Mark Zuckerberg is testing Meta's new personal AI agent with a decidedly low-stakes assignment: helping him bake with his 3-year-old daughter.
Speaking on the "Sources" podcast released on Tuesday, the Meta CEO said he set up the agent, called Muse, to plan a baking project for them every weekend.
Its job is to pick something manageable for a toddler and an adult who knows little about baking, then use a service such as Instacart to make sure the ingredients are ready.
The early verdict? Muse may need to adjust its difficulty settings.
"Cake pops, really difficult, surprisingly difficult," Zuckerberg said. "Don't start with cake pops."
Zuckerberg said he reports back after each project so the agent can learn what worked and what didn't.
"You give it projects, or you give it goals," Zuckerberg said. "And then it just works, and it works 24-7, and it doesn't stop until it's helped achieve the goal."
You can see Zuckerberg's comments below:
The example reflects one of Meta's broader claims about Muse. Unlike a chatbot that simply responds to a prompt, it is designed to pursue longer-term tasks, work in the background, and retain information about a user's preferences.
He said he is also using Muse for other family-related tasks.
The agent watches for mountain-climbing permits for his older daughter and alerts him when one becomes available. It also created a guide to "Civilization" — a video game about building societies — for another of his daughters, then suggested turning it into a history lesson.
Away from parenting, Zuckerberg uses Muse to review footage from cameras in his MMA gym. Its feedback can be blunt: "It looks like you really gave up," he said the agent once told him.
"I was like, yeah, I did. I was really tired right there," Zuckerberg said.
Meta plans to offer Muse with what Zuckerberg described as a large free allowance — about 100 million tokens a week — alongside a paid subscription option.
The company says the agent could eventually help users run small businesses, manage ad campaigns, and handle other tasks that require access to outside services.
That ambition requires users to trust Muse with sensitive data and account access. Zuckerberg said Meta built a confidential virtual-machine system that the company itself cannot inspect, along with monitoring agents and approval prompts for actions such as payments and sending emails.
For now, Muse's assignment in Zuckerberg's household has exposed a potential limitation of AI assistants: they can organize the ingredients, but they may not know that cake pops are an ambitious place to start.
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Georgia is a Business News Fellow at Business Insider's London office.Before joining Business Insider, she worked at Japan's largest newspaper, The Yomiuri Shimbun, and interned at the Financial Times. She is an NCTJ-qualified journalist with a degree in Philosophy from the University of Birmingham.
Theron Mohamed is a London-based correspondent on the International team at Business Insider. His coverage spans finance, investing, wealth, markets, and the economy.Theron joined BI in 2019 as a reporter at Markets Insider and rose to the rank of correspondent before moving to the Trending team then the broader International team. He previously covered tech, media, and telecom stocks for Investors Chronicle magazine and had a brief stint on the Financial Times' Data team. He interned at the Wall Street Journal in New York where he primarily wrote for Heard on the Street.Theron has freelanced for The Independent, The Telegraph, WIRED, and several smaller publications. He holds an undergraduate degree in geography from the London School of Economics, and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.Theron often covers Warren Buffett, Michael Burry, and other elite investors. He also writes about the world's wealthiest people and shares financial advice from all manner of rich and successful people.Email Theron at [email protected] and follow him on X @theron_mohamed.
