Meta tries it again, now with a pendant

BarcelonaTen years ago, Zuckerberg announced that the future of Facebook was bots for Messenger; within a year, the bet had already collapsed. Then it was the turn of the cryptocurrency Libra, which also did not succeed, and a little over five years ago the company rebranded itself as Meta and promised a metaverse full of legless avatars. On Wednesday, in Menlo Park, the individual returned to the stage with a novelty that, he said, is "the center of our vision": Muse, an artificial intelligence agent that is barely three weeks old.

He barely spoke about the metaverse. Until four days ago, it was what held together a company besieged by litigation and controversy; now that role is occupied by Muse. Zuckerberg even acknowledged that he had thought virtual reality would arrive before AI, and that is why they have "shifted the focus." He said nothing about the billions that that mistake has cost shareholders.

An agent in a hurry

Muse is a friendlier consumer version of the AI agents that were already running on the network: you connect your email, calendar, or bank account to it, and you let it make reservations, purchases, or manage things for you. Zuckerberg boasted that "millions" of people had tried it, a figure that clashes with the one published the day before by The Information: just over half a million users in the first week. Threads, Meta's answer to Twitter, added 100 million in five days, and still today it has no device of its own.

The rush to demonstrate success has a simple explanation: money. Meta expects to spend up to 145 billion dollars on infrastructure this year, almost double what it has lost so far with Reality Labs, the metaverse division: about 85 billion. Investors had been patient, because the advertising business continues to be a money-making machine, but the second-quarter results have cracked that confidence: revenue grew by 28%, to 60.8 billion dollars, but net profit fell by 14% and cash flow plunged to just 784 million. Meta needs a new narrative for the public.

Little more than the intention is known about the concrete business. Zuckerberg says that Muse will be free for wide use and that, over time, it will make money by charging a small commission for each transaction and will stop being just a company that sells ads to also become an intermediary. Amazon has already seen the danger and has blocked Muse's access to its store: large retailers do not like it when a third-party agent gets between them and the customer.

There is a technical detail that is not very flashy but reveals where Meta is heading with AI. The model that powers Muse, called Muse Spark, is the company's first cutting-edge model that does not publish its algorithm parameters. Until now, Meta presented itself as the great defender of open source, with the Llama family, in contrast to the closed doors of OpenAI or Google. It says it will continue to maintain the existing Llama models, but the discourse no longer sounds as convinced.

A tool to bypass the mobile

The pendant to carry all of this around is called Muse Charm: a device the size of an earbud case, with a two-inch touchscreen, integrated 5G, microphones, and a fingerprint sensor. Zuckerberg introduced it by saying that they have packed "the entire Muse experience, including real-time voice and avatar, into something that fits on your keychain and is always available to talk to." Meta will sell it starting at Christmas, with no known price yet, although Bloomberg suggests it will cost about as much as a smartwatch. It is not the first time someone has tried to sell us a device like this: the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 generated a lot of hype a couple of years ago and ended up being two commercial failures, probably for having rushed to market.

The Charm, however, is not just a fashion accessory: today, a large part of purchases made from a mobile app end up paying the Apple and Google commission. With its own device, without going through either of the two stores, Meta could skip this toll and collect it itself. And there are more suitors willing to retire the mobile phone: OpenAI has hired Jony Ive, the legendary head of design at Apple, to work on an AI device with the same intention.

Many glasses and no apology

Meta already has a wide range of glasses. Alongside the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3, with a camera and starting at $449, there are the Ray-Ban Meta Display, with a screen on the lens, which are now also arriving in France, Italy, and Germany for 899 euros. The formula works for them, without making any noise: EssilorLuxottica sold more than 7 million units in 2025, far above the 2 million combined from 2023 and 2024. According to Counterpoint Research, Meta already controls 94% of the global market for AI glasses without a screen.

The most talked-about novelty, however, has been some Ray-Bans without a camera, only for audio, which Meta presents as just another option, but it is hard not to see them as a reaction to months of controversy: Meta's camera glasses have ended up receiving the nickname of "pervert glasses" following numerous cases of people –especially women– being recorded and harassed without consent. There are instagramers who make systematic use of them to harass women on the street. Several cities have already responded: in London, restaurants, bars, and theaters are studying their prohibition, and some Australian governments have already banned them in public spaces.

With all these antecedents, at Wednesday's event there was neither an apology nor any acknowledgment of the problem. Zuckerberg limited himself to repeating the protections that already existed, such as the light that turns on when the glasses are recording, and insisted that removing the camera had nothing to do with the controversy. He even told journalist Joanna Stern that they had not designed the new product because people had had "some doubts" about the existing one. The new glasses, mind you, continue to record audio without any perceptible warning to those being recorded.

All of this coincides with the week in which the European Commission has presented the Kids Act, its proposed regulation to protect minors on the internet and limit adolescents' access to social networks. Meta has not said a word about it, despite being one of the digital giants potentially most affected. And while Muse was being presented as the great domestic revolution, neither the agent nor a good part of its most ambitious functions will be available, for now, outside the US.

Not everything has been shadows. The new virtual reality glasses manage to fit a good part of the features of the Apple Vision Pro into a device six times lighter and three times cheaper. Perhaps it is the only corner of the whole session where there was real engineering.