Zuckerberg wants to create a giant online network of AI agents
Kyiv • UNN
Meta is planning a large-scale Muse network, but is facing privacy concerns and high costs. The company's free cash flow has turned negative.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to create a large-scale network of Muse AI agents—so that everyone can communicate with these agents, and then so that the agents can communicate with one another. UNN reports this, citing Gizmodo.
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"We expect Muse to expand our ability to serve billions of people. This is both our mission and our strategy," Zuckerberg said. "It is also our strategy because we believe that billions of Muses in a network of this scale will be able to do more for people and businesses by working together, so we would like to create a large-scale Muse network as quickly as possible."
The goal of creating a network of AI agents that work together to handle the requests of more than a billion people around the world is why Meta is not "charging everyone upfront" to use Muse, so that more people will sign up. It is unclear what this collaboration will entail, but it raises some questions about data sharing, an area in which Meta does not have an impeccable track record, the publication notes. Against the backdrop of these reports, a judge in the U.S. state of New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading consumers about data privacy in connection with the notorious Cambridge Analytica data leak that occurred about ten years ago. Meta said it would appeal the verdict.
Muse has also faced several privacy-related allegations in just a month and a half since its debut, including one user who claimed that the agents analyzed private text messages without being asked to, and another user whose home address was provided to a stranger. Researchers claimed that Muse stores incredibly detailed and regularly updated files about every person in the user's life, while Amazon blocked the agents from making purchases on its platform, citing concerns about how they handle customers' credentials and account data. Meta also had to fix a serious zero-day vulnerability that effectively allowed hackers to steal a user's account, the publication writes.
During a conference call, Meta executives praised figures demonstrating the company's strength both in artificial intelligence and beyond. According to the executives, Threads surpassed X in monthly active users during the last quarter. Meanwhile, Muse agents allegedly performed so well that more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada created personal agents since its debut in early September.
"Growth continues to be strong, and we are nearly at the top of the App Store every day," Zuckerberg said. "The most common use case for Muse is shopping, with more than a quarter of the people who use Muse doing so, and the average purchase size exceeding $200."
But these rosy AI goals have one particularly major problem: they cost a lot of money, the publication notes. Muse is already "very resource-intensive to operate," Zuckerberg acknowledged during the conference call, and scaling that figure to more than a billion would likely require significant investment.
Meta expects to spend at least $135 billion this year, and probably more, with most of that money going toward AI infrastructure projects, the publication writes. After a drop of approximately $8 billion in free cash flow was reported in the penultimate earnings report in July, Meta's free cash flow officially turned negative in the report on Wednesday, October 21. Meta's free cash flow in the third quarter, which ended September 30, was negative $2.12 billion.
The executives hope to finance their artificial intelligence ambitions with the help of a new class of shares they introduced during the earnings call. Beginning next year, all existing Meta shareholders will receive a new class of nonvoting shares as part of a two-for-one stock split. The company, then called Facebook, ultimately withdrew a similar plan for nonvoting shares about a decade ago, the outlet notes.
According to Meta, this move will give it more ways to raise financing without diluting Zuckerberg’s power over the company. It also serves a second purpose—to keep Zuckerberg in California.
Meta said it had entered into a co-financing agreement with Zuckerberg, under which Zuckerberg committed to remain in California, where Meta is headquartered, for the next eight years. Along with a list of other billionaire tech executives, Zuckerberg threatened to leave California if Californians voted to approve a 5% wealth tax on billionaires (Proposition 40) in the November election. Under the new share structure, Zuckerberg will be able to sell any nonvoting shares to liquidate his assets in the event of a billionaire tax without losing control of the company.