I was in the room when Zuckerberg shared his AI victory lap with a thicc Muse mascot

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Pranav Dixit

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Mark Zuckerberg swaggers onstage to thunderous applause and a sea of raised phones. He is wearing a T-shirt that reads "BUILDING IS MY LOVE LANGUAGE."

Meta has indeed been building, and in the auditorium at the company's Menlo Park headquarters, Zuckerberg is taking a victory lap.

The company's personal AI agent, Muse, has proven a hit since its September 8 launch.

And at Meta Connect, the company's annual event where Zuckerberg unveils its latest gadgets and technology, Muse is the star of the show.

I couldn't walk 10 steps across Meta's sprawling campus without running into lifesized versions of Jolly, Muse's thicc (officially), pudgy mascot that somewhat resembles a sloth. A group of people sat in the row behind me couldn't stop talking about how cute Jolly is.

Meanwhile, Zuck prowls the stage like he owns it (which, to be fair, he does). The sweaty nerd who wilted in his hoodie under questions from Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher in 2010 is long gone.

And for the next hour, the CEO and his wingmen, CTO Andrew Bosworth and chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, announce a lot of new products and features, including a new camera-free pair of its smart glasses, and Muse availability for Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

Nearly everything turns out to be yet another way to talk to Muse, which can perform tasks for you like booking a flight or ordering shopping. That includes a surprise reveal — a little Muse Tamagotchi-style device you can carry on a keychain, shipping just in time for the holidays.

"I think this could be a generational opportunity to start building for a new platform as it takes off," says Wang of Muse. He's appearing at his first Meta keynote, sporting a mullet, a Camo T-shirt, and Crocs. Walmart, he declares to a round of applause, will connect to Muse. So will Best Buy, and Dick's, and a dozen other retailers.

Muse, says Wang in his trademark irreverent style, is "scientifically speaking, a banger." Then he announces that it can now take over your Mac. A solitary person in the audience yells "woo!" and Wang flashes a relieved thumbs-up.

Zuckerberg then demos his own Muse agent, a toga-wearing, more on brand avatar named Agrippa, named after the Roman general. He asks Agrippa to check his calendar to see whether Meta's CNC machines and 3D printers are available for him. "For you, I'm sure they'll be open," Agrippa tells him from the stage's large screen.

'Stay optimistic out there'

The biggest cheer in the room comes when Zuckerberg attempts a Steve Jobs-style "one more thing" moment and shows off a new pair of $1,300 VR glasses that look almost indistinguishable from regular sunglasses.

When Zuck announces that they weigh only a hundred grams, there are gasps around the room. A few people sitting near me jump up for a standing ovation, then sheepishly sit down after realizing nobody's joining them.

For years, Connect was infused with the strained optimism of Zuckerberg asking us to believe in a series of big bets that didn't always match the hype: the metaverse, its flagship AI model Llama, and legless avatars.

After Llama failed to gain traction, the company spent billions of dollars going back to the drawing board and hired Wang from Scale AI.

This year, it felt like Meta wasn't asking. Onstage, Zuck, Boz, and Wang have the energy of men who know that their bet on personal AI assistants — first made in 2025 — is starting to pay off.

As Zuckerberg wraps up the keynote, he waves goodbye and tells the crowd to "stay optimistic out there."

Agent cocktails and smoked grills

Outside the auditorium, the giant double-decker buses that usually ferry Meta employees from their homes to their offices are waiting, ready to take us to Hacker Square, the plaza at the heart of Meta's campus, for an after-party.

The ride takes more than 25 minutes, but there's booze for the road, a concoction of blue spirulina syrup, lemon juice, and vodka, served in blue plastic bags. They look like IV bags used in hospitals, and mine promptly leaks all over my jeans.

At the party, chefs in white coats work smoking grills outside a barn-red shack called Lightning Bolt's Smoke House. There are blue-corn mushroom tacos, truffle mushroom ravioli, kurobuta sausages, vegetarian hot dogs made from king oyster mushrooms, and endless trays of chocolate cream puffs, all labeled on little cards displaying the Meta logo.

Meta's share price is up about 25% since the launch of Muse. But it's still early days for the AI agent, and Meta's video-recording glasses continue to face privacy criticisms.

However, chatting to other attendees while sipping a vodka and coffee liqueur cocktail aptly called "The Agent," the vibes matched the optimism that Zuckerberg had asked for.

"I'm really happy to see excitement around VR again," Steve Lukas, the founder and CEO of a mixed-reality game studio called ContractXR, tells me.

"It felt like it was touch and go for a minute."

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Pranav Dixit

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Pranav Dixit is the Meta Correspondent at Business Insider based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes about Meta’s products, policies, and internal workings while examining how the company’s decisions shape how billions of people connect and communicate.Previously, Pranav was the India-based technology correspondent for BuzzFeed News, covering the impact of Silicon Valley’s largest companies on the culture, society, and politics of more than a billion people in South Asia. He has also been a senior news editor at Engadget and ran technology coverage at the Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest national newspapers.Pranav’s reporting has shed light on the human consequences of Big Tech’s quest for growth in emerging markets, and sparked widespread conversations about the impact of American technology companies on the Global South. In 2019, he won Syracuse University’s Mirror Award for a boots-on-the-ground feature about how WhatsApp misinformation sparked gruesome lynchings in rural India. He has also reported from Kashmir, a volatile geopolitical hotspot, documenting the world’s longest-running internet shutdown.His work has been widely cited by major national and international publications, and he has been featured on the BBC, Al Jazeera, and podcasts such as Vox Media’s Land of the Giants to discuss his work. He has also spoken in journalism classes including at UC Berkeley’s graduate journalism program. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vox, Time, The Information, and Al Jazeera.Pranav moved to the United States in 2021 from New Delhi, India, to be a fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where he studied the evolution of the American tech press and ways newsrooms around the world can cover technology and society more effectively.Got a tip about Meta or anything else in Silicon Valley? Contact Pranav via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1408-905-9124), or email him at [email protected] or [email protected]. You can also reach him on WhatsApp at +857-753-3949 or DM him on X (@PranavDixit) or BlueSky (@pranavdixit.bsky.social).Pranav keeps sources anonymous. Please use a non-work device to reach out.Expertise: Meta, Facebook, WhatsApp, Llama, AI, Threads, Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, social media, platforms, immigration

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