Muse's normie-friendly design is the playbook for how Meta can win at AI

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, dropped hints about Meta's AI agent playbook way back in April.

Chris Graythen/Getty Images Muse, Meta's AI agent , has become a hit app.

Meta knows how to design normie-friendly apps — and that matters, a lot.

As Zuck would say, it passes his "mother" test.

Ultimately, Meta's edge in the AI battle is its vast edge in creating and cross-promoting consumer apps.

With Meta's Muse agent shooting to the top of the App Store charts , I'm reminded of something Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year.

"There's a lot of agents out there," Mark Zuckerberg told investors on an April earnings call.

"There aren't that many that I would want to give to my mother." The Meta CEO said the company was willing to tinker until it had an AI agent "more polished and dialed and easy" than the competition.

Something that "just works." Something that would pass his "mother" test .

Nearly a half a year later, that strategy is paying off, with Meta's Muse agent overtaking ChatGPT as the top free AI app.

This is the playbook for how Meta wins at AI — not by having the best frontier models, but by having the most successful consumer app and pushing it out to its billions of existing users.

People seem to like Muse! Like, really like it! I've been playing around with it myself , and am pleasantly delighted by some of the tasks I've asked it to do (to be fair, it's also failed a bunch of tasks I asked it to do).

It's debatable whether Muse is the most powerful or "best" agent.

Instinct is a similar product that I know one of my colleagues was really enjoying, and it seems to have a growing fanbase.