Product1 publisher2 min readPublished
Meta's one-hour Connect keynote put Muse behind every piece of hardware
Almost every announcement at the hour-long keynote tied back to Meta's personal agent, including glasses from $449 and a Mac that Muse can operate while the user is away. The metaverse barely came up.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Muse, Meta's recently launched personal AI agent, sat at the center of almost every announcement in a Connect keynote that ran about an hour, with nearly every hardware reveal tied back to it.
- Mashable reported the metaverse was largely missing and barely mentioned compared with the 2025 keynote, five years after the rename and an estimated $80 billion of Reality Labs losses.
- Muse can operate a user's Mac starting today and, with permission, run any program in the background even when the user is not at the computer, with email support promised later.
- Walmart, Best Buy, Gap and Sephora are integrating with Muse through connectors so the agent can shop and buy items on a user's behalf.
- Meta Ray-Ban Gen 3 arrives in more than 51 styles starting at $449, with a $399 Lisa from Blackpink edition and a future Adventurer model starting at $249.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure Background execution on a Mac is granted by the person wearing the glasses, not by the person who administers the laptop, so a consumer permission dialog now decides what runs on a managed machine.
- decision Every retailer joining connectors is deciding whether an agent rather than a shopper browses its catalog and completes the payment, and that decision changes who sees its prices.
- constraint Because the money comes from a fee on completed transactions, Muse has to finish purchases to pay for itself; glasses sold and conversations held do not produce the revenue Zuckerberg described.
- precedent If glasses are the only form factor Meta believes fits the agent, future Meta hardware gets specified around Muse first, and the cheapest route to the agent becomes a $249 pair of Ray-Bans.
Zuckerberg talked to his glasses on stage and asked the assistant, which he had named Agrippa, to search his calendar for meetings about a "handheld device" the team was working on [14]. Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang's examples went further: finding a replacement for a broken vase, planning a vacation and moving the dates around bad weather, and negotiating down an insurance bill [7]. "Muse makes you money," Meta said on stage [8].
The glasses conversation ran live [14]. The fitness and meal segment was a pre-recorded video with the MMA creator Nina Marie Daniele, in which Muse built workout routines and suggested dishes from a restaurant menu [20]. Wang's shopping and insurance examples were described from the stage [7].
Muse is free for now, and Zuckerberg said that "over time we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions" [9]. Meta did not give a rate. At one percent, covering the estimated $80 billion Reality Labs has lost since the 2021 rename would take $8 trillion of purchases through Muse [19]. The fee arrives when the agent completes a checkout, and Meta is working with Stripe and Shopify on that part, with a Connector Platform for developers who want to build their own integrations [12].
"We're making personal superintelligence wearable," Zuckerberg said, and he called glasses the only form factor that lets people interact with their personal agent the way Meta intends [13]. He said he expects Muse to become a superintelligence used by billions of people one day [2]. The Adventurer model coming later at $249 is $200 below the Gen 3 entry price [18]. Meta also showed its first glasses with no camera [17], and the slimmer VR glasses were pitched for watching movies, playing games and streaming live sports [5].
For anyone deciding what to let an agent like this reach, sort the tasks by two questions: does the agent prepare the action or complete it, and can the result be undone. Calendar lookup prepares something reversible. The live demo stayed there [14]. Buying from Sephora completes something a person then has to return [11], and running a program on a Mac while nobody is at it completes something the user may not see for hours [10]. Meta's revenue comes from the box where the agent completes a purchase [9].
What to watch
- Whether Meta publishes an actual fee rate for Muse transactions, or the connected retailers disclose their terms.
- Whether Meta ships admin controls for Muse's background computer use on Macs that an IT department manages.
- Whether the $249 Adventurer model ships at that price, and how far it undercuts the $449 Gen 3 line in practice.