Meta is starting to gain traction on Wall Street after announcing a new AI app called Muse on Tuesday. The tech giant’s efforts in agent AI are also a hot topic of X conversation among industry insiders. Now, early numbers provide a better insight into how popular Muse actually is among its target market of U.S. consumers.
Muse has been downloaded more than 83,000 times on iOS in the US, according to new data provided by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. (Currently, this app is limited to the United States.)
While this has propelled Muse to No. 2 on the App Store’s top charts, its launch pales in comparison to other apps that have recently debuted from Meta, such as Threads and Meta AI. For example, Threads was downloaded more than 4.3 million times in the US on its launch day, and the Meta AI app was downloaded 108,000 times in the US on its debut.
Muse is even further behind ChatGPT, another notable consumer AI app launch. Within a week of its launch, ChatGPT had over 500,000 installs in the United States, its only market at the time. If this spread were evenly divided, it would mean that ChatGPT had an average of 83,300 downloads each day when it debuted. This is a number that took Muse twice as long to achieve.
This doesn’t necessarily mean Muse isn’t launching well, it might just be a little slower. The app is still climbing the iOS charts, rising from No. 4 in the U.S. App Store on Wednesday to No. 2 as of today.
However, the Android version doesn’t fare so well. Muse only ranks 338th in the productivity category on Google Play’s app marketplace. (Android download number not yet available.)
Muse is also available on the web and WhatsApp, neither of which are included in this estimate.
Still, while Muse’s numbers are early, the app is worth noting because it represents one of Meta’s biggest bets to date. In short, the company believes that agents that get things done for people is the future of consumer AI, and it’s staking its claim on this emerging market. (This is a move at least as significant as when the company rebranded from Facebook to pursue its Metaverse ambitions as Meta.)
Of course, Meta is not alone in its pursuit of consumer-facing agent AI. It seems like everyone from Google’s Gemini Spark to Anthropic’s Claude Cowork is joining the race. But for easy-to-use agents for the average person, the competition right now is between Meta’s Muse and Instinct, a new AI agent that works on text messages that was recently valued at $2.5 billion.
Despite security concerns and a broad and permissive privacy policy, Silicon Valley insiders have raved about Instinct’s features.
There are plenty of other agents with a narrower focus, such as managing work and home life, but given the $350 million it currently has at its disposal and the speed with which it’s releasing new features, Instinct seems like the one to beat. For example, just this week, Instinct announced that it is making email addresses available to all users and building something of a social network of its own. This means that a person’s Instinct Agent can now talk to their friend’s Agent and coordinate their plans.
If agents are the future, Instinct’s ability to build a new social graph based on people people actually talk to and spend time with in real life could end up being more valuable than Meta’s friend graph, which combines people users actually know with people they just follow.
In the past few days, Instinct has also launched integrations with Stripe and 1Password, as well as a location sharing feature that allows agents to perform actions that require knowing their current location.
The timing of Muse’s release could be another factor influencing its debut numbers. The attorneys, who are demanding that users provide Meta with more personal information, arrive just days after Meta agreed to a massive $18 billion multi-state settlement in a social media consumer harm lawsuit. The company’s reputation has taken many other legal hits over the years, as it has been involved in major data scandals and has been targeted and fined multiple times by the US Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations.
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