Meta's Muse gives Zuckerberg another shot at building a real platform

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg Jeff Chiu/AP Meta's AI agent Muse dominates the App Store, surpassing ChatGPT in downloads.

Muse offers a potential new platform for developers, attracting services such as Shopify and Stripe.

Muse competes with other AI agents for the "top of the funnel." Meta 's new personal AI agent, Muse, gives Mark Zuckerberg another chance to build the kind of technology platform he has chased for years.

Muse jumped to the top of the App Store last week and remained the most downloaded free app on Monday, beating ChatGPT.

If enough people use Muse as their main way to get things done online, developers could flock to the nascent platform, and businesses may have little choice but to engage with it.

Meta surged 11% on Monday, getting the stock within striking distance of a record it hit last summer.

Investors appear to be betting the company has found a new way to sit between consumers and the businesses trying to reach them.

This broad idea has been driving Zuckerberg for years.

Meta spent tens of billions of dollars trying to build the next major computing platform through virtual reality and, more recently, smart glasses.

Part of that ambition came into focus in 2021 when Apple made it harder for Meta to track people across apps and target ads, reminding Zuckerberg how much power platform owners have over companies that depend on them.

Developers invited Muse offers a different path.

Its swift climb up the app charts gives Meta the kind of early consumer momentum that attracts developers.

Last week, the company opened Muse to outside developers through a new connector platform that lets businesses plug their services directly into the AI agent.

Those connectors help Muse do useful work on a person's behalf.