Qualcomm Launches Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 for AI Wearables

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.

Meta's $14.3 billion deal to buy up the employees of AI startup Scale AI, including Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who received about $5 billion as part of the deal, appears to be paying off. Meta's new AI products developed under Wang's leadership have added roughly $200 billion in market value, and Meta has added about $234 billion to its market cap in the past five days. At Meta Connect, Zuckerberg unveiled the Muse Charm, a standalone pocket device built exclusively for voice interaction with the company's new Muse agent, along with the Meta VR Glasses, a 100-gram spatial computing device priced at $1,299 with 5K micro-OLED displays, and the third-generation Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 glasses starting at $249. Muse reached 2.8 million downloads in its first 12 days across the US and Canada App Stores, and surpassed OpenAI's ChatGPT in early adoption, with 1.8 million downloads in Muse's first 12 days compared to 1.3 million for ChatGPT. Muse also set a new US daily download record of 264,000 on Sept. 19, its third straight day above 200,000.