How Meta’s AI Agent Muse Beat ChatGPT to #1 | The Week

All the footage is going to come from the White House. That's exactly how they want it. And it's crazy to me. I was watching Scott Bessent this morning with Joe Kernen on CNBC. And you know, Kernen likes Trump a good amount. It takes a lot to get him fired up, and he is fired up about this assault on the First Amendment. And Bessent said, you know, I don't really know the details. I was away when this happened. You know, they're also spineless. But this quote from Trump, it just sticks with you and it sits on you. Like, how did we get here? He says about what's going on, it's sick. I mean, there's something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stuff. Now, if they want to write them, that's fine, but I don't have to let them into the people's house. Into my, the people's house. It is not your house. You are a short-term tenant. You are a renter at the very least. The White House is public space. The taxpayers pay for it. And a key component of a healthy democracy is press. And no, the president does not have the right to start cherry-picking only friendly press. My sense is, and I'm curious because you're closer to this group than I am, that even Fox doesn't like this, and eventually everyone's going to like, okay, you throw a party and you think only people who like you and tell you how handsome you are are going to show up to your party. Well, you're not going to have a party. No one's going to show up. My sense is they're all going to rally together. The majority of the press is going to rally together. And at some point, you know, other than the Daily Wire or the Daily Caller or whatever, or, you know, at some point these press briefings are just going to look very sad and very weird. What do you think is going to happen here?

Well, they all already have banded together, so no one is covering today. So UNGA is not going to be without a press pool. And the White House Correspondents' Association statement I thought was great. And the thing that stuck out to me the most is when they wrote, "This is about more than the rights of journalists. It's about the right of the American people to receive a full and independent account of activities, policies, and decisions of whoever occupies the nation's highest office." And Republicans know better. I mean, lo and behold, that has been the message or the biggest truism of the entire Trump era, that they know better, but the majority of them just feel like their backs are up against the wall and they have to dig in.

The concern now, given what happened over the weekend with Trump essentially banning CNN from the White House because he doesn't like the way that they're reporting, i.e., just reporting and just covering what's actually happening, the concern will be that I guess David Ellison will move in more of a Fox Newsy direction or move into more of a pro-Trump direction in order to get CNN back into the White House, and that might be the editorial direction. And of course, that is what a lot of people are so worried about when it comes to this deal. Is there anything about this deal that should put those concerns to rest? I guess my question is, how unmitigated of a win is it in terms of David Ellison and his editorial control over these properties?

Ellison, based on the conversations I've had with folks who know him well and who have been advising on this deal, is I think genuinely mostly focused on turning around a business that has already been encumbered with a huge amount of debt that he is adding more debt to. And so any decision that reduces the cash-generative potential of CNN, which does I think throw off $500 to $600 million worth of EBIT annually still, would be monumentally stupid. Ellison is not going to want to do anything that undermines the business value of the assets that he bought. So I do think the business realities actually protect CNN as a fiercely principled and largely independent newsroom with, of course, a lot of editorial and opinion people who irritate the president and who frustrate the president, but which do incredible reporting day in and day out. Ellison has no business reason to meddle with that. Now, absolutely, I could see a world, and it is his right as the owner of a business, where if there are issues that he personally feels strongly about, Israel being the chief and most important one to him, where you could see a world where he intervenes or steps in. But in terms of actually diminishing the value of that asset, I don't realistically see him doing that. Not in the short term. Longer term, five, ten years from now, it's anyone's guess. But he's got to keep this ship together. Diminishing CNN from a business perspective doesn't make a lot of sense.

What I've said for a long time is, you want to build a trillion-dollar company, you have to do one thing. You have to build a time machine. And that is, you have to give people time back. And when you download Muse, you log in using your Instagram or Facebook or WhatsApp. So it immediately knows you. So it's already benefiting from the first-party data that another company would take years to build. It knows where you like to eat, who your friends are, where you live. And it's also taking AI from defense to offense in the sense that it doesn't wait for you to tell it what to do. It takes about basically three clicks from the download to the Ideas tab where it begins telling you how it can help. So for example, it will proactively find and cancel random subscriptions you forgot about. It will turn your inbox into a daily schedule. It will track travel fares. It can even make calls on your behalf.

As of this week, Amazon has blocked MetaMuse from accessing any and all products on Amazon.com. In other words, if you ask MetaMuse to say restock on paper towels, it won't be able to do it. You will have to do it yourself. Now, clearly, this isn't a huge problem right now. MetaMuse could just find another retailer to buy your paper towels. But if this becomes a theme across other companies, then it could be a real problem. I mean, for example, what is stopping Google from cutting off Meta's access to Google Search? What is stopping ByteDance from cutting off their access to TikTok? What is stopping any tech company from targeting any AI agent and inhibiting their ability to interact with the internet? After all, it's not really the intelligence of these agents that make them useful. It's their ability to go out into the web and do things. Without that ability, who is to say that anyone will use agents at all? In other words, this could be the beginning of a very different chapter in the AI agent story. This could be the chapter of less interaction, less integration, and more technological seclusion. It could be that agents become increasingly unhelpful because of the restrictions that were put up by their competition.