The Future Just Showed Itself

## Editorial:

The Future Just Showed Itself

Personal Agents, For Free, On All Devices

Every week when I sit down to write this editorial I an shocked at how much has happened. This week shock does not cut it. Wow.

I thought that last week ended the discussion about the leading LLM labs asking for Government to set rules covering the development of AI models. It seems conclusive that Anthropic and OpenAI had lost the argument. Donald Trump said absolutely no way, and David Sacks had stated bluntly that if things were so bad the labs should slow down themselves. No Government oversight was needed. At that Elon Musk, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman all stated they would do just that. Argument over, right?

Well, no. This week has some outstanding contributions to the discourse. The best, and probably an interview for the ages, is [Jensen Huang’s Ezra Klein interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjurAWAr_nY). Klein had published his own “concern” about AI being possibly dangerous and Huang had been on the All In Summit saying the opposite, so this really was a “world heavyweight” contest.

You should listen. My take away was that when Huang said that the labs were making up fiction and that if they believed their own statements they should be “shut down” Klein really had no credible arguments. Game Over.

But then, within 24 hours both Altman and Amodei addressed the UN asking for global policy oversight. The Associated Press rendered its [headline](https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-un-security-council-64519ea66b38e2600026f4481ad7f211?link_source=ta_thread_link&taid=6ab4304b58ac1f0001e23842&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+New+Content+(Feed)&utm_medium=social&utm_source=threads) as:

“Tech leaders to UN: For the sake of humanity, please control the AI technology we created”

Hmm, exactly what Altman and Amodei seem to have wanted. Doubling down on, “we cannot be trusted”.

The image of the UN trying to tell engineers how to control AI comes into my head. Many of the employees of the labs were hired on contracts paying millions of dollars. But they need a suited diplomat to oversee their work? It simply is not credible and the Huang/Klein interview is probably the best place to spend time to decide your view.

Azeem Azhar and the CEO of the Atlantic also discussed Ai - the amount being spent. And Azeem did an excellent job debunking the idea that the money can never produce enough to repay it.

All of these interviews are gatherd in a new section called ‘News of the Week’. There for you to form your opinion.

There is another new section called ‘Focus of the Week’. It is also news, but I think it is much more than that, and this week’s headline comes from it. Meta had its opening keynote at the [Connect conference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI3M_4UQoWk) on Wednesday evening. I strongly recommend anybody working in AI, consumer software or hardware take a long listen.

Zuckerburg has done it again - re-inventing Facebook. Now explicitly putting the ‘Metaverse’ into second place behind AI, he introduced Muse and demonstrated it on three types of glasses (Audio only, Camera and Audio, full Mixed Reality). And also a new device - like an old watch on a chain.

Muse is a computer with an avatar and a personality. It is animated and unique to you. The computer lives in the cloud and if you share logins with it, it is capable of carrying out pretty much any service you wish. You can talk and listen to it, see it, message it. Its computer is a full virtual machine.

Muse connects any device you own and makes them a single group of devices that all access the same muse avatar, history, and capability. You no longer need a computer so long as you can use your voice, ears and eyes. If you buy the mixed reality glasses next year you can even conjure up a keyboard and screens to mimic a computer.

Muse and its ecosystem is light years ahead of OpenAI, Anthropic, Openclaw, GrokBot in terms of reach potential and capability. Its model may not be leading edge, but it is good enough.

I think we have seen the future.

Of course Apple and Google should have an equally big play here. They don’t, mainly because they don’t have the risk appetite of Zuckerburg. The world iPhones and Android phones clearly should have the best agentic service for consumers (indeed all individuals). Capability is not the issue. Risk taking and leadership is.

That can be recovered, and probably will be. But hats off to Zuckerburg. He has shown everybody else what to build and also the business model.

Muse is free. It has no ads, but it does have ecommerce. The model is free, forever, with Meta getting a small piece of every transaction. That may not last. It is a viable model for Apple and Google.

But wherever it goes we cannot unsee that in the here and now there will be more intelligence made more available for free, across many devices. With almost 3 billion users Meta is well placed to lead the charge to this new landscape of the internet and computing married to intelligence.

In May 2024 I wrote an editorial called “[Eyes, Ears, hands and Mouth](https://www.thatwastheweek.com/p/eyes-ears-hands-and-mouth?utm_source=publication-search)”. At that time I assumed Apple would best understand how human anatomy could be leveraged to deliver in-ear, visual, hand gestured software than you can speak to and hear. Over two years later, after several failed attempts to shift the center of gravity from the smart phone, Facebook/Meta may have stolen the lead, and the understanding of how humans and AI can work together. And nobody seemed to exude fear. The idea of your Muse esacping did not come up.

[](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1Hjy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ca91444-df49-4586-8fda-7a830158cbde_320x320.webp)

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