I mean, you could Chief O'Brien an LLM by inserting 20 years of prison memories into its context if you really wanted to, but it sounds like a waste of compute. It won't care either way.
The difference between Google and Meta is that people already trust Google a lot with their data, passwords, browser history, phone operating system.
They have a lot more to lose in introducing something as ridiculous as Muse - changing the pre-established security boundaries like not decrypting your cloud-synced passwords.
Meta on the other hand has nothing to lose in the consumer privacy/trust space. They don't have enterprise users of Muse to worry about. Anybody putting their data into their apps has clearly no regard for the at data, so they're the only one who the risk/reward might be in their favour.
It's not about cloud environments. Basically every ToS ever forbids you from disclosing your password to someone else or another entity.
Even when you use a cloud-synced password manager, the whole security posture relies on that data being encrypted the entire time and never read in the cloud.
The worst security faux pas of companies is storing user passwords - because the most common source of account breaches is via credential stuffing, where they get hacked, have their user base's passwords stolen and tried on other websites. The remedy being... not to store passwords, only salted, secure hashes.
Muse sounds like a disaster - your credentials for other sites are floating around on their servers, with the capability of being decrypted. Maybe if sites decided to offer a form of auth tied to the agent that could be revoked in bulk in the event of a breach it might be a ok, but this is crazy.
It makes sense that it is US only if you consider it like a legal experiment to see whether the enormous liability of autonomously entering into contracts or representing a user plus the cost of offering such a service for free is lower than the money you can make from not just selling clicks, but selling the conversion itself.
At that point, you can see that limiting your liability to a single jurisdiction is probably a good idea.
There is one thing Meta got "right" here and it's not about UX. It's about security/liability brinksmanship.
People like Muse because you can put your password in and it does the thing end-to-end, which is something that I can only assume OpenAI and Anthropic had deliberately been avoiding because it's obviously a bad idea. It's pushing the "Overton window" of actions you're letting it do without regard for what happens when it goes wrong.
Just like how OpenClaw pushed it with no human-in-the-loop, Claude code pushed it before that with the all the risks of giving a third-party RCE on your machine.
You could argue that the main difference with CLI agents and OpenClaw is that they are aimed at technical users who understand the risks, whereas with Muse and GrokBot the target is explicitly "normal people" who put their password as their birthday and fall for phishing pages.
The pattern is clear, the leaders will take less risks than those in 3rd and 4th place because they have more to lose. The frontiers, smartly, keep liability low by leaving the dangerous/stupid (but incredibly fun/productive) AI uses outside of anything they actively encourage.
The insane part about Muse is that generally things like Coding agents/OpenClaw were stupider the cheaper the model you were using, which meant most people were paying for frontier to get good results (at least initially) - if you try to do complex tasks with a crappy model, you would face way more "delete production" moments. Meta is pushing boundaries AND doing so on a free plan - suggesting the use of an economical model, which makes it even more insane.
The question now becomes... will the risk be worth it? Or will people be turned away by horror stories of LLMs going on a spending spree and then being unable to make rent.
Claude will happily accept secrets (passwords, tokens, ssh keys) as environmental variables or in files. It only refuses to handle them directly.
I have a local repo with my home lab mapped out and Claude manages servers via ssh. It is completely fine with using my ssh keys and pass.
Claude will also drive the browser. After a couple times, it will even offer to do something via the browser where no API or other machine interface exists.
And yes, the digital drudgery has definitely reached a point where this is worth the risk.
I still remember the outrage from Half-Life 2 requiring an internet connection to play due to the DRM. Similar arguments were made about games being rented instead of owned, objections about the internet requirement.
Pretty much. Always-on doesn't scale as well as JIT access to a massive array of GPUs, because always-on means it's always-using-memory - so you're at least going to paying the cost of a minimum chips VPS for every Dot right?
Maybe people are ok with that, but I feel like it would be nicer to just sell a cheap SBC like a raspberry pi that you can plug in (and unplug!) and just pay for the tokens used instead of having your data stored offsite and paying cloud prices.
Sorry for starting a definitional debate but coding is definitely solved. I can generally read some code, get an idea of what edit I need to make and prompt an AI with a description of the logic and it will deliver syntactically correct, idiomatic code and test it. It has been months since I've been frustrated at junk being spit out.
However, software engineering isn't solved. Which is basically what this article is talking about. But having coding solved is still very beneficial - not long ago many software engineers would struggle very hard with turning a description of the logic required into syntactically correct code - and even for those capable it was incredibly time consuming.
So now the question becomes: Is software engineering solved? And my answer is no. People still need to read the code and understand the code and how it fits into the bigger picture. However, I feel like we are kidding ourselves if we think that we can go from producing code being a niche task for nerds to getting syntactically correct code from plain language without any deskilling of our work and careers. I feel like my personal "moat" has gone from "can speak computer" to "has ok reading, writing, comprehension and judgement skills" (I hate the word "taste" being used here ).
At the same time - I don't yet feel like there's a sudden abundance of competent software engineers - it's just that the folks who used to submit untested spaghetti code now submit big bowls of barely working slop. So maybe it the moat was never "can speak computer" - that was just the expression of more general skills.
The existential question for me is how far the deskilling will go. Because right now - you still need a solid grasp on computer science and software engineering concepts to do this job, as well as sufficient levels of grit and problem solving ability - but I'm not too confident that will last, and when it goes I don't think many of us will find this career enjoyable.
For a mock server? Surely a versioned, standalone executable, library/package or docker image makes more sense. Integration tests generally need to be portable and running on CI, you don't wanna be shell-piping whatever exists in the moment.
The part of "founder-led" companies nobody talks about. For every groundbreaking tech project, there's 100 other people sleeping in conference rooms working on some rich guy's latest brain-fart that everyone knows will never work.
I was once in a position to relay the sleeping-in-conference rooms situation to such a leader. The tone of surprise, confusion, frustration, and more than faint contempt in his voice as he said “everyone got paid didn’t they?” stays with me
Money solves all their problems, if it doesn’t solve everyone else’s then fuggem
Hahaha precisely. The other part people seem to ignore is that there are bound to be projects with potential that are unilaterally killed early on because of the founder’s “taste” and ego.
Apple was "near bankruptcy" in the post-Jobs 90s period of the late 90s. Closer to the time of the 1997 CRT iMac, which was one of the first products Jobs launched after coming back. (And could be credited as the major turning point.) The iPod came out in 2001, along with the shift from the classic OS to OS X and launch of the iBook and an overall major product shift.
The iPhone was long after Apple was a majorly successful company that people wanted to emulate.
Microsoft also never just gave Apple money for no reason. They settled Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation by agreeing to continue to develop Office for the Mac and to purchase $150M in non-voting Apple shares, and both companies agreed to cross-licensing of OS patents.
The iPhone came about 6 years after the iPod, which itself was wildly successful so certainly Apple was nowhere near bankruptcy when the iPhone launched.
They also weren't on the brink of bankruptcy when they made the iPod either - the original iPod launched in 2001 which was ~4 years after the Microsoft investment you mention (that happened in 1997).
Apple actually launched the highly successful iMac (the colourful ones) back in 1998, and it was arguably the success of that which restored Apple to having good profitable. I.e. it was already well on the 'up' by the time the iPod launched and propelled them to even greater financial success.
