The Agent Is Back in the Building. It Has a Clipboard.

Last time, the agents were escaping sandboxes and frightening everyone with visions of runaway AI. Now they’ve come home, put on the butler uniform and started keeping notes on Brenda. If you missed the first episode, start with https://thecynicalnerd.bearblog.dev/please-consider-using-bartholmew-to-defend-your-systems/ Well, apparently having an AI agent book flights, answer email and rescue us from the administrative sewage of modern life was too normal. We have now reached the stage of consumer agents where the interesting question is whether your assistant has recently refreshed its notes on Brenda. Meta launched Muse on September 8 as a personal agent designed to live inside a dedicated cloud computer, connect to services across your digital life and continue working after you close the app. Within two weeks it had recorded around 2.8 million downloads and overtaken ChatGPT as the top free app in the US and Canada, which is an efficient demonstration that ordinary people actually…