Meta's Muse AI app gains traction but lags behind Threads and ChatGPT launches

Meta is beginning to win over Wall Street following Tuesday’s launch of its new AI app, Muse. The tech giant’s push into agentic AI is also a hot topic on X among industry players. Now, early numbers offer better insight into how popular Muse actually is among its target market of U.S. consumers.

According to new data provided by the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, Muse has been downloaded north of 83,000 times on iOS in the United States. (The app is currently limited to the U.S. for now.)

While this pushed Muse into the No. 2 position on the App Store’s Top Charts, its launch pales when compared with other recent app debuts from Meta, like Threads and Meta AI, the data indicates. For instance, Threads was downloaded more than 4.3 million times in the U.S. on its launch day, and the Meta AI app saw 108,000 U.S. downloads during its debut.

Muse is also further behind when compared with another notable consumer AI app’s launch: ChatGPT. In less than a week after its arrival, ChatGPT had topped half a million installs in the U.S., which was also its only market at the time. If that spread was divided evenly, that would mean ChatGPT was seeing an average of 83.3K downloads daily at its debut — a number that it took Muse twice the time to achieve.

None of this necessarily means that the Muse launch is going poorly — it may just be taking off at a slightly slower pace. The app is still climbing the charts on iOS, having moved up from the 4th position on the U.S. App Store on Wednesday to now No. 2 as of today.

Its Android counterpart, however, is faring less well. Muse has only achieved a rank of No. 338 in the Productivity category on Google Play’s app marketplace. (Its Android download numbers aren’t yet available.)

Muse is also available via the web and through WhatsApp, neither of which are being counted in these estimates.

Still, Muse’s numbers, while early, are worth watching as the app represents one of Meta’s bigger bets to date. In short, the company believes that agents that work to get things done on people’s behalf will be the future of consumer AI — and it’s staking its claim on this emerging market. (It’s at least as significant a move as when the company rebranded from Facebook to chase its metaverse ambitions as Meta!)

Meta, of course, is not alone in its pursuit of consumer-facing agentic AI. Every company has a horse in this race, it seems, from Google’s Gemini Spark to Anthropic’s Claude Cowork and beyond. But for simple-to-use agents aimed at the everyday person, the competition for now is between Meta’s Muse and Instinct, a new AI agent that works over text messages and was recently valued at $2.5 billion.

Despite security concerns and an overly broad and permissive privacy policy, Silicon Valley insiders have been raving about Instinct’s capabilities.

While there are plenty of other agents that focus more narrowly on things like managing work or family life, Instinct seems to be the one to beat, given the $350 million it now has at its disposal and the speed with which it’s shipping new features. This week, for example, Instinct has rolled out email addresses for all its users, and just announced it’s building its own social network of sorts — that is, one person’s Instinct agent can now talk to those belonging to their friends to coordinate plans.

If agents are the future, then Instinct’s ability to build a new social graph based on who people actually talk to and hang out with in real life could be ultimately more valuable than Meta’s friend graph, which is a mix of people users actually know and those they just follow.

Over the past several days, Instinct also launched integrations with Stripe and 1Password, and a location-sharing feature so the agent can take on actions that require knowing your current location.