OpenAI dots and Meta Muse fight for the personal agent entry point

The contest over who becomes the default personal AI agent now has a clear pair of front-runners. Meta's personal agent, Muse, crossed 3 million downloads by late September and at one point pushed ChatGPT out of the No. 1 spot on the US App Store free chart. As reported by Leiphone, Muse runs inside a standalone cloud virtual computer with its own browser, letting it open web pages, fill out forms, send emails and book travel on a user's behalf. Longer jobs keep running in the background even after the user leaves the app. Mark Zuckerberg's example was using Muse to arrange a hike, a task he said could persist across days or even weeks.

The field filled in quickly after that. On September 28, Manus released a standalone app called Cue. A day later, on September 29, OpenAI launched dots, a personal agent it framed around the idea of always-on agents. The same Leiphone report noted that Qwen, Doubao and Tencent are all moving in the same direction.

On October 1, Wired cast the situation as OpenAI's Dots versus Meta's Muse, both vying to be the personal AI agent users pick. The author wrote that they had tried both and suspected readers will end up using one of them as well. That is where things stand for now: Muse and dots have both shipped, other companies are following the same path, and the reports offer no verdict on who is ahead.