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  • Hacker News
  • Hand over every piece of personal information to Zuck .... um... no thanks, dawg, I'll pass.
    by mlmonkey
  • Brought to you by the company that gave an LLM access to directly reset user passwords, all you had to do was manipulate the LLM.
    by wolttam
  • source?link?
    by kkapelon
  • "With its own browser"

    I can't even begin to comprehend what kind of personal and PII data this thing will be scraping from its users. Caveat emptor!

    by declan_roberts
  • It’s sad, but non-issue for super-majority of the population.
    by tokioyoyo
  • "Your data is safe with us, trust me bro" /s
    by hazelnut
  • Yeah nah thanks I'm building my own. An agent that knows every bit of my life? Dream come true for data harvesting. It's bad enough what it can infer and sell from the public statements I make in social media and imperceptible metrics I could not fathom.
    by mixedCase
  • I agree I want a self hosted thing.

    I can't wait until we have drastically better models we can run locally that don't cost as much as a car.

    by kilroy123
  • This is where we're at, and all us devs are taking a crack at building our own. Then some of them take off like OpenClaw or Hermes but I don't find myself particularly drawn to those solutions. Its still very hackerish.

    Also the swiss army knife approach feels wrong. Too much choice. It can connect to everything, ok great, so I could chat with it on telegram, discord, email, whatsapp, etc. For a person who comes along and wants to configure great. But for someone who just wants to use it and get a web ui and maybe some sane defaults it's a bit overwhelming. If we can go from super highly configurable does anything to sane defaults with an opinionated interface and its open source we might get somewhere. Not only that but if we can get to like Proton/Notion sort of equivalent alternatives where everything is not controlled by one player that would be good. Proton did mail. Notion did docs. Maybe someone else will do chat.

    by asim
  • Same. Personal ORM essentially with a sqlite DB that sinks to a home server. Totally useful without an agent at all, but exposes basically all functionality via tools that have access limited for private information and the like.

    My favorite part is that I'm in full control. All that caution about giving an app phone permissions? Gone. I could track my physical location in a table recording all the DB changes if I wanted to.

    All it's missing is a local model.

    by aviperl
  • 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
  • Yup its so dumb.

    Part of the fun of holidays IS THE PROCESS OF DISCOVERY! Imagine wanting to kill that.

    Business travel? Sure but Im sure solutions already exist.

    Zuckerberg has ZERO vision - he has a catalogue of content he can leverage to do so much. What an abosolute bozo!

    by d3dd
  • Haha I actually clicked through to see the mascot, and wow, at it's best it could be a Miyazaki ghost, but at it's worst it looks like a haunted doll
    by Schlagbohrer
  • Also, this is meta we are talking about. Last place that should have my kids data
    by para_parolu
  • 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 think ChatGPT work (web) uses the client browser for browser use, butn not sure. So it should be possible.
    by edg5000
  • > 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.

    I think this is a foregone conclusions. Traditional internet marketing is dead - including funnels and dark patterns.

    by Gareth321
  • Your example is about helping a consumer navigate a market to get the best product and I think it’s bang on.

    Too many sectors of the economy sell the lie that they are operating as a free market when in reality they are confusopolies that inflate their margins by being tricking me into buying the worse product.

    I can’t wait to have an agent navigate and summarize my options for me, so I can choose without having to be dragged through deal terms salad.

    Choose from $9.99 for 1000 minutes then 12c/min and maximum 400 minute per day, $12.99 for 2000 minutes then 10c/min local only, both with optional NationalTalkXtra add on for $1.99, or $14.99 for unlimited minutes up to 1000 minutes per day, and 2c/min thereafter except on weekends with our $2.99 WeekendPlus addon…

    by gorgoiler
  • 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
  • Same folks that still use Yahoo or Ask
    by sharts
  • Younger people may not use Facebook, but they use Instagram.
    by duskdozer
  • Not many people in their 50s are trying new technology. No, what usually happens is a distrusted corporation just keeps sweetening the pot until the users come crawling back.

    I distrust Meta but if I'm being honest, if their tools were awesome and cheap enough I might start using Muse. A lot of people are in my camp: aware of privacy issues, too lazy to be strict about it.

    Then again, maybe I won't come crawling back. Privacy issues barely affected most people in democratic America. If it ever goes full authoritarian (and we're heading in the wrong direction), then they'll matter a lot.

    by asdfman123
  • Billions of people use Facebook regularly. It's a tiny minority of us who would not use a useful product because of privacy concerns. I think you are wrong. It's not they who are a "special kind of stupid." It is us who are a "special kind of paranoid." Justifiably so, I would contend.
    by Gareth321
  • 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
  • When I look at the technology and capability of frontier models for ideation, brainstorming, and research, or when I look at the open source community and open weight models, and running local LLM's... I'm convinced that this is a technology revolution the size of the internet.

    When I look at businesses trying to turn this research and technology into profit, I think that this is a bubble that will burst. You are not alone, I am very doubtful of the current concoction of AI features being offered. The true winners and legitimate applications will emerge over the next 30 years. Google, Nvidia, and Microsoft could all become IBM, Xerox, and Kodak. Or maybe they find a way to pivot. Because truly, there is an amazing amount of nonsense BS in the AI hype train.

    Acknowledging the outside chance that recursive self-improvement works and we just scale directly into a Kardashev 1 civilization within my children's lifetime, and K-2 in theirs'. Can't rule it out no matter how hard I try.

    by hermitShell
  • I thinks this agents are early prototypes of what will eventually become something like jarvis from iron man.

    An ai that is always at your reach and can interface with everything.

    I don’t use these work apps because they don’t do anything that improves my workflow or computer experience

    by maipen
  • Just my use case: outside of software job, I have two young kids and we have two rentals to manage. So when I'm standing in line at a pharmacy or watching kid at practice, I'd like to continue a session about some xyz thing I need to do.
    by jambalaya
  • * Lodging complaints with customer service

    * Filling out tedious PDF paperwork with the same personal information over and over again

    * Having it proactively scan my calendar to give me a heads up on potential traffic issues (like making plans and forgetting that a marathon was being held and running into detour after detour after detour).

    by kytmizuno
  • 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
  • > mismanages its access to sensitive personal data

    > interactions being used to train Facebook's AI models

    Yupp, the only "edge" Facebook could possibly have, is user data.

    by the_gipsy