All this is prelude to noting the sudden emergence of FaceBook Muse: an agentic AI system that has underlying economics I do not understand, but that Amazon fears enough to preëmptively block.
From Sensor Tower via Paul Kedrosky:
& Paul notes:
Paul Kedrosky: Meta’s Muse & Moat-less AI <[https://paulkedrosky.com/metas-muse-and-moat-less-ai/]>: ‘Meta's agentic AI app Muse entered the U.S. App Store’s top 20 on September 9 at No. 4. Nine days later, it was No. 1. Muse’s rise is a useful reminder thatAI consumer products can gain sharequickly, given buzz and distribution. Users can switch applications at negligible cost, while the underlying model intelligence is available to every serious competitor. The takeaway should be, in short, that there is, despite trillions in spending,minimal moat. The real assets are familiar ones:default placement, brand, habit, proprietary data, and an effective product loop. The AI itself is not a moat when competitors canaccess comparable modelsandcheaply reproducethe surrounding interface. Meta engineersin posts.[concede]as muchMuse may fall back out of the top 20 next month. Or it
may get blocked everywhere, as has already happened[at Amazon]. That would make the point even more clearly: AI consumer software is beginning to look like ahit-driven marketin which the model isrented, the interface iscopied, and the users remain [—]mobile…
- Brad DeLong here*: The key question is this: What is FaceBook’s monetization strategy for Muse? FaceBook has a monetization strategy for everything, and it—at least for me—makes committing to using their programs painful, and something that after the fact I wish I had not done, I think that the monetization strategy is that FaceBook watches what you do with Muse and uses it to better target its Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp ads, plus extorting money from shopping websites that are willing to pay to have Muse direct traffic to them. It would surely be a bad bet for me to commit to Muse, just as it would be a bad bet for me to commit to Threads.
But that is just me. I am not representative here. Of anything. Paul thinks the lesson is that “consumer AI” is becoming a hit-driven market where the model is rented, the interface copied, users stay mobile. This smells much more like the streaming-wars media financial disaster than like a new platform-monopoly in progress. But—nobody knows anything here.
##mamlms
##chart-of-the-day
#facebooks-muse-on-the-apple-ios-app-store
#moat-less-ai
#agentic-ai
#move-fast-move-on
#next-big-thing
#paul-kedrosky
