Muse Goes Open Source for Hardware and Zuck Wants It All

Mark Zuckerberg might’ve been screaming “we are so back” since the day it got to number 1 in App Store downloads, above ChatGPT. Zuck has spent billions of dollars and has the most desired resources, but he has experienced failure year after year. Yann LeCun quit, Llama became a joke, and there was the fake benchmark scandal. All messy.

Hiring Alexandr Wang seemed a big risk to take, and not many saw it as a smart move. This guy must have been going through hell to come back.

Then came September 29, just 21 days later. Sam Altman released dots, a Muse kind of thing, with a rough, vibe-coding-y UI. It felt rushed. He sees the pressure.

Now Meta’s move reveals its bigger ambition. Since the vibe coding market is narrow and very crowded already, Zuck aims at the market for everyone: bigger, yet not taken, personal assistants. Open-sourcing Muse peripherals for ESP32 and so on makes that ambition loud and clear.

Since Meta is getting the upper hand, the next move is not Meta’s, it’s OpenAI’s. OpenAI has been working with former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive on AI hardware for more than a year. So will Sam Altman follow up and open-source dots to all hardware? Let’s wait and see.

Since the release of Muse, rumor has it that another big dude feeling the urgency is the head of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming. The rumored schedule? September 27 for integration testing, September 30 for an internal trial version. Just days. Even with China’s seven-day National Day holiday coming, Zhang was rumored to be pushing the team to rush out a Muse kind of thing too.

The battlefield is getting hot again.