• Meta's AI agent, Muse, is unprofitable due to "very high compute costs," CEO Mark Zuckerberg says.
• Meanwhile, Meta expects Reality Labs, its AI glasses division, to lose $15 billion next year.
• The social media giant has a plan to fix that.

Meta says some of its biggest cash incinerators could finally start turning profits.

The social media giant, which generated over 97% of its quarterly revenue from ads, has faced persistent questions from investors about the lack of profitability in its AI and hardware initiatives.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed those concerns head-on during its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

Zuckerberg said that Muse, the AI assistant it launched last month, is unprofitable since it's "very compute intensive to run." Meta expects to start turning that around next year by massively improving Muse's efficiency.

"If compute efficiency continues improving quickly for another few years, which we think is highly likely, then Muse will be highly profitable over multiple years," he said.

Meta plans to make money from Muse by taking a small transaction fee off of purchases it drives, Zuckerberg said at Meta's Connect conference last month.

Zuckerberg added that Muse, which launched only in the US and Canada, wasn't launched globally due in part to the amount of compute it requires. (Meta's North American users are generally its most lucrative.)

Zuckerberg also struck a positive note about its cash-hemorrhaging Reality Labs division, which makes products like Meta Ray-Bans and virtual reality glasses.

Meta expects Reality Labs to narrow its losses to about $15 billion in 2027, down from the $18 to $19 billion it expects to lose this year. The division should start trending toward profitability next year, as Meta's AI systems make it more useful, Zuckerberg said.

"I continue to believe that the path to delivering holographic experience, of bringing together the physical and digital worlds and everyday glasses, will come through VR first," Zuckerberg said.

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• Anthropic has its answer to AI agents like Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots.
• Claude Duet, built on Anthropic's flagship model, has entered the personal agent frenzy.
• Karan Ahuja, a recent departee from Meta, led Claude Duet's development.

Anthropic is joining the personal AI agent craze.

The company announced the new app Claude Duet on Wednesday, billed as a "proactive agent" that can run in the background, surface tasks to a user, and handle a variety of work. The tool is in research preview for now with a waitlist, meaning it won't immediately compete for the larger market with other new agents like Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots.

Still, the announcement ramps up the pressure on those companies — Anthropic says it built Duet around its flagship Opus 5.5 model, which was released in late September and has already become one of the industry's most popular. Recent model breakthroughs have made AI better at handling work on its own, spurring a rush to build these "always-on" personal agents.

"It can have the discernment and judgment around when to be proactive, when to act on your behalf," said Mike Krieger, a co-lead of Anthropic's Labs team, said in a Duet launch video.

The tool, Anthropic says, will send users a brief each morning about what's happening on their connected apps, and message them when something needs attention. Like other companies' offerings, it runs outside a user's computer, sends notifications, and asks for approval on certain tasks.

Anthropic announced Duet on the day of Meta's earnings report and used the opportunity to mention a new poach from Mark Zuckerberg's company. Karan Ahuja led product management for Meta Superintelligence Labs until July, according to his LinkedIn, before starting at Anthropic in August and leading Duet's development.

He wrote on X that he's been using Duet to build Duet, and said the team "built it for professionals and small business owners juggling a lot at work and at home."

Ahuja also wrote that Anthropic is letting people into Duet from the waitlist "as quickly as possible."

The news didn't go unnoticed at Meta. Alexandr Wang, who heads Meta Superintelligence Labs, posted a meme about Duet's similarity to Muse.

Anthropic is fast approaching a giant initial public offering, which could value the company at as much as $2 trillion. Like other AI players, the company navigates a high-wire competition to win over users, secure computing power, build state-of-the-art models, and deliver AI-native products.

The data firm Apptopia estimates that Muse had more than 14 million installations as of Wednesday. It found that Claude users who installed the Muse app were using Claude more than before, though still for fewer minutes per day than they spent on the Meta product.

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• It's time to play our favorite pastime of the 21st century: Are you smarter than an AI agent?
• Today, I asked Muse to identify everything on Mark Zuckerberg's desk.
• Muse clocked this BI reporter on some things — but this reporter also knows a few useless facts.

Ever wondered on a random Thursday afternoon what the chief executive of Meta might keep on his desk at the HQ?

I'm glad you asked.

Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo of his office desk to announce the release of Muse Spark Open, which lets you run a model with a fairly simple desktop setup. The company calls it "the most capable US open-weight model to date" and has teamed up with Apple to enable it to run on two M5 Ultra Mac Studios.

But never mind that; let's focus on the physical workspace.

Since this Muse is supposed to be so smart, I wanted to see how easily it could identify the objects on Zuckerberg's desk.

Two things immediately popped out to me: the black trinket on the right and the graffiti on the desk. Yeah, sure, there's whatever is on Zuckerberg's screen, which might provide a hint on what the CEO is working on as he steers a nearly $2 trillion company. But we don't want to know that, right?

Here's what the Muse agent caught — and what it needed help identifying.

Looks like Zuckerberg is cooking on his desktop

Obviously, as a tech and business publication, we have to snoop on Zuckerberg's screen to see what he's working on.

At a glance, he appears to be chatting with his Muse agent, Agrippa, named after the Roman general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. The CEO is telling his agent to build something onto his Mac, which is relevant to today's announcement.

What exactly is he working on? My own Muse helped point out that Agrippa is describing a "Tamagotchi-style" virtual pet after Zuckerberg asked to identify its "official form"— a "chunky cream-and-gold 90s egg, blinking red LED, speaker grille, Feed / Train / Play buttons," Agrippa said.

Agrippa is then asked to "build it on my Mac."

My Muse said that the CEO is essentially asking for a "software simulation of the Agrippa pet." On the right, a terminal displays the agentic AI narrating its work while implementing Zuckerberg's request.

Zuckerberg has the latest and greatest Apple hardware

I'm going to give Muse some points here since it correctly identified the two computers as Mac Studios. I mistakenly referred to them as Mac Minis while entering my request into Muse to review everything in the photo.

I also could've read Zuckerberg's post more carefully. He clearly said what was going on: "Muse Spark Open — weights releasing today — runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple."

This is directly relevant to what Meta's press release said: You can run Muse Spark Open on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios with 1 TB of unified memory.

The quiet flex here is that the 512 GB memory option for the M5 Ultra isn't publicly available yet. We're not worthy, Zuck.

Earbuds or the Muse Charm?

This looks like the Charm Zuckerberg debuted at Meta Connect in late September. It's supposed to be a keychain-sized wearable that gives people quick access to their Muse agent, so instead of talking to your phone, you can talk to a keychain.

Anyway, Muse thought it was a "wireless earbud charging case" before I nudged it to conclude that it's "very likely the Muse Charm."

Zuck is prepared to party

Yeah, I run a multirillion-dollar company, but I still know how to party! That's what I imagine Zuckerberg thinking to himself when he set up this shot of his desk.

Muse was fairly helpful here, identifying the bottle as Noble Champagne. It couldn't identify the exact vintage, which is fine. The bottle label is pretty simple and not informative.

A quick Google search shows that it's most likely a $230 bottle of Noble Grand Cru Brut. Another flex!

Classic taped-up nerd glasses meet next-gen eyewear

Obviously, Zuckerberg can't be caught without Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which are part of the company's big push for wearables.

These look to be the new "Audio AI" glasses that Meta announced at the Connect event, since there are no visible cameras on the rims. The glasses are meant to be like a hands-free listening device with speakers.

Meanwhile, the glasses in the back have tape on the bridge. Old school!

Hey, Jolly!

By now, we're familiar with this guy: Jolly, the mascot for Meta's Muse AI.

Muse went a bit literal with the identification and simply described what it saw: "The plush is a cream blob with dot eyes, a small smile, and one arm raised."

A few trinkets to spice up the desk

Muse was both helpful and unhelpful here.

It reminded me of the significance of the February 4, 2024 date — the 20th anniversary of Facebook's founding.

The chatbot can't seem to identify the two figurines.

At first, it guessed they were "custom or commissioned caricature figures playing on Zuck internet lore": "The yellow angry one as 'grumpy Zuck' (dark hair, scowl) and the blue blank-eyed robot as a nod to the eternal 'Zuckerberg is a robot' meme." I'll give props to Muse for that, because it made me laugh.

I gave it a hint and said they're two Marvel characters. The bot then said they were Wolverine and Beast. Um, no.

That's Tony Stark and a blue Iron Man, right?

Zuck never forgets the old Facebook

Here's a true test to see how many useless fun facts you might know about Facebook.

Before Meta was Meta and Facebook was settling into its Menlo Park office around 2011, the company hired Korean-American graffiti artist David Choe to spray-paint the new digs. There's a video on YouTube from 12 years ago, in which the artist wanders the grounds and spray-paints the walls.

According to Gawker, Choe was previously commissioned by Facebook, thanks to his relationship with Sean Parker, who helped shape the early days of Facebook Inc.

I thought the style looked familiar. Turns out the desk was, in fact, marked up by Choe, according to the artist's website.

Muse didn't immediately identify the artist, but it did say that one of its guesses was Choe.

I'm smarter than an AI! (Not really.)

We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. As more and more AI applications have become available, people have turned to them to seek advice, build businesses, express ideas, learn, and improve their health and quality of life. Nowhere is this more clear than in Asia. AI is already turbocharging small businesses […]

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