Mark Zuckerberg has survived a remarkable series of expensive technological bets, controversies and strategic mistakes, yet Meta continues to emerge with new opportunities for growth. The latest example is Muse, the company’s new artificial-intelligence assistant, whose rapid popularity demonstrates Meta’s greatest competitive advantage: an enormous global network that gives the company repeated chances to experiment.
Muse launched on September 8 and quickly became one of the most downloaded applications in the United States.
The AI agent is designed to perform practical tasks rather than simply answer questions. It can send emails, arrange travel, make purchases and handle other everyday activities on behalf of users.
By September 22, Muse had accumulated more than 2.5 million downloads and reached the top of Apple’s U.S. App Store, according to Sensor Tower data.
Investors reacted enthusiastically.
Meta shares jumped 11% on September 21, adding nearly $200 billion to the company’s market capitalization and lifting its overall valuation to roughly $1.9 trillion.
Muse currently offers a free version, but Meta plans paid services costing approximately $20 per month, with heavier users potentially paying around $100.
The excitement surrounding Muse is especially striking because Zuckerberg’s record contains numerous costly setbacks.
Meta spent enormous sums pursuing the metaverse, with cumulative losses at its Reality Labs division reaching roughly $80 billion. The company has also faced regulatory investigations, lawsuits concerning youth safety and addiction, privacy controversies surrounding its AI-powered Ray-Ban glasses and years of criticism over the effects of Facebook and Instagram.
AI itself has not been a consistently successful area for Meta. Previous releases, including its Llama models, faced criticism and failed to establish the company as the clear leader in consumer generative AI.
Yet Meta possesses something that few competitors can replicate: scale.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp collectively reach around 3.6 billion daily active users. That represents more than 40% of the global population and gives Meta an extraordinary distribution system for introducing new products.
This network effect can dramatically reduce the consequences of failure.
A smaller technology company may depend on one successful product for survival. Meta can spend billions on an unsuccessful initiative and still retain access to billions of consumers through its established platforms.
When one experiment eventually succeeds, the company can introduce it to an enormous potential audience.
Muse illustrates that advantage.
Seemingly, the assistant reached approximately 2.8 million downloads during its first 12 days, with analysts suggesting its early adoption compared favorably with ChatGPT’s initial growth. Some Wall Street analysts believe Muse could eventually become a significant new source of revenue for Meta.
But its early popularity does not guarantee long-term success.
Allowing an AI agent to send messages, make purchases or arrange travel requires consumers to trust the system with sensitive personal and financial information. Meta’s previous privacy controversies could become particularly relevant as AI assistants gain greater access to users’ lives.
The larger lesson from Muse is therefore not simply that Meta has produced another successful application.
It is that Meta’s network gives Zuckerberg an unusual capacity to absorb failures while continuing to search for the next major technology platform.
The metaverse may disappoint. Hardware experiments may encounter privacy concerns. AI models may fall behind competitors. Yet Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp continue providing Meta with billions of users, enormous advertising revenue and a powerful distribution network.
That combination effectively gives Zuckerberg multiple lives.
Muse may ultimately succeed or become another expensive experiment. Either way, Meta’s enormous network means the company will probably have another opportunity to try again.
The early commercial opportunity is substantial but still speculative. For example, one analyst estimated Muse could produce $10.8 billion in annualized revenue by 2027 if it reached 1 billion users and converted at least 3% to paid subscriptions; those figures are projections, not established results.
