Zuckerberg Tells Earnings Call: 10 Million People Have Built Muse Agents, a Quarter Use Them Daily
An AI assistant less than two months old, and users aren't "chatting" with it — they're "building agents." That difference may matter more than the numbers.
Three key facts
On October 21, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the company's earnings call that 10 million people have set up Muse agents. According to The Verge, he also said: "About 25% of people who have set up Muse use it on any given day. For our earliest adopters, the longer that they use Muse, the better the retention seems to get."
Earlier this week, Sensor Tower reported that the Muse app had hit 10 million US downloads. The report says Muse is only the 12th app to reach that milestone within 40 days, with part of its success attributed to what Sensor Tower describes as a sizable "advertising push by Meta."
Note that the two "10 millions" aren't the same thing. Sensor Tower measures US downloads; Zuckerberg is talking about the global number of people who "set up an agent." The former is an install; the latter means staying and completing setup — which is harder, and worth more.
Wang Dou's Take
Credit where due: if 10 million people genuinely completed "build an agent," that number is far more meaningful than "downloads." A download is one tap; building an agent means — filling in preferences, connecting accounts, granting permissions, iterating again and again. Users drop off at every step. Getting 10 million people through that path means the product genuinely hit some real need.
But then pour the cold water: 25% daily active sounds decent, but translated it means — 75% built one and don't use it every day. Someone who spends time configuring their own AI assistant and then opens it twice a week isn't a "must-have" — that's "tried it." Zuckerberg's line about "the longer they use it, the better retention" sounds good, but read it another way: new users don't stick; only veterans who cleared some threshold persist. If a product needs people to "tough it out" to stay, its problem isn't growth — it's the first-run experience.
What's most worth pondering is that "advertising push" footnote. Sensor Tower says success is partly attributable to Meta's massive ad promotion. That means one thing: of these 10 million, how many are "users who wanted it" versus "users who saw an ad, tapped download, and casually built an agent"? Meta has the world's most powerful ad distribution machine; it can push any product to 10 million downloads in 40 days. The real question isn't whether you can push it up there, but how many are left after you do.
This industry is too used to telling stories with "user counts." But an agent isn't a content product — its success isn't in "how many installed it," it's in "how many actually handed their lives over to it." Whether 25% is a starting point or a ceiling will be clear in three months.
Source: The Verge · Sensor Tower