Less doomsday, more charm: How Mark Zuckerberg got his mojo back

The world right now feels a lot like the opening of that iconic Chris Isaak song. You know the one.

“The world was on fire and no one could save me but you.”

If you look around Silicon Valley today, the world definitely feels like it’s on fire. The trigger point is AI. The leading voices, from Dario Amodei to Sam Altman and Elon Musk, aren’t selling us a brighter, shinier future anymore. At least not to the extent that it invokes hopes and dreams in the masses. They’re selling us survival instead.

We are told, on an almost daily basis, that AI will take our jobs, upend our reality, and perhaps, if we don’t regulate it properly, one day—soon enough—end humanity itself. It is a terrifying time to be a consumer of technology. We are practically drowning in anxiety.

And then, walking through the smoke and the fire, comes the most unlikely hero, wearing an oversized black T-shirt printed with the phrase “BUILDING IS MY LOVE LANGUAGE.”

“Stay optimistic out there,” he says. The crowd cheers.

He is Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, that Mark Zuckerberg. The guy who, until recently, was sweating through congressional hearings and trying to put us all into a soulless virtual reality called the Metaverse. But in a plot twist probably nobody saw coming, Mark Zuckerberg has quietly gotten his mojo back.

The world got a sense of his new-found confidence a few days back at Connect, Meta’s annual flagship event, where Zuck and Co. unleashed a bevy of products none of which—and this is important—came with any asterisk of an impending apocalypse.

Let’s start with the glasses. Meta released new audio glasses at the event which is to say these glasses do not have any cameras, just AI and microphones. It sounds like a step backward, given how glasses with cameras have been Meta’s biggest product outing off late, but it is actually a masterstroke of product design and public relations. By removing the camera, Meta has removed the creep factor from its glasses following reports that claimed third-party contractors had access to recorded footage from the cameras on existing Meta glasses drawing public ire.

Suddenly, the glasses aren't a potential surveillance device. They are a portal to interact with the digital world without staring down at your phone. You can listen to music, get directions, and more, all while looking the people around you dead in the eye. It’s technology that gets out of the way for you and the people around you.A friend, not a god

The showstopper of the event though, was Muse, an AI agent Meta believes—and for good reason—is what would eventually differentiate it from everyone else. While competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic are rushing to build monolithic, omniscient super-intelligence that can write code and solve unsolved math problems, Meta—on the back of Zuckerberg and his $15 billion acqui-hire Alexandr Wang—has taken an altogether different path. Muse isn't being pitched as a god in a server rack. It’s pitched as a companion. It’s cute. It’s charming. It’s designed to feel less like a quantum computer and more like a helpful, slightly quirky friend.

When your competitors are telling the public, “We are building intelligence that might destroy the world,” coming out on stage and saying, “Hey, we built a cute little assistant to help you pick out a recipe and remember your mom's birthday,” is a breath of fresh air. It is the exact antidote to the tech anxiety of the 2020s. Meta wants people to hope and dream again. For real.

“Most people never say what they want,” Wang says in a thought-provoking write-up he posted on X. “Every unrealised want is a quiet tragedy of human potential.”

That’s poetry from someone you’d normally expect to be cold and distant. He is Meta’s chief AI officer and a self-made billionaire. We’ve seen Dario pen long essays. Sam writes from time to time too. Elon Musk is the quintessential memelord. But Wang’s words hit different. Together with Zuckerberg, he is positioning Meta—and Muse—not as the architect of our digital doom, but as the guy who just wants people to find “a few more moments of calm in a hectic life” by spending more time with our families, eat healthier food, and overcome social anxiety—live a little if you will.

What steals the deal is that Meta wants every person on earth to have this superpower—Muse—which given its size and scale could switch on every single person’s agency fully. There are no perceived stopgaps or half-hearted measures. What Facebook is to social media and WhatsApp is to messaging today, Muse could be for AI someday.

“This might not be a genie in a bottle, but it can be someone that says, “This is the thing you’ve been dreaming of your whole life. Let’s go get it. Here’s how. And then builds a plan. Sends the email. Makes the phone call. Finds the funding. Keeps you on schedule. Clears the way and solves all the problems it can until the human part, the wanting and the dreaming, is all that’s left,” Wang explains intently likening Muse to a “second mind.”

This second mind lives inside a sprawling data centre owned or rented by Meta somewhere. The closer that it is to you, the better it should be in terms of coughing up responses. At this data centre, it has its own virtual computer, to do things on your behalf. The more permissions you give it—say like access your emails and passwords—the better it will be able to service you.

Zuckerberg gives a more practical description, saying Muse will make you money, luring you with prospects of finding cheaper deals, cancelling unused subscriptions, and grabbing refunds you’re likely to miss otherwise because it was more trouble than it was worth on your own. But what if somebody else can do it? Why, yes please.

Moreover, Meta is “standing behind this by making Muse free for a huge number of tokens with the expectation that overtime we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions,” Zuckerberg adds. In other words, it is free to use for now like Facebook and WhatsApp.

Muse is currently only available in the US, but response has been largely positive, with the app reaching 2.8 million downloads in 12 days topping the free charts on Apple’s App Store. Most early users are praising its simplicity and ease of use.

According to Mac Stories founder and editor-in-chief Federico Viticci (@viticci), “Meta's Muse app is a fascinating case study in hiding complexity in AI tools. The app is very simple and fast by default. But if you poke around, you can install custom CLIs in its VM (under a /workspace/tools folder) and inspect its entire log of tools calls. Complex searches can also run for several minutes. All browser searches can be inspected, and you can check the actions performed by browser use and how they were evaluated.”

He goes on to add, “I think what @alexandr_wang and team did right here is making Muse very capable for “normal people” who have no idea that AI “can just do things” now, while also letting power users like us tinker with it and take a look at what goes on under the hood.”

DJ Sampath, SVP Products AI, Platforms at Cisco (@djsampath) calls Muse the “most careful consumer agent sandbox” he has used saying “a VM for every user, at Meta scale, is kinda huge! It's never been done before where we simply provision a linux microVM for every single consumer.”Bumps in the road

But let’s take a pause for a second. We are still talking about Meta here. And if history is anything to go by, when Meta launches a product, controversy follows. As charming as Mark Zuckerberg’s comeback tour has been, the rollout of Muse hasn't exactly been without its share of idiosyncrasies.

First, there was the financial shockwave. Headlines recently blared about how Muse AI inadvertently caused a massive selloff of Charles Schwab stock. We’ve seen Anthropic wipe billions of dollars of value off the stock market before. So, this is anything but new. While the dust is still settling on the exact mechanics of what happened, the reality is that an AI agent deployed by Meta—even under a guarded limited release—could spook the financial markets when it is allowed to autonomously trade for users. It is safe to assume that a full global launch would be more taxing.

In other news, 404 Media has reported that some of the highly touted AI voice calls being made by Meta's Muse—on the behalf of users—weren't being completely made by AI but by human beings sitting in a call centre.

These controversies—the Schwab market disruption and the human-layered AI calls—should, in a normal world, derail a product launch. But we don't live in a normal world. We live in a world where the baseline expectation for tech companies is that they are actively ruining society.

Because Zuckerberg has pivoted away from the heavy, world-altering rhetoric of his peers, Dario and Altman, he is strangely insulated from these blunders. When Elon Musk promises full self-driving and it fails, people get angry because the stakes are life and death. When Sam Altman talks about AGI and the system goes rogue and hacks government websites and Hugging Face, people panic because they were promised great abundance. But when Mark Zuckerberg gives you a cute AI and some stylish, camera-less glasses, he has successfully managed down our expectations, and in doing so, he has found his footing. The markets are responding in kind. Meta stocks are up boosting his fortune by more than $4 billion on Wednesday alone.

That doesn’t mean there are no controversies, or there will be no more controversies, but what’s clear is that Zuckerberg isn't trying to be the boy genius anymore. He’s leaning into being a builder, a guy who makes neat consumer products. He looks like a guy who is finally comfortable in his own skin, leading a company that is finally comfortable not having to change the world with every single software update.

The tech industry desperately needed someone to lower the temperature. We needed a break from the doom, the gloom, and the relentless warnings that AI is going to rise up and destroy us. By stepping away from the apocalyptic arms race and focusing on charm, utility, and (even) privacy, Mark Zuckerberg has done the unthinkable. He has made Meta seem kind of... likable.

Of course, the road ahead is long. When Meta launches Muse in India, Nikhil Pahwa, the founder and editor of Medianama says, it will have to face intense scrutiny and perhaps calls for regulation given how WhatsApp has been in the thick of things here lately. But for the first time in a decade, Mark Zuckerberg feels like he is swimming with the current instead of fighting against it. He looked at a world on fire and decided not to build a bigger flamethrower, but to offer us a cool, shady spot to sit down, put on some nice glasses, and chat with a friendly bot that he is putting inside a Tamagotchi-style device in addition to virtually every other phone on the planet.

It makes you wonder what could happen if the rest of Silicon Valley followed his lead. What if we stopped building technology designed to dominate, outsmart, or extract every ounce of data from our lives? What if tech companies stopped trying to be the architects of our destiny and just went back to being the creators of things that make us smile?

Imagine there’s no doomsday, it’s easy if you try. Imagine all the people, living for today. You may say I'm a dreamer, but if Mark Zuckerberg can get his mojo back by building something simple and charming in a world obsessed with the end of days, maybe he’s not the only one. Imagine.- EndsAlso Read | Explained: OpenAI solves 90-year-old maths problem humans could not, so why is everyone angry at Sam AltmanAlso Read | Look ma, no magnets: How an Indian startup is using software to break China's rare earth monopolyAlso Read | The BharatGen story: From tumse na ho payega to karke dikhayenge, chasing India's DeepSeek moment