Meta plans to build agentic AI assistant for consumers

Meta outlined its plan for the project at a companywide meeting last week

Meta plans to build an agentic artificial intelligence assistant for consumers that is comparable to OpenClaw but easier to use, The Financial Times (FT) reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources.

The assistant is being trailed internally by some staff, and Meta outlined its plan for the project at a companywide meeting last week, according to the report.

According to the FT report, Meta tried to hire OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger before he joined OpenAI, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week during an earnings call that there is an opportunity to develop a version of the OpenClaw experience that is more polished and easier to use.

Also during the call, Zuckerberg said the company had seen a surge in business users employing its AI tools. The number of conversations being handled by these tools each week leapt from 1 million at the start of the year to 10 million by late March.

In addition, Muse Spark, Meta’s first model from the company’s in-house AI lab, debuted during the first quarter and now powers Meta AI across all apps and the standalone Meta AI app. Sessions per user grew double digits following the introduction.

Meta also upped its full-year guidance for capital expenditures from the earlier $115 billion to $135 billion to a new projection of $125 billion to $145 billion, citing the rising cost of memory and additional data centre capacity and acknowledging that it has consistently underestimate its compute needs.

On Friday, it was announced that Meta has acquired Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI), a startup developing AI models for general-purpose, humanoid robots.