More Tales From Nvidia: I’m Not Trying to Call the Stocks But Consider That Muse Was Offered for Free! (Issue #253)

Avatar photo Doug Kass on September 23, 2026

“Muse personal AI agent is free to use with a generous weekly usage limit (such as up to 100 million tokens per week), though paid subscription tiers are available if you need higher usage capacity.”

– From AI 

Does Anyone Do Their Homework Anymore?

Not that I am or have been trying to call the stocks, because that is a fool’s errand these days, especially in these types of mania-driven markets. But it is fun to occasionally comment on the markets relative to the underlying fundamentals and business issues.

Monday and Tuesday were a combination of a gamma squeeze aided and abetted by Facebook’s Muse announcement.

For those that don’t know, Muse is Facebook’s personal assistant app, a theoretical AI agent, that made it to the top of the app stores download list, helping to inspire the gamma squeeze rip of the last two days.

Why did it make it to the top of the list? Because it is both new and FREE! (I don’t recall a single person in the business media saying this!)

Hundreds of billions of investment, and this is what they have to show for it? A free, largely non-differentiated personal assistant app that Amazon ($AMZN) has already cut off from shopping its site? And an app, that after the novelty factor wears off, will probably not be used all that much and likely never generate any economics, because it is free and of limited real utility and effectiveness.  Guess what, people actually like shopping themselves, that is why they do it! 

Heck, even Angry Birds costs money (and generates economics).

My guess, this thing goes the way of the Metaverse and Threads.

If any thing speaks volumes about AI, not sure if it is this, or it is OpenAI spending $22.5 million of compute to win a $1 million prize and needing to cheat along the way to even do that!

Coincidentally per prior on Muse, I just saw these. 

The reference to Amazon is their theoretical no human convenience stores where AI was supposed to figure out everything you put in your basket. Turns out they had humans in India watching people on cameras. End of day, none of it ended up working, it lost too much money, and they shut all the stores anyway. Same for McDonald’s ($MCD) automated AI ordering system, where “no onions” seemed problematic for the AI to get right. I guess I was too optimistic, hundreds of billions of investment, and Meta ($META) still needs the humans too, because the AI still does not work. 

Trillions of dollars of market cap added across the board due to this? And PS, Meta already paid for the junk they have in place to do this. They would have been better off buying offshore call centers for pennies on the dollar. Incidentally, that is one more thing AI was supposed to replace, but the opposite is happening, because it turns out Gen AI is multiples more expensive than cheap offshore labor.

The secret behind Meta’s Muse

Amazon’s Just Walk Out at Fresh stores ‘relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts’

Position: None