The secret behind Meta’s Muse
The new secret is the old secret
TL;DR
- Meta has launched a new agent called Muse.
- This is not Meta's first attempt at building an agent; Project M was launched in 2015 when Meta was Facebook.
- Project M faced issues with cost, scalability, and revealed human involvement behind the scenes.
- Project M was canceled in January 2018, with AI serving less than 30% of requests.
- Muse appears to have similar goals to Project M, such as handling restaurant reservations and theatre tickets.
- The article raises concerns about Meta's handling of privacy in relation to these AI agents.
- The author implies that Meta, and specifically Zuckerberg, may be repeating past errors with Muse.
For the last few days, all the buzz has been about Meta’s new agent, Muse:
Old-timers with an especially good memory will remember that this isnotthe first time that Meta tried to build agents.
Back in 2015, when Meta was still called Facebook, Facebook made a big splash, dutifully picked up across the tech media, with their Project M:
Alas, it never really took off.
Part of the problem was that M was expensive for Facebook to run; so they only rolled it to about 10,000 users, and never scaled it to the general public. One wonders how reliable it was.
And eventually it leaked that there were humans behind the scenes, shades of the originalMechanical Turk, the chess playing machine that concealed a human hiding inside.
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After all that came out, David Marcus (no relation, but then working at Facebook) assured Alex Kantrowitz that everything was A-OK:
I am not sure what the other Marcus had in mind, exactly, by “a lot more”, but the project ended in sorrow in January 2018, canceled less than three years after it was launched :
No more than 30% of requests served by AI! Most people today probably have never even heard of the project. (Then again, most people probably think OpenAI invented chatbots, even though the first one was built in 1960s, if not before—long before OpenAI was founded.) RIP, Facebook M, 2015-2018.
It was all more or less a ruse.
Or a fantasy, with Zuck overestimating how well the AI of that era could work, believing that if he just got enough data he’d be fine.
You’d think he would have learned his lesson.
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Fast-forward to today, and basically Meta Muse is trying to do exactly what Facebook M tried to do, restaurant reservations, theatre tickets and so on.
Maybe it will work this time, maybe it won’t. I can’t really say for sure.
But forgive me for laughing out loud when I read this:
Some things never change.
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And, wait, it gets better:
Could Zuckerberg be more tone-deaf about privacy?
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You know what else I am reminded of? This classic essay from Zeynep Tufekci:
Dude just keeps making the same “mistakes”over and over.