Meta’s Muse Inspires Double

On Amazon, the world’s largest online store, you’re encouraged to shop until you drop. Unless the platform drops the hammer on you and your AI bot for allegedly violating its terms and conditions. The ecommerce giant abruptly blocked Meta’s new personal artificial intelligence agent from shopping on its marketplace on Sunday, and claimed Monday that Muse AI was collecting customer credentials and failing to identify itself (which Meta denies).

It’s probably just a temporary setback for Muse, which investors believe heralds a boom in the AI supply chain. Since its launch on September 8, the free personal agent has won both plaudits and downloads, offering some vindication for Meta, a hyperscaler that seemed all but irrelevant in the frontier model race.

Chatbots are built on large language models that let people query them for text-based responses, which range from bang-on to Woodstock-level hallucination. As a personal AI agent, Meta’s Muse fills a different niche.

AI agents perform continuous activities, often in the background, on behalf of a user: filling out forms, researching travel or shopping. The appeal is straightforward. Who doesn’t like having things done for them? The caveat is you’re handing access to your email, bank accounts, credit card and personal passwords to the newfangled technology.

Regardless, expectations are mountain-sized. During last year’s holiday shopping season alone, traffic from AI sources to retail sites rose nearly 700% year over year, according to Adobe. Precedence Research estimates the global AI agent market could grow from $8 billion last year to $236 billion by 2034. Meta’s betting big on this, having launched a nationwide TV spot for Muse over the weekend.

AI agents could also light a fire under a handful of AI infrastructure providers. LLMs require Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for heavy training. That’s why $5.4 trillion Nvidia, the king of the GPU, has become the world’s most valuable company. But personal agents, because they perform continuous actions, are often better suited to Central Processing Units (CPUs) that can handle repetitive, sequential logic. Investors made clear they expect a CPU rally:

Law & Order History: Amazon is serious about preventing shopping on its marketplace by automated tools from other companies, though the results of its efforts have been mixed. In August, a US appeals court overturned a temporary ruling that blocked AI firm Perplexity’s shopping agents; Amazon filed an amended complaint on Monday.