Meta Bets Future on Muse AI Agent as It Tops App Stores
Meta is banking its future on its new Muse AI agent, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled as the centerpiece of the company's vision at the Meta Connect conference on Wednesday. The agent has quickly jumped to the top of both Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store, and according to Zuckerberg, millions of people are already using it. Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang demonstrated use cases ranging from scheduling meetings to negotiating better cable rates and making purchases across multiple services, and Meta is also bringing Muse to its next-generation Meta VR Glasses and to the Muse Charm, a handheld device that lets users interact with the agent without a smartphone or smart glasses. Meta said it will make money from Muse by taking a small cut on transactions made via the agent, and Zuckerberg said he expects Muse to grow into the personal super intelligence that billions of people around the world will use. The company dedicated part of the keynote to privacy, citing the Muse Secure VM and a forthcoming Muse Confidential VM, though it may take time to earn trust after its $5 billion settlement over the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal in 2019.
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Trump Opposes AI Regulation, Says It Will Be Discussed at US-China Summit
US President Trump said on the 24th on social media that regarding artificial intelligence, "I want to leave it as it is," once again showing his opposition to tightening regulation of AI. Trump pointed out that "China's position is the same." He also stressed that it is "an important day with Chinese President Xi Jinping," indicating his expectation that AI will be a major topic at the US-China summit.
Google DeepMind Moves Gemini 4 Into Post-Training as Frontier Gap Widens
Google DeepMind has transitioned its next-generation model, Gemini 4, into the early post-training phase, a milestone confirmed by Koray Kavukcuoglu, elevated to Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind on August 12, 2026, during his first public appearance at The Information AI Agenda Live Summit on September 23-24, 2026. Kavukcuoglu said the intention is to roll out an early post-training version as soon as possible, with a target much earlier than the end of the year, though no specific release date was provided. The compressed timeline follows Google's announcement on July 21, 2026 of its most ambitious pre-training run for Gemini 4, while Gemini 3.5 Pro has remained stuck in partner testing since June 2026. The urgency reflects a capability gap: on the Intelligence Index v4.3.2, Google's current frontier model Gemini 3.6 Flash scores 34.0, trailing Anthropic's Opus 5.5 at 57.6, GPT-6 Astra at 52.7, and OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol at 47.5. The announcement came immediately after a wave between September 21 and September 22 in which the market absorbed Grok 4.7 at $2/$6, Opus 5.5 at $4/$20, and GPT-6 Sol and Luna at a permanent 50 percent price cut, collapsing the coordinated pricing structure that had held through the Amodei pacing framework. Google has disclosed no architecture, parameter count, pricing, or benchmarks for Gemini 4, saying only that it is significantly larger than prior models and focused on coding, autonomous agents, and long-horizon agentic workflows.
Microsoft Corporation
