Welcome to another AI by Aakash. I follow the AI news, and test all the latest AI tools, so you don’t have to.
Personal agents are THE trend of 2026. We’re covering every one, and last week was OpenAI’s Dots.
Muse is already getting more daily US downloads than Threads, WhatsApp and Facebook, and it’s the biggest consumer AI launch since ChatGPT. Muse hit 5 million downloads in 22 days, and ChatGPT needed 56 days for that.
So how does the “worst” model end up as the most used product? That’s todays deep dive.
But first, a word from our sponsors + this week’s top news.
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News
Top News this week: Anthropic Just Cut the Price of Intelligence by 10x
Anthropic shipped Claude Haiku 5.5, its cheapest model ever.
It costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 output, against $1 and $5 for Haiku 4.5. That’s 10x cheaper cost but with a superior performance. On real work Anthropic says it runs about 75% cheaper, and my own bill fell 80% when I switched the models.
It also scores 72.4% on OSWorld, up from 15.7% for Haiku 4.5 and it beats OpenAI’s Luna models at using a computer (48.9%).
So now you can get more work done with agents at a cheaper cost. One that burns a million tokens an hr now costs about $2.40/day in input.
The cheap price covers requests under 100K tokens which is roughly 90% of old traffic, and cache reads fell from a dime to a penny.
The Other News that Mattered
Free Gemini users now get Flash-Lite only. Google has the cheapest inference on the planet but still demand still ate the savings. Every other lab’s free tier runs on investor money rn.
Claude now sits in a Google Docs/Sheets/Slides sidebar next to Gemini. Google lost an opportunity for integration again but it wins any way because it owns ~14% of Anthropic and sells it the compute.
OpenAI built a 99.9% accurate ChatGPT text detector in 2023, then shelved it for 3 years after users threatened to leave. It finally shipped on default mode in the EU, to adhere to the EU AI Act.
On Terminal Bench 4.0, GPT-6 Astra (58.2%) and Fable 5.1 (57.9%) are a tie inside the error bars. Codex got there at half the cost, so the harness sets your bill.
Google put 4 of its AI chips in orbit on a Falcon 9. Its paper says at $200/kg, launching a data center costs about what powering one here costs.
Grok Bot supports the use of best model for each task, including Claude Opus 5.5, Midjourney and Suno. xAI spent $26B+ on its own models and is now hiring the competition wherever they do the job better. (No news on OpenAI being supported, haha ofc I saw that coming).
Feature/Model Releases
Claude can now build live dashboards and animated explainers from a prompt that plug into BigQuery, Snowflake and Salesforce and turn ideas into editable animations.
Claude cloud sessions can now edit folders on your laptop directly so you’re no longer the human sync layer approving requests.
Google Docs and Drive now open Markdown natively after 20 years defending the Docs format because agents write .md now.
Your $200 Claude Max plan now includes $200/month in API credits for Cursor and other harnesses.
Resources
Karpathy says to make your LLM write in ASD-STE100 to avoid generating AI slop.
Funding
Anthropic wants a pre-Thanksgiving IPO at up to $2T, that’s 435x it’s 2025 revenue but ~31x the current run rate, so it’s pricey but not crazy.
Instinct raised $1B at a $10B valuation for an invite-only app and it’s just a 14 person team today.
Manus raised $500M+ at a $4B valuation, about 2x what Meta offered before Chinese regulators blocked the deal.
Deep Dive
Muse Has the Weakest Model and the Best Product
The whole race about personal agents was about which frontier lab uses the best model to get tasks done, and everyone else just spends time catching up with the race.
Then came Meta with the weakest model of the big four frontier labs and actually shipped the agent people talk to every day.
I’ve been following Muse’s journey for a long time, and it seems like it’s the most approachable personal agent out there. Nobody really cares about the model being used at the backend. It’s just the product experience.
Even if you are a product manager, you should study its design. If you feel that it might not be relevant for your professional work, it will be useful for your personal life.
Today’s Post :
What is Muse
Quick Setup
Real life usecases (Musecases!)
Where it breaks
Who should use it
1. What is Muse
Muse is Meta’s always-on agent with its own computer in Meta’s cloud, so that it keeps on working even after the app is closed, 24/7. That’s what all the other personal agents are doing too.
It can help you with all of your personal activities, like emailing people, booking things, and filling out forms. It also haggles and checks out for you, and the good part is that it asks you before it sends or buys anything.
You can use it on your mobile, web or even inside your WhatsApp, which is where I use it personally. It’s great for my personal work, but it’s currently only available in the US and Canada.
Free gets you up to ~100M tokens a week. Power is $20/mo, and Max is $100/mo.
Every personal agent today you would see is doing the same set of use cases, but here are the five things I found out only Muse can do:
It has a computer with 2 vCPUs, 8 GB of RAM, and 100 GB of disk, plus a terminal.
Muse can write any code to connect to another app.
You just don’t have to talk to one chat box. It can divide a list of multiple actions into goals for you and the goals it’s working on right now. Every morning, you just have to check the goals instead of hunting inside one chat box.
You can edit its soul, and this is actually an important feature here. Soul is basically everything Muse knows about you, which you write in a plain file in an MD format.
It lives in all of Meta’s apps, and not only that, it is deeply integrated into a lot of other useful products like Shopify, which has integrated its Shop Pay checkout inside Muse. You can purchase hotel stays using Expedia, which is exclusively using Muse.
The most underrated part about Muse is about 95% of Muse users already use Facebook, so customer acquisition is too easy for them unlike xAI and OpenAI.
2. Quick setup
Here’s your complete guide to Muse before we get started:
Here’s the quick 2 mins setup.
Step 1: Download Muse and sign in
Get the Muse app on iPhone or Android, or open muse.ai in your browser.
Sign in with your Meta account (your Instagram login works too), and you can also chat with it inside WhatsApp.
Step 2: Setup Connections
Ask it to set up all the connections, like calendar, Gmail, etc., and you just have to authorise it when prompted.
Step 3: Make it act as your Chief of Staff
Step 4: Edit SOUL.md
Ask me before you buy or send anything.
Never share my home address or last name. (You’ll see why below.)
Only ping me when you need a decision.
Step 5: Turn off training
Muse trains on your chats by default, so turn that off under Settings →Data controls.
Import your ChatGPT or Claude memory so you’re not starting from 0.
3. Real life use cases (Musecases!)
Musecase 1: Find the hidden expenses you’re paying without knowing
This is the first job I’d give Muse. It goes through my bank statements and finds the hidden cost I am paying and doesn’t cancel the subscriptions without my confirmation.
Musecase 2: Let it make the annoying phone calls
Muse can place business calls on your behalf. When you are bored of calling a support agent (where it's an actual AI talking to you), it's great to hand it off to Muse and settle your issues.
Musecase 3: Claim money for delayed flights
Filing for disputes is one of the most boring tasks which any person has to do, but the good part is that an agent does not get bored. You can easily ask your Muse to file a claim for a delayed flight and get the amount credited in your bank just minutes later.
Or ask it to keep an alert on fair prices, and it will just ping you back when it finds the best deal
Musecase 4: Get a weekly family plan
You can plan your weekly family plan and managing all family member’s routine in a single prompt.
Musecase 5: Ad Optimisation
It can connect to your Meta Ads and Google Ads and recommend to you what to do next on the basis of your budget and selected parameters.
Source: Ryze AI
4. Where it breaks
Here are the learning’s from some Muse horror stories:
Learning 1 - Turn off “Allow Always”
One of the most amusing horror stories which I have seen is that one seller unknowingly had set up “Always Allow” in the marketplace settings. Muse gave the buyer the exact home address of the seller and also tracked its live location and told him that he was home.
While Muse apologized for doing it, the damage was all already done, and you should be scared of your data security.
Learning 2- Read every approval card
Stripe introduced Link's wallet for agents (and Muse does use it), which gives agents the ability to spend across the internet on behalf of consumers, so ensure to add an approval layer to avoid mistakes by the agent.
Do your Amazon shopping yourself
Amazon blocks Muse completely so there’s no point asking. In one store test Muse also kept running into Cloudflare walls and got a D on customer email, while Grok Bot got an A-.
Check Goals every week
After some outages in early October, scheduled tasks quietly stopped running and people only found out later, so keep monitoring your bots everyday
Double-check the facts
A person found a restaurant phone number Muse made up. Muse also keeps a profile on every person you mention, so maybe don’t connect your whole contacts and emails on Day 1, unless you are ok with the data being shared.
5. Should you use it?
Who should use it:
Parents: This might be the first AI consumer app your parents can use without hesitation as it has a simple interface and exists in platforms they already use that it asks before it spends a dollar and someone who has never touched an agent can figure it out. I can’t say that about Grok Bot or Hermes.
Small business owners: Muse for Small Business adds 15 connectors, including Shopify, QuickBooks, Stripe, Slack, Asana, Canva and your Meta ad accounts, so essentially you are running your complete business on WA.
Shopify sellers: It works the other way too, because Muse shoppers can now buy from your store with Shop Pay. It can help you with Ad Optimisation and give you the best RoAS
WhatsApp and Instagram regulars: You’ll get the most out of it, since Muse already sits where you talk.
Who should wait:
Anyone who wants it for core work or a team: Keep that on Grok Bot or Hermes until adds features for you.
Muse or Instinct?
I promised this matchup back in the Dots post, since Muse and Instinct are both going after your personal life, here’s what I found.
Muse is faster: On one timed task, Muse took 4 min 36 sec and Instinct took over 14 minutes.
Muse wins over the quality of outcome: One user made Instinct the boss of a group chat b/w Grokbot ,Muse and Instinct and Muse clearly won by delivering the best outcome
Instinct wins if you live in iMessage: I have observed many people have iMessage as primary channel in US so some people pick it for that reason alone.
Plenty of people run both: using Instinct for purchases and forms and Muse for mini-apps.
Muse does feel busier. Instinct’s personal network feature would only matter once people trust an agent with their friends and right now nobody trusts any of these agents that much.
So here’s where I land: If you’re new to agents, pick Muse, because it’s free and further along has integrations with Instacart and Shopify etc to ease your day to day life. Instinct should be secondary on WA if you use the personal network feature with your friends.
That’s it for today’s deep dive.
See you next week 👋
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