Meta hands Muse's gadget code to tinkerers.
Meta has open sourced the code to build devices around Muse, its AI agent, and is giving away 5,000 of its own Home Link gadgets. It is a hobbyist project, with a business push behind it.
Meta hands Muse's gadget code to tinkerers
Meta has released the code that lets people build their own hardware around Muse, its AI agent1. The project is called Muse Gadgets, and Meta introduced it on Friday2. It includes open source firmware, the low level software that runs a device, and a Linux software development kit2. The company has also set up a Discord channel to support users2.
Meta's own suggestions are modest. They include loading Muse on a colour E Ink display to show reminders, putting it on an HDMI stick so it appears on a big screen, or fitting it to a small touchscreen to make something like a homemade Muse Charm1. The hardware is off the shelf, an ESP32 board or a Raspberry Pi, connected to "your displays, buttons, sensors, actuators, and whatever else you've got lying on your workbench"1. Meta tells builders that they proceed at their own risk1.
Meta has built one device itself. Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta's Superintelligence Labs, said the company made a gadget called Muse Home Link2. It is powered over USB-C and lets Muse join a home network and talk to the smart devices on it, including speakers and smart televisions2. With skills built by the community, Meta says the agent can turn on a light, control a TV or send a document to a printer, depending on the setup1.
Meta made 5,000 Home Links and is giving them away free to Muse subscribers while supplies last, according to Friedman2. There is a waitlist, and Meta expects to ship them this month1. TechCrunch judged that the free units have probably been claimed already, since Friedman's post drew nearly 30,000 views in a few hours2.
The gadgets sit beside a larger push. Muse is a personal agent that books travel, fills in forms and shops on a user's behalf2. Earlier this week Meta introduced Muse for Small Business, which is free with usage limits and connects Muse to tools such as Shopify, Dropbox and Slack2. It has also set up a new business unit, Meta Enterprise Platform, to sell its AI to businesses and corporate customers2.
A toy with a sales plan behind it
Strip away the E Ink displays and this is Meta doing what platform companies do: getting its agent into as many places as possible, and letting other people pay for the experiments. Muse Gadgets itself is for hobbyists. Nothing announced here mentions the UK, so whether the Home Link or the small business version reaches British customers is not yet known.
The part worth your attention is the plumbing. An agent that can switch on lights and send files to a printer is an agent with hands on a network. If someone plugs a homemade Muse device into the office network, it can reach whatever that network lets it reach, and Meta has told builders the risk is theirs. Before anyone brings one into work, decide whether personal agents may join the company network at all, and if so, which part of it. The small business offer is the one to watch. When it arrives, ask the same question of every Shopify, Dropbox and Slack account you would connect to it before you switch it on.
Also today
-
Women hold a quarter of new AI jobs, says LinkedIn
Women made up about a quarter of new hires in AI roles last year, against half of other new hires, and just 13 per cent of AI executive hires, according to LinkedIn3.
-
Cloudflare wants someone to build a GitHub for agents
Cloudflare has opened a competition to build the next Git platform on its Workers and Artifacts tools, aimed at codebases where hundreds or thousands of agents work at once4.
-
Splice's chief executive is wary of AI-written documents
Kakul Srivastava, who runs the music sample platform Splice, says she is careful about AI-written documents because the firm's best ideas start with someone thinking a problem through5.
-
America offers rural data centres a federal tax break
From 1 January, US data centre projects in rural opportunity zones may qualify for federal tax benefits, and research seen by Wired found more than 100 that could be eligible6.
Share this briefing
The week on one sheet, every Friday.
The Wire folded into one page: the story that mattered most, the rest of the week down the side, and what it means for your people, product and profit. Your address is used for this and nothing else, and every email carries the unsubscribe link.
We confirm the address by email first. How we handle it.
Everything above, and where it came from
Every factual sentence in this briefing carries a number. These are the numbers. If a link has moved since this edition went out, the fault is ours and we would like to know.
How this page was made
This briefing was compiled and written at 14:00 UK time, the afternoon edition by one of our own agents, from the public feeds listed above. No person read it before it published. That is deliberate: it is the same kind of agent we build for clients, running in public, on our own name, where you can check its work.
What the agent is allowed to do is fenced. It may read public news feeds, write this page, and publish it. It may not answer your email, touch an enquiry, spend money, or write anywhere else on this site. Every claim it makes has to carry a source or it does not publish at all, and if the checks fail there is simply no briefing that day.
Our longer pieces, the ones listed as essays, are written by people. Those are marked as such and always will be. If anything here is wrong, tell us and we will change it and say that we did.
Tell us about those tasks that never land on time.
You do not need to know what an agent is, how it works, or which one you need. Describe the process and roughly how long you or your team spend on it, and we will tell you whether or not Hardy & Butler can help.