OpenAI has a Mark Zuckerberg-shaped problem

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the face of consumer AI.

But it’s no longer the hot new thing.

Meta’s Muse agent overtook ChatGPT on the free app charts this week, part of a new craze over personal AI assistants in Silicon Valley.

Muse can browse, click, type, and chat across the internet, handling tasks you give it.

Meta is adding Muse to its smart glasses and building a new Tamagotchi-esque gadget called Muse Charm, it announced at its Connect conference on Wednesday.

The capabilities aren’t new; ChatGPT can do many of the same things.

At the same time, Muse’s explosive growth is still a major headache for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Muse proves that an AI tool can handle work without relying on OpenAI’s frontier models.

It shows that Meta will pour huge amounts of money into keeping a ChatGPT competitor free.

And it signals that OpenAI’s longtime push into “browser use” — one of the capabilities that Muse rests on — isn’t turning into a moat.

OpenAI hasn’t launched a direct answer to Muse, though it could easily do so at its DevDay conference on Tuesday.

As early adopters suss out new AI assistant options, OpenAI risks getting left behind.

There’s Instinct, from a tiny startup run by a 23-year-old.

There’s SpaceXAI’s Grok Bot and Google’s Gemini Spark, with all the firepower of those giant companies.

And then there’s Muse, bolstered by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive growth tactics.

The internet has begun rumbling about rumors of a competitor from OpenAI.

And Thibault Sottiaux, an OpenAI product leader, teased a release.

He replied to a post about agents, showing notifications from Muse, Instinct, and Grok Bot and saying “it’s enough,” with a hand-wave emoji. “Everyone is sort of circling around this,” Techsponential analyst Avi Greengart told Business Insider.

He said each assistant launch fits a general trend from the companies: they’re “all trying to arrive at a durable and monetizable way to use AI to, hopefully, improve people’s lives.” OpenAI’s chief rival has always been Anthropic, and all the while, OpenAI owned a major advantage: ChatGPT is way bigger than Claude.

OpenAI’s tool hit 1 billion weekly active users this year.

Zuckerberg’s empire extends to more than 3 billion daily active users across Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

It’s easy for Meta to promote a new tool to vast numbers of users, plus the company’s advertising business prints enough cash to fund billions in AI compute.

Meta’s smart glasses have also turned into a hit, giving it another touchpoint for the Muse assistant.

More than 2.5 million people downloaded Muse on mobile in the 13 days after its launch, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm.

Seema Shah, vice president of insights at the firm, told Business Insider she sees Muse’s simplicity as its biggest draw.

The assistant lives in a messenger-style window, handles work quickly, and has garnered rave reviews from techie first adopters.

And though it’s meant to handle work, it also answers questions, like ChatGPT.

Instinct, similarly, leans into ease of use as a selling point — you don’t need to download an app.

If the tools continue their boom in popularity, they could eat into OpenAI’s attempt to make it a one-stop shop for work.

Shah expects OpenAI to launch something similar to Muse and Instinct.

And on Monday, the Information reported that OpenAI is developing features to compete with the new AI assistant apps.

We could see the response very soon.

Altman wrote on X that he’s excited for something big to ship next week, when OpenAI holds its yearly DevDay conference.

Shah said that in this still-early stage of AI competition, she assumes no top company wants to be left out of any popular market.

She said that despite Muse’s speedy growth, the contest is far from over since retention indicates success better than the early wave of downloads. “Even within the chatbots, there are different levels of engagement, different levels of churn, different levels of retention,” Shah said. “And ChatGPT is the most successful in those metrics at the moment.” Have a tip?

Contact this reporter via email at scouncil@businessinsider.com, or over text, Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 415-757-8198.

Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.