Muse, Zuckerberg shared a few promising data points. To date, the app has been downloaded and set up by more than 10 million users in the US and Canada, making it one of Meta\u2019s \u201cmost successful launches ever,\u201d according to Zuckerberg.<\/p>\n
He did not share specific retention numbers, but said that a quarter of people who downloaded Muse initially are using it daily. He sees the biggest opportunity in commerce. A quarter of Muse users are shopping through the platform, Zuckerberg said, and are spending on average more than $200 per purchase.Meta earns a fee for every commercial transaction that takes place on Muse. Zuckerberg\u2019s thinking seems to be that if AI agents are doing the shopping, the potential number of transactions that could take place on the platform is, essentially, unlimited.<\/p>\n
Unlike the average consumer, AI agents don\u2019t sleep. In theory, they\u2019re available 24\/7 to scrape the Internet, generate product recommendations, and buy things, constantly, in real time.Meta didn\u2019t offer any details as to how all of this will actually work in practice, which makes sense given the very legitimate concerns about how the company handles data privacy. In September, a YouTuber said his Muse agent sent a stranger to his home in the middle of the night while arranging a Facebook Marketplace transaction on his behalf. When Muse launched last month, Zuckerberg claimed it was \u201cbuilt for privacy and security from the ground up,\u201d but there have been reports of agents leaking content from users\u2019 private conversations.<\/p>\n
A Canadian bank executive told Bloomberg earlier this week that it would consider blocking Muse from accessing its customers\u2019 financial data.Zuckerberg seems to think if people get on board with Muse, enterprise will have to follow. But, what if people don\u2019t want to? What if they can\u2019t afford to? Someone has to pay for all the stuff the bots are buying in this fever dream of a never-ending, Supermarket Sweep episode taking place inside our phones \u2014 or Muse Charms, if you\u2019d rather.<\/p>\n
New research from the University of Michigan shows that consumer sentiment in the US is at an all-time low as gas prices and inflation continue to creep up.If Meta knows that all of this sounds dystopian and a little bizarre, it does not care.\u201cAgents are going to be an important part of how reality evolves, and everyone is just going to have to adapt,\u201d Meta\u2019s chief financial officer Susan Li said when one investor on the call asked about potential \u201cfriction points\u201d in getting businesses on board with the Muse plan. After all, Meta says Muse will likely remain free for consumers, while businesses will be expected to cover the transaction fees.Meta really does need Muse to work. The company\u2019s capex is through the roof, and other financial obligations are piling up. It plans to spend between $135 billion and $145 billion in 2026, double what it spent last year.<\/p>\n
As of yesterday, it owes New Mexico $25 billion after a jury found it had violated the state\u2019s consumer protection laws. Meta, and the rest of Big Tech for that matter, is under increasing pressure to show that its AI investments will be worth it.Forget consumers \u2014 it\u2019s not clear if Meta itself can afford its plans. Zuckerberg stated clearly on the call that the reason it hasn\u2019t launched Muse internationally is because of compute efficiency.It\u2019s incredibly expensive and energy-intensive to run GPUs at the level that a network of Muses would require, and Meta seems to have reached the limit of what it can achieve with its current data center operations. Zuckerberg told investors the plan is to \u201c10x\u201d the cost-efficiency of its compute next year.<\/p>\n
He didn\u2019t explain how the company plans to do this. Luckily for him \u2014 and possibly the rest of us \u2014 there is already research on how data centers can maximize compute capacity with energy use strategies that also reduce strain on the electric grid. Maybe he\u2019ll read it.Ultimately, Muse won\u2019t be profitable and won\u2019t succeed if Meta can\u2019t figure out how to get its compute costs down. Zuckerberg said it himself.\u201cOne of the biggest constraints so far is that because this is a compute-intensive service to run, we haven\u2019t launched it globally,\u201d Zuckerberg told an investor who asked about the \u201climiting factors\u201d he sees in growing Muse\u2019s user base.Muse\u2019s 10 million downloads since launch are even more impressive considering they came only from the US and Canada, Zuckerberg said. \u201cIf we actually did roll it out more broadly, then you would expect that number to be significantly larger than what we\u2019re seeing today.\u201dZuckerberg at least seems to understand that some people \u2014 and, probably more importantly for him, some businesses \u2014 won\u2019t immediately \u201cget\u201d Muse.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s okay, he said. \u201cWe\u2019ll work with folks on the terms that make sense for them,\u201d he said. \u201cI do think that over time, this is going to be quite valuable for everyone.\u201dThen again, this is the same guy who brought you the Metaverse. We\u2019ll see what happens.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
TechAIMetaIn Meta\u2019s version of the future, I\u2019ll have my Muse call your Muse\u201c… everyone is just going to have to adapt,\u201d Meta\u2019s chief financial officer Susan Li said during the third-quarter earnings call.\ufeff\u201c… everyone is\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30563,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}