Musing Your Mind 🤖😵‍💫

What’s Appening: Meta Muse, Tilly Norwood, Wired Women, AI Safety

META MUSE AIMS TO BRING AI SHOPPING TO THE MASSES

👀 TLDR

In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover the release and success of Meta’s Muse, an AI agent tool that is experiencing success in terms of downloads not seen since the early days of ChatGPT. It promises “agentic AI” for everyone, but some, including Amazon, aren’t ready to open their doors. We also have news on X bringing lawsuits against those aiming to game its revenue system, how an AI actress glitch has caused a stir, the Warner-Paramount deal gets the go-ahead, and all the latest from 3Advance.

🎬 Our Top Take

🐡⛓️‍💥 Muse – A Smash Hit for Meta But An Issue for Amazon

Meta’s new AI agent Muse is just about two weeks old, but in that time it has already reached several million downloads. In fact, it has surpassed the download rate ChatGPT saw in its first couple of weeks after its mobile launch. A win for Meta, then, and to be honest, it’s easy to see why: Muse is a consumer-friendly AI tool – Meta brands it as The World’s First Personal AI Agent Built for Everyone – and it’s free (usage limits apply). If we can put it another way, it’s designed for ‘normies,’ not just experienced developers. Anyway, it can do many of those things that we envisaged AI agents doing, including going out to the live web to go shopping. Meta has installed permission safeguards so that it won’t suddenly come back informing you that you’ve bought a condo in Florida. But there is a little fly in the ointment – it has been banned from Amazon as of yesterday. There’s a bit of a war of words currently happening between the two tech giants as to why, though it seems to focus on privacy violations. Amazon, for its part, seems to see AI agents (except its own) as an issue. It has $68 billion in annual ad revenue because people browse its sponsored products and pages. How will that fit in with this new era of agentic AI? #AmusingTimes Read more here.

📲 App of the Week: Wired Women

It’s not quite App of the Week today; more like Platform of the Week. Technology platform Wired has released a special edition – Wired Women – of its print magazine and a kind of takeover of its website. It aims to highlight women in tech, but not with meaningless platitudes and puff pieces. It’s real warts-and-all stuff, specifically throwing shade at the “bullshit” (Wired’s words) that women have had to deal with in Silicon Valley and beyond. Whether you’re a woman, man, employer, or employee, working in tech or not, having a look at the specially curated issue is well worth it, as is perusing around the broader site, as it looks to do something different with “Wired Women”. 

🧐 Stat of the Week: 0% Chance

📈📉 AI – Jensen Huang Promises Us We Are Safe (Until 2030 at Least)

We reported last week that Nvidia boss Jensen Huang was on the other side of the argument from those who claim AI development should be slowed down, and he was quick to try to calm people’s (investors?) nerves on the issue, claiming that there was a 0% chance that AI would destroy humanity by 2030. Questions of what happens in 2031 aside, we thought it best to highlight this week, since the real discussions are happening behind the scenes. Reports say that China and the US are discussing AI safety measures ahead of the Trump-Xi summit later this week. That, folks, is what really matters. #ZeroChance Read more here.

😵‍💫 Glitch. Tilly Norwood (the AI ‘actress’) has been on a press tour, and it’s going… well, in one interview, she glitched out and started speaking Cantonese. Suppose it shows range. More here.

🤝 Resolved. The lawsuit that largely held up that huge Paramount-Warner merger seems to have been resolved, paving the way for the deal that could change broadcasting forever. Story here.

🆕 X Changes. An interesting update from X, which will now use its “Under the Hood” tool to let users see if certain posts have been limited/downranked due to government interference. Story here.

💸 More X. An interesting and cautionary story here: X is suing a bunch of crypto influencers it claims fraudulently abused its creator revenue system with coordinated engagement. More here.

📍 Meanwhile at 3Advance

We’ve been running What’s Appening for around four and a half years and are considering its future. Should we keep going? Is it worth it? Is it time to wrap it up? We love seeing it come together, and it’s been a great way to keep in touch with all of you. We’d love to hear what you think, or if you have any ideas for funding it moving forward. Sponsorship? New stewardship? Open to all your thoughts.

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