AI products that reduce my personal engagement with software and screens while still helping me experience the conveniences of instant communication — that’s a big win.
I’ve found the two-week freak-out about AI unenlightening for the most part. The vast majority of the people prophesying imminent doom know very little about the technical side. Barack Obama gave comments this weekend suggesting a ban on “agentic AI” — a term that is very poorly defined.
Meanwhile, much of the talk about “agentic AI” has switched to Grokbot (owned by SpaceX) and Muse (released by Meta). These are not just LLMs that produce text or help you write software code — though they are that and can do that. They are much friendlier consumer forms of agentic AI that are much easier to set up than open source alternatives like OpenClaw. Look at this ad from Meta about Muse.
muse is going NATIONWIDE to a television near you
this is our first @muse ad ever, going live this weekend! we hope you like it while watching the big game(s)!
big ups to @joshginsberg, denise, and the whole meta marketing team ❤️ pic.twitter.com/1zMUVgdKna
— Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) September 20, 2026
Notice that the ad shows the software completing digital busy work, and changing things in the real world, while the phone owner is enjoying tactile reality — making drinks and preparing to party with friends — not staring at her phone. I’ve been using Muse in a less glamorous version of this situation this weekend. While making lunch for the kids and doing dishes, I told my agent what groceries we needed for the week. When I picked up my phone later, my cart was ready to be checked out — and in a few hours I drove to the store and picked it up. Next time, I’m going to let it check out for me, too. On Friday night, Grokbot completed, in minutes, a reorganization of my digital files that I had been planning to spend a weekend doing.
This kind of agentic AI can serve as a bridge between the world we’re in now — where we are constantly fiddling with apps and software; where we set about a task and get interrupted by notifications, or start shopping for one item, and then get pulled away from others — and just free us to get back to our lives. This is a major threat to companies that depend on your eyeballs being focused on their sites — Amazon just banned Muse agents from their site.
AI products that reduce my personal engagement with software and screens while still helping me experience the conveniences of instant communication — that’s a big win. And “you no longer have to put up with as much digital drudgery” is a much better sales pitch for the technology than the one we’ve heard from the frontier labs, OpenAI and particularly Anthropic, which — whatever the coders think of it — has been translated to the public as, “We are going to destroy education for your children, then make you redundant in your job, and then probably kill you all.”