Meta stock gains over ten percent as eight percent trust AI with accounts
Meta’s personal artificial intelligence agent Muse has accumulated more than 3.4 million downloads since launching earlier this month and held the No. 1 spot on Apple’s U.S. App Store for the past week, according to a Wall Street Journal technology newsletter published Sunday by WSJ technology reporter Meghan Bobrowsky.
At Meta’s annual developer conference on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said people will soon be able to talk to their agents live and access them through Meta smartglasses and a forthcoming handheld device called Muse Charm. He painted a vision of a future in which the AI agent becomes increasingly intertwined in users’ lives, the newsletter reported.
The commercial momentum carried through to Meta’s share price. The newsletter said Meta’s stock rose more than 10% over the past week on the prospect of the agent’s expansion, though the agent has yet to achieve the level of consumer integration Zuckerberg described.
A central obstacle is consumer trust. According to a recent Oppenheimer & Co. survey cited by the newsletter, only 8% of people feel comfortable enough to grant AI agents access to their email, bank, and other online accounts. The newsletter identified the trust hurdle as one Meta would need to overcome for Muse to succeed.
Retailer decisions will shape how broadly Muse can shop for users. The newsletter reported that Amazon has decided to block Muse from completing purchases on its platform, while Walmart, Sephora, and Best Buy have cut deals with Meta to allow the agent to act on users’ behalf. The split leaves Meta with a partial commerce footprint at launch and signals the negotiations ahead.
The newsletter flagged a competitive question about when rivals will release their own agents and, in the newsletter’s phrase, “try to steal Meta’s thunder.” The newsletter’s author, Meghan Bobrowsky, said she would be closely watching what OpenAI launches at its own developer day on Tuesday.
The newsletter also touched on a wider set of technology concerns. It cited researchers who found that AI use among more than 2,300 middle-school students is increasing rapidly, that any AI use was associated with higher social anxiety and depressive symptoms, and that the more often the students use AI, the more anxious and lonely they become. It noted the continued investor debate over whether the AI boom will end the way the original dot-com bubble and the mid-2000s housing bubble did, nearly four years after the public launch of ChatGPT.
It noted that inside Berkeley’s tallest office building, a small community of AI researchers has been mobilizing to save the world from AI apocalypse for more than a decade, and that the resignation this month of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon woke up the American public to the notion that runaway AI development could end humanity. The newsletter also flagged Andreessen Horowitz’s $35 million investment in an unaccredited San Francisco-based two-year alternative to college for students ages 16 to 22; Amazon’s expanded warehouse robotics rollout; a pattern of startups shrinking head count thanks to AI; power-supply and permitting challenges for Oracle’s “Project Jupiter”; a push by a group of Western presidents and prime ministers for global controls on AI modeled on early nuclear arms treaties; and a pattern of AI-generated food ads leaving would-be customers feeling queasy rather than pleased.
The newsletter is a weekly digest of technology columns, reviews, and headlines, edited by Anne Steele and Wilson Rothman.