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. “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.”
This goal of building a network of AI agents working together to serve more than a billion people’s inquiries worldwide is a reason why Meta isn’t “charging everyone up front” to use Muse, so that more people sign on. It’s unclear what this collaboration will entail, but it does raise some questions about data sharing, which Meta does not have a squeaky-clean record of. Just earlier today, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading consumers over data privacy regarding the infamous Cambridge Analytica data breach from roughly a decade ago. Meta said that it will appeal the verdict.
Muse has also dealt with a couple of privacy-related accusations in the mere month and a half since its debut, including a user who claimed the agents analyzed private texts without being asked and another user who had their home address given out to a stranger. Researchers have claimed that Muse keeps incredibly detailed and regularly updated files on every person in a user’s life, and Amazon blocked the agents from shopping on its platform after saying there were concerns related to how they handled customer credentials and account data. Meta also had to patch a major zero-day vulnerability that pretty much allowed hackers to hijack the user’s account.
On the 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 is expecting to spend at least $135 billion this year, probably more, with most of that money going towards AI infrastructure projects. After reporting a roughly $8 billion drop in its quarterly free cash flow in its second-to-last earnings report in July, Meta’s free cash flow officially went negative in its report on Wednesday. Meta’s free cash flow in its third quarter that ended September 30 was negative $2.12 billion.
Executives hope to finance their AI ambitions with a new class of stock that they unveiled on the call. Beginning next year, all existing Meta shareholders will be distributed a new class of non-voting capital stock in a two-for-one stock split. The company, then called Facebook, eventually withdrew a similar non-voting stock plan roughly a decade ago.
With the move, Meta says that it would have more ways to raise financing without diluting the power Zuckerberg has over the company. 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 Californians vote to pass a 5% wealth tax on billionaires, Proposition 40, in the November election. With the new stock structure, Zuckerberg will be able to sell any non-voting stock to liquidate his assets in the event of a billionaire tax without losing his grip on the company.
