alt Hacker NewsI think the product as shown in this marketing material with these examples falls squarely in the “nobody asked for this” territory of AI.
At least with B2B AI there is a problem to be solved: reduce my labor costs and increase my business output.
What’s happened here is that consumer technology is already solved, but companies like Meta are trying to jam AI technology into something that solves the non-problems that supposedly exist in hopes of squeezing the last drops of profit out of the space.
It’s hard for me to say if this problem is with the product itself or the examples that feel like an executive’s out of touch guesstimate of what it must be like to be a working class peasant consumer. What do the poor do again…book movie tickets? Is that like making a dinner reservation at a Michelin star restaurant? I bet they’ll need an AI assistant for that!
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No, after seeing how powerful AI is at my job, I definitely want AI to help plan dates, book flights, generate spreadsheets, do all the things.
The only problem is, like someone else pointed out, that I don't trust Meta.
> “nobody asked for this”
I absolutely want a general purpose assistant.
I absolutely don't trust Facebook with the necessary data.
Try asking it to find a good deal for you for <item> across multiple sites. Then tell it to use the browser to navigate through the two most promising sites to confirm pricing and availability, and prepare comprehensive breakdown with its findings.
People shop a lot on the internet, actually. Between that and ads for the things people shop for, it’s pretty much the backbone of the Internet economy.
I bet they would purchase more things than they currently do, and seriously break the economics of Google/Amazon search ads (about $300B of yearly spending just for those two), display ads, and internet-first e-commerce sites if they could just ask an agent working for them to help research/source/purchase things without all the navigation and dark patterns in the middle. Personally I would probably spend at least $1k/yr more on snack/beverage subscriptions alone if it had less friction.
> working class peasant consumer
You mean the majority of people in the world? Most people only their computers to entertain themselves, look things up, buy stuff, and complete tedious tasks (taxes, email, etc) they’d rather not do.
How much do you and your peers spend a year on online shopping and how much do they pay out of pocket for SAAS or AI tokens? And how many of your offline purchases had a significant amount of associated online research involved despite technically completing offline? (Houses, cars, schools, hardware) Yeah that’s pretty much where all the money in the global software industry comes from
> I think the product as shown in this marketing material with these examples falls squarely in the “nobody asked for this” territory of AI.
I agree. The time to launch something like this would have been during the OpenClaw hype cycle (although, obviously, Muse is much more limited in the types of tasks it can accomplish).
I thought about installing it, but I realized I couldn't think of any real uses for it in my personal life.
I disagree. It matches exactly what I need.
Whenever I try to do something with ChatGPT or Gemini, it just refuses to do things citing limitations in its web browsing capabilities. An everyday LLM that can actually fill forms and do stuff for you on the Internet without having to run on your computer, write programs or interact through special harnesses is what normal people actually need.
It's a different need from the agentic coding type of LLM, where you provide the environment where it can write and execute arbitrary code.
I've been alpha testing muse and there's precisely one area it's useful in.... Finding things on Facebook marketplace and haggling for me lol
The first example I saw was making a shopping list for school for pick up.
Do the same thing for recipes and buying groceries.
Or "order me take out from a bunch of places I haven't been that you think I'd like." The AI can ask follow up questions and see your ratings.
"Make a music playlist for my daughter when she enters the car based on the conversation last month. I remember vaguely her mentioning what she liked"
These are things that 100% people want AI to do -- imagine if you had a personal assistant, is something people have asked for since forever.
Now, I kind of agree on the minimal use compared to business, because in business everything has always been highly integrated. That said, that's changing rapidly.
I'm not sure - it may as well be that regular consumers just don't realize they need this and will greatly benefit from it.
My personal anecdote - we had a complex family travel in the summer, with 6 ppl and 6 separate flights booked (some multi-leg). SAS messed up on one booking - they decided to cancel the flight we had from Oslo, and rebooked us to an earlier date (2 days shift). That wouldn't work for the rest of our schedule, so I had to rebook, overpay extra money for now longer & more expensive flights - but to add the insult to the injury, when I did this through their website, they didn't transfer the food that I paid for the earlier reservation. Calling them in roaming and trying to get it fixed with a human support agent didn't help - the agent said he just can't fix it on his end, and suggested that we just file for reimbursement on their site.
I never had time to file it since July.
But today I had a reason - to test Muse - and asked it to handle it for me. To my surprise, it dug through all of the SAS emails and actually found the emails confirming that the food fees were reimbursed exactly the same date when SAS moved our original flight. Apparently I didn't notice those notifications since they were spamming with all kinds of notifications that day. But, if not some tool like Muse, I wouldn't even find time to handle this and either file a claim or figure out my miss on their earlier reimbursement.