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- Hacker News
- This feels poorly marketed. The examples like health, travel, and kid's education all have a ton of anxiety around them. Highlighting a confirm button existing is recognizing the problem, but isn't a fix.
You can see this not working in existing products. Alexa could book a flight for you in 2018. I've never heard of anyone using that feature. Travel planning can be extremely complex, so it's challenging to make people trust a tool is going to do the right thing.
Also, I know this is picky, but your mascot should not feel like it'd feature in a list of worst Olympic mascots.
by nitwit005 - The inline browser the agent uses that you can take control of or watch is awesome! This is something I built a lot of tools to do in the past year (including a similar inline UX/image + click pass through) but having it Just Work in a remote, fully managed client for free is extremely convenient and useful.
But… this feels like a UX that won’t last once a significant portion of consumers and purchases adopt it.
Either the network traffic is getting proxied through my client (effectively making each user a residential scraper for meta’s crawler) or it’s between meta’s servers and the sites, which puts site operators in a difficult position: if real customers are making purchases through this interface and throttling/blocking meta’s IPs makes you invisible to them and meta’s userbase, you don’t want to block that traffic.
But now every consumer in the world can just ask a question or say “check all these prices and sites for a thing I want” and go do something else, right out of the box for free, and have thousands of page loads and site interactions fire off for them.
Bypassing the branding/marketing funnels or intended UX (cf. vc twitter abusing resy thru instinct) of sites, through some kind of proxy client amplifying the traffic a human would create, with the ability to let anybody scrape or interact directly with a site’s backend… definitely a consumer win, but seems unsustainable.
by weitendorf - I cant help feeling you'd have to be a special kind of stupid at this point to start feeding even more of your life into Meta. This is clearly aimed at the over 50's - their primary market on facebook.by esskay
- Perhaps a better overview is from Reuters …
https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-launches-ai-agent-that...
From the article:
- … rolled out … despite internal concerns that the technology mismanages its access to sensitive personal data
- The product will be available only in the U.S.initially
- A basic version of the agent will be available for free, while Meta will offer subscriptions priced at $20 a month and $100 a month for heavier usage
- People can opt out of their interactions being used to train Meta's AI models.
- Others flagged serious security flaws, like an agent routing around guardrails …
by aryehof - I’ve desperately tried to use the Claude work, ChatGPT work, even OpenClaw, and I’ve yet to find a meaningful use of such an assistant. Maybe my life is too boring, but what I see here is a bunch of stuff that makes life more complicated. IF the things I use are well supported here, and IF I have manual repetitive tasks to delegate with them, it feels a bit like taking a nap while using FSD - I don’t trust an LLM to make life decisions for me.
Summarizing FB? Christ I hope not. Paying my bills? Auto pay was like 25 years ago. I’m still staring at the whole ecosystem and shrugging a bit. That it’s offered by Facebook - the “we will never has ads ads are for losers” company promising security and privacy today with a T&C that changes by the metrics wind - is much less compelling than the other offerings that at most I believe they will use my data for training.
But I’m solicitous of use cases - has anyone actually used one of these harnesses to their benefit on some on going basis ?
(Btw I did use Claude work once - I had it shop for my daughters textbooks on a complex UX website that would have required me to tediously do a lot of repetitive tasks, and it sort of did it, over a long period of time - and felt like a perl script could have done it better faster)
by fnordpiglet - Facebook is the first to market with a polished openclaw? Good for them.
I'm sure many others will criticize other aspects of Meta, and rightly so. But imagine using a Claw agent with zero tech support available
by sroerick - Meta AI's David Singleton has a thread about their security prompt injection defenses here: https://twitter.com/dps/status/2097404102468899131
> One threat we’re particularly focused on is prompt injection, and we handle it in layers. The model is trained to recognize and resist it. The harness marks anything coming from an untrusted source. Deterministic code checks the result. And an ensemble of classifiers runs where the agent can't reach them.
That "deterministic code" bit makes me wonder if they've implemented ideas from the DeepMind CaMeL paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18813 - my notes on that paper here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/11/camel/
by simonw - I think Meta's strategy is to capture the 'normie-tier' of AI users. I know most of us here on HN track model releases quite frequently and discuss every parameter weight out of them, but most of the world is just... oblivious?
I was discussing latest in tech with an accounting friend out of curiosity, and I kept talking about tiers of GPT-5.6 (Sol vs Terra vs Luna) and asked which one she used on the desktop 'Work' app, and she responded with, "just ChatGPT, what is Sol?."
I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them. So, us serial HN users and commenters are the extreme minority, and I'm sure millions of people will gobble up this Muse agent from Meta as if it's some sort of an innovative cutting-edge way to use the internet by Meta alone.
Curse of knowledge and all. [0]
by abixb