AI Summary
5 min readMeta’s Muse is real, its privacy problem is not solved, and Google Books are a bet on Android lock-in
At Meta Connect this week, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the company’s new AI agent, Muse, alongside a slate of hardware that included audio-only Ray-Ban glasses and a remarkably thin VR headset. Meanwhile, Google announced the first five “Google Books” — laptops that run Android and promise seamless integration with your phone. The week’s dominant theme: big platforms are building the next interface for computing, and every one of them faces a fundamental trust problem.
Muse works. That’s the problem.
Muse, Meta’s new AI agent, launched a few weeks ago and has already hit the top of the App Store. The hosts agreed: it is shockingly useful as a consumer product. It can read your Gmail, find receipts, negotiate on Facebook Marketplace, and summarize your day. “They built the thing that Siri should have always been,” Eli said. David noted that it feels like “baby’s first OpenClaw” — the file structure is nearly identical — but Meta has wrapped it in polished design and hard-coded prompts that actually do what normal people want.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:24) **Meta Connect and the Muse AI Launch** - The hosts begin by discussing Meta's annual Connect event, which was dominated by the introduction of their new AI agent, Muse, and the privacy concerns surrounding it.
- 2 (08:44) **"Phones Don't Have a Light" - Zuckerberg's Privacy Defense** - The hosts critique Mark Zuckerberg's dismissive response to privacy concerns about the Meta Ray-Ban glasses, focusing on his "phones don't have a light" argument.
- 3 (14:57) **Muse's Early Success and the "Vibes" Metric** - The discussion shifts to analyzing whether Muse's early success is real, focusing on its rapid rise in app store rankings and its positioning as a finished consumer product.
- 4 (19:23) **The Consumer Agent Dream vs. The "Now What?" Problem** - The hosts explore the promise of a "robot butler" AI agent versus the practical reality of finding consistent, daily use cases for it.
- 5 (26:53) **Meta Connect Hardware: Audio Glasses and VR** - The hosts return from a break to cover the other hardware announced at Meta Connect, including new audio-only glasses and a high-end VR headset.
- 6 (45:05) **Google Books: The New Era of Laptops** - The hosts pivot to the announcement of the first Google Books, a new category of laptop deeply integrated with Android phones.
- 7 (57:58) **Hype Desk: Mahershala Ali's "Blade" Shade** - Ashley Esqueda joins the Hype Desk to discuss a viral moment where actor Mahershala Ali publicly criticized Marvel's Kevin Feige over the stalled "Blade" movie.
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Show Notes
Meta's Muse AI agent is cute (sometimes caked-up) and it performs well as a productivity tool. And, if you give it access to your social media and e-mail, it can know basically everything about you. This week on The Vergecast, Nilay Patel, Jake Kastrenakes and David Imel give their reactions to Mark Zuckerberg's demos at Wednesday's Meta Connect keynote. They also talk about the new glasses hardware, including the new VR glasses and audio-only, camera-free Ray-Bans.
Then, we take a look at the newly-announced, chimeric Chrome/Android hybrid Googlebooks, find out why Brendan Carr is a dummy this week, analyze the Paramount merger, discuss what YouTube's A/B video testing means for the increasingly tenuous concept of a shared reality, and end on a surprisingly heartwarming story about RODECaster 4K support.
Further reading: