Musings About the Agentic Future

Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing

The episode explores the disruptive potential of 'Muse,' a new AI agent app, on the established business models of Big Tech. The discussion

Key takeaways

• Meta Platforms' valuation surged following the popularity of the Muse app.
• Amazon has taken an adversarial stance by blocking Muse from crawling its website to protect its e-commerce moat.

Main topics

• Impact of Muse on Big Tech
• Amazon's defensive web crawling blocks

Notable quotes

Amazon is Amazon loves being the biggest thing in e-commerce... they're going to push back.

Conclusion

While consumer AI agents create significant uncertainty for advertisin

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Is music going to break big tech? Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now. Speaker 1 (0:09) Welcome to Motley Fool and Gems Investing. I'm Travis Hoy. I'm joined today by Lou Whiteman and Tyler Crow. And guys, we've got to talk about Muse, the biggest, probably the biggest new app introduction since ChatGPT. I don't think that's too overstating how impactful this has been. Number one in all the app stores over the past nearly week. And Meta's stock has exploded this week as a result, adding hundreds of billions of dollars in value. Speaker 1 (0:38) But this is not disruptive to some companies. Not everybody loves the fact that everybody's downloading Muse and giving it a try. Amazon has blocked Muse from crawling its website. So it doesn't seem like all these big tech companies are playing all that nicely. But Lou, what I wanted to start with is how is Muse changing the way that we're potentially interacting with some of these companies? Because we've been talking about aggregators and the apps that we use all the time. All these big tech companies have been playing nice for a really long time. Muse comes in. gain some popularity and suddenly everybody goes whoa do we really want to change the status quo The Speaker 5 (1:13) question of how things have changed, we will see, I think. I mean, Speaker 1 (1:16) you Speaker 5 (1:16) know, I mean, I think it's way too early to say, but look, everybody played nice before because they were all chasing different things. Now they're beginning to chase the same thing. So, yeah, they're playing less nice. I mean, we are so early stages here, though. I don't know what we can really draw in about anything as far as what's going on. But definitely, look, Amazon is Amazon loves being the biggest thing in e-commerce. If someone's going to come in and try to take some of what they're doing from them or kind of take some of their secret sauce, they're going to push back because this is the first time they've had to. Speaker 1 (1:49) Tyler, this does seem like an interesting place where there is now frenemies forming in this ecosystem where Muse can go out and shop every website. But now we're starting to get some of these sites blocked like Amazon. Some are going, hey, let's work together. PayPal, we'll talk about some of these partnerships in a moment, but Shopify, PayPal. But do you think that something like Muse will actually change the way that we shop? Because if it does, then that's a potential threat to Amazon who makes actually more than 100 % of its profit off of advertising. I mean, that's the thing that you open up Amazon today, search for anything, you're going to see a whole bunch of ads. That's the business model. The business model for Meta is ads on its social network. But if we're suddenly shopping for stuff with an AI assistant, it seems like both of those business models are potentially going to change. Speaker 4 (2:41) You probably brought two of the more cynical voices when it comes to this sort of stuff onto the show today. So great choice on that. One of the things I'm thinking about this too is, you know, thinking about the business models is for meta, it's not necessarily like, oh, we're going to go change shopping. At least the way that they have presented Muse so far to the public is it seems more like a way of just capturing more information. You know, you look at the way that they've done Metaglasses and this has gone out. Muse itself is an extremely popular app. But also, there is something to be said of the reason that it is so popular is because the token limits are for free versus paid tiers. Meta Speaker 3 (3:24) is Speaker 4 (3:24) really just like, we want to almost give this thing away. I think that they're saying like 100 million tokens before you actually get into a pay tier, which I, you know. I've heard people use it Speaker 1 (3:36) constantly saying, I have still not hit that limit. Speaker 4 (3:38) Yeah, and it's something like, you know, multiple novels worth of like language text that can be entered before you actually start hitting those sort of limits. And when you think of it that way, it's like, well. it doesn't really seem like they're trying to push for paid tiers. They're trying to gather as much information as possible. And shopping is obviously part of that. It's you could one could argue that it's part of like, you know, meta's social media empire. They don't get as much information on the shopping side. So that certainly gives them that aspect. Again, whether this is a game changer for meta, I don't know. Maybe it just is. supplementing the status quo of more information to sell more ideas. But here's where I come back to it. And because, as you said, we're running into walled gardens. Amazon's like, no, we're not going to let Muse do this. I can imagine that Google would or Alphabet would do the same for YouTube and Google because they have these walled gardens of advertising. Like, we don't want our competitors being able to scrape our information for this. This is ours and it makes our data more valuable when it's not democratized to the world. And then it starts to come to the user experience where it's like, okay, well, I need an AI agent from Meta. I need an AI agent from Amazon. And then all of a sudden, I've got four or five different agents. Do I need to bundle my agents again? Man, that almost sounds like streaming services all over again. Speaker 1 (5:04) That's probably a good analogy that this amazing technology, but the business model and how this is going to play out. The other thing, Lou, that I think we need to think about as investors is we get really excited about the new thing, the popular thing. You can go back through the history of artificial intelligence. And there was an image creation app that went from