Meta built another AI model. Called it Muse Wonder. Locked it behind a paywall. The company that spent $46 billion on a metaverse nobody uses now wants you to subscribe to an app called Muse to access their latest experiment in generative mediocrity.
This marks a strategic pivot from "lose unimaginable amounts of money on free products" to "lose unimaginable amounts of money on products we charge for." Progress.
The Muse app exists. It costs money. Meta decided the best way to test whether users will pay for AI is to make them pay for AI. Groundbreaking market research. Someone got promoted for this insight.
Zuckerberg's company already offers Meta AI for free across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Billions of users have access to that one without opening their wallets. But Muse Wonder is different. It's special. It requires a subscription to a separate app that most people don't have installed and won't install because they already have seven other AI chatbots they don't use.
The business model is bulletproof. Charge users to beta test your unfinished product while simultaneously training the model with their data. They pay you. You harvest their inputs. They get a chatbot that hallucinates with slightly different phrasing than the free ones.
Retail traders will see this headline and think it's bullish. They'll mumble something about recurring revenue streams and monetization strategy. They'll ignore that Meta is testing whether anyone will pay for the privilege of talking to a robot that makes sh*t up with confidence. The answer is no, but the test will continue until morale improves.
Muse Wonder. Even the name sounds like a product designed by committee to fail in exactly 11 months.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
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