Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone chatting with its Muse agents. And then he wants those agents chatting with each other.
“We expect to grow Muse to serve billions of people. This is both our mission and our strategy,” Zuckerberg said during Meta’s earnings call on Wednesday. “This is also our strategy because we think that billions of Muses in a network at scale will be able to get more done for people and businesses by working together, so we’d like to create a large-scale Muse network as quickly as possible.”
Meta’s goal of building a network of AI agents that work together to serve more than a billion people worldwide helps explain why the company isn’t “charging everyone up front” to use Muse. The idea is to attract as many users as possible. It’s unclear exactly what this collaboration between agents will entail, but it raises questions about data sharing, an area where Meta has a checkered history. Just earlier today, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading consumers about data privacy in connection with the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal nearly a decade ago. Meta said it will appeal the verdict.
Muse has also faced several privacy-related issues in the mere month and a half since its debut. One user claimed the agents analyzed private text messages without permission, while another had their home address shared with a stranger. Researchers have also claimed that Muse maintains detailed, regularly updated files on everyone in a user’s life. Meanwhile, Amazon blocked Muse agents from shopping on its platform, citing concerns about how they handled customer credentials and account data. Meta also had to patch a major zero-day vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to hijack users’ accounts.
On the earnings call, Meta executives touted numbers demonstrating the company’s strength both in and outside of AI. Threads surpassed X in monthly active users in the past quarter, executives said. Meanwhile, Muse agents were allegedly doing so well that more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada had set up personal agents since its debut in early September.
“Growth continues to be strong, and we have been number one in the App Store almost every day,” Zuckerberg said. “The most common use case for Muse is shopping, with more than a quarter of people who are using Muse engaging in this with an average purchase size of over $200.”
But these rosy AI goals come with one particularly big thorn: they cost a ton of money. Muse is already “very compute intensive to run” right now, Zuckerberg admitted on the call, and scaling that to more than a billion will likely require a significant investment.
Meta expects to spend at least $135 billion this year, probably more, with most of that money going toward AI infrastructure projects. After reporting a roughly $8 billion decline in quarterly free cash flow in July, Meta officially slipped into negative territory in its earnings report Wednesday. The company reported negative free cash flow of $2.12 billion for the third quarter, which ended September 30.
Executives hope to finance their AI ambitions with a new class of stock that they unveiled on the call. Beginning next year, Meta plans to distribute a new class of non-voting stock to existing shareholders through a two-for-one stock split. The company, then known as Facebook, abandoned a similar plan nearly a decade ago.
Meta says the move would give it more ways to raise capital without diluting Zuckerberg’s unquestioned control. It also serves a second function of keeping Zuckerberg in California.
Meta said that it entered into a Founder Alignment Agreement with Zuckerberg, in which Zuckerberg has committed to stay in California, where Meta is headquartered, for the next eight years. Along with a list of other billionaire tech bros, Zuckerberg threatened to leave California if residents vote to pass Proposition 40, a 5% wealth tax on billionaires, in the November election. The new stock structure would also allow Zuckerberg to sell non-voting shares to raise cash in the event of a billionaire tax without weakening his unusually tight grip on the company.
Update: This post has been updated to add additional information.
