I think Muse is what AI is supposed to look like. Feels like every lab has been shipping the same thing recently with minor incramental improvements. Text boxes in front of a model = shiny new toy syndrome! No one cares if Muse Spark is the best model in the world rn because it literally doesn't matter to 99.9% of people. Only the top 1% of coders/engineers care about what's changed from one Claude release to the next ChatGPT release. Personally, I have found little improvement since Fable 5 was released and I think that says a lot. I'd probably say it's regressed recently for higher end research tasks. Muse makes me more convinced now that Anthropic/OAI have absolutely zero moat at the consumer level. Enterprises are a different story and that's where both frontier labs need to (already are) focus rather than doomerism and frontier pacing bs. Agents are where AI endgame probably goes - most users just care about usefulness so having one run laborious tasks is way more important than a tiny push on the frontier by Fable 5.1 / Astra to most people. Checking in with your agent will become force-of-habit, same way you check your WhatsApp or emails every morning. Not everyone logs onto Claude or ChatGPT in the same way. (Already a known thesis on Agents, but yeah, worth resurfacing). For the average Joe, this is all the matters. Same way most people don't change phones from one generation to the next because their current phone is good enough. Same way laptops were so important for the PC industry because they were just more convenient than desktops. In that sense, I guess you could say that Muse has pushed the frontier from a usefulness POV. I think we think that most people care about AI like we do...they don't lol. If AI is gonna become mass adopted, it'll be via agents doing stuff for people just how Muse is rn. Since most people already know ChatGPT (noun for AI e.g. "ChatGPT it" similar to "Google it"), it seems like OAI doing a solid enough agent could be enough to oust Anthropic longer term at the consumer layer to have all your context with one lab in an agent + frontier model combo. Sorry for the ramblings and no idea if this logic holds lol - I'm walking to get lunch and wanted to write after a stressful morning!