For all of the talk of the AI industrial buildout, the productivity gains and creative development of new products have largely accrued in existing U.S. businesses.
Frequent Grey Swan contributor Ian King released research earlier this week showing only 2% of households are using, or at least paying for, AI.
The balance of those subscribers are using an LLM like ChatGPT or Gemini as a high-grade search engine. The select adventurous few are using more advanced AI tools to analyze personal needs and solve your real-world problems.
Mark Zuckerberg and Meta see individual users as an enormous untapped market.
Muse, launched in September, by Meta Platforms (META) is taking off at a faster pace than ChatGPT did in November 30, 2022 — the event that kicked off the ongoing AI boom on Wall Street:
Meta’s Facebook has been the conduit for baby boomers to social media for two decades, making it the ideal provider to see if in fact individual users will use AI for more than searching for restaurant recommendations and booking destination cruises.
It’s a gamble. Meta has spent nearly $180 billion bringing Muse to market. Zuck is hoping it will pay off better than his ill-fated acquisition of Oculus and tumultuous relationship with creator and founder Palmer Luckey.
Muse was launched on September 8, 2026, just over a month ago.
Three weeks from now it will drop its updated Watermelon model. The first iteration of Muse is currently rolling out internationally to select test markets.
In our search for the killer apps for AI at the top level of AI’s “Five-Layer Cake,” Meta has two advantages over SpaceXAI, OpenAI and others trying to be players in the personal AI market. They already have a huge number of daily active users habituated to a profitable advertising infrastructure.
Meta reports an average of 3.60 billion “family daily active people” (DAP). Meta is also the internet’s dominant digital advertiser.
Meta’s full-year total revenue is projected to be in the area of $245 billion and Muse could materially accelerate their advertising spend for small businesses at scale.
Meta has taken an early lead marketing the first real personal AI model – to a core constituency. Andrew’s Pro gives you an early stake in the “holy grail” of AI: a viable non-enterprise level AI app.
~ Addison
P.S. Yesterday, Grey Swan Live! returned with John Robb.
We continued the conversation that John has started in recent issues of the Grey Swan Bulletin.
Specifically, we reviewed John’s thesis that the age of “mass” – dominated by large nation-states and large corporations – is giving way to a new geopolitical order.
- Mass media has already fractured into millions of competing voices.
- Politics no longer produces anything resembling national consensus.
- AI is beginning to dismantle the mass market.
- And cheap drones and robotics are changing warfare so dramatically that relatively small countries can increasingly frustrate much larger military powers.
John argues these aren’t separate stories.
They’re manifestations of the same technological shift.
The replay is up on the site for members. Make sure you take advantage of this feature of membership – we love being able to share our conversations with some of the smartest minds today in Grey Swan Live!
