• 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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