Meta’s AI chief wants Muse to make you $1,000

Alexandr Wang has set Meta’s new AI agent a simple target. Meta’s chief AI officer asked on X whether Muse could “make you $1000”, launching a hashtag challenge a few days after Muse went live on 8 September.

The replies have been generous with dollar figures, but not always independent. Many of the posts answering the challenge came from Meta employees, Business Insider reported, sharing what they said Muse had saved them on phone bills, insurance, and furniture returns.

Business Insider’s Matthew Loh did not put a number on that share, and TNW has not independently counted it. None of the savings in the thread, from staff or anyone else, come with independent before-and-after figures.

The best of the thread

The pitch is that you point Muse at your finances and let it work in the background. It can compare insurance, cancel forgotten subscriptions, chase refunds, and hunt for discounts, then act on what it finds.

The headline example came from startup founder Joseph Devoy, who said Muse found him car insurance $3,500 a year cheaper than his existing plan. According to Axios, which listed the case among the stories Wang highlighted, the agent bought the new policy and cancelled the old one in about five minutes.

Other posts collected by Business Insider were smaller but more relatable. One user said Muse found a book subscription his wife had forgotten to cancel a year earlier and got the money back, and another said it turned up an unused $200 Verizon gift card.

Coinbase product manager Nick Prince wrote on X that Muse saved him $1,250 at a car dealership by steering him away from upsells and a large fee. Axios also highlighted a user who said the agent caught a fraudulent recurring charge their bank had missed.

Why Meta wants this story told

A savings challenge is a neat answer to the question every AI agent faces, which is why anyone should pay for it. Muse launched with a free tier and subscriptions at $20 and $100 a month, below the $199.99 tier floated before launch.

If Muse can reliably recover a few hundred dollars, the maths sells itself. Wang runs the lab behind Muse Spark, the model Muse is built on, so the challenge doubles as a public demo of his team’s work.

Analysts are starting to put numbers on it. Truist’s Youssef Squali estimates in his base case that Muse could add $28.5bn a year to Meta’s revenue by 2030, through subscriptions, commerce, and developer access, TipRanks reported.

The downloads suggest it is landing. Muse became the most downloaded free iPhone app in the US within about ten days of launch, ahead of ChatGPT and Instagram, Axios reported, and Business Insider said it also reached the top of Google Play.

Mark Zuckerberg has pitched Muse as a counter to rival labs, telling the Sources podcast that holding back AI models is the bigger danger. The savings thread is the consumer version of that argument: give people the agent and let them show what it does.

An agent with your wallet

The same features that make the challenge work are what make the agent risky. Muse only saves money because it can reach inboxes and payment details, and act on them with little prompting.

That access is already being tested. On Monday, Amazon blocked Muse from placing orders, saying unauthorised agents break its conditions of use.

Payments companies are moving the other way. PayPal said in a post on X on Tuesday that its customers can now shop and check out through Muse at PayPal merchants worldwide, as Harshita Tyagi reported for Stocktwits.

That adds PayPal to the Stripe Link checkout Muse launched with, according to PYMNTS. Shopify signed up the same day, with chief executive Tobi Lütke writing on X that Shop Pay checkout would work through Muse on all Shopify stores.

Zuckerberg promised “more partnerships like this” in his own post on the Shopify deal, Benzinga reported. Shopify’s shares jumped about 7% on the news, according to 24/7 Wall St.

Muse asks users to approve the total in the chat before it pays, PYMNTS reported. With more of the web’s checkouts opening up to it, that approval step is now the main safeguard on a user’s money.

Early on Tuesday, Meta shipped a hotfix for a flaw in the Muse Mac app that could let malicious software on a computer take over a user’s session, Gizmodo reported. Meta called the practical risk “quite low”, while the researcher who found it, Patrick Wardle, disagreed.

None of that disproves a single savings claim in the thread. It does mean the most useful number for Muse users is not the $1,000 a Meta executive asked them to find, but how often the agent gets it right when nobody from Meta is posting the result.