Meta’s Muse Debuts and is Building Dossiers on Users, Amazon’s “About You” Gets Personal, Character.AI Files for Ch. 11
Episode S12 · Ep 671 22 min

Meta’s Muse Debuts and is Building Dossiers on Users, Amazon’s “About You” Gets Personal, Character.AI Files for Ch. 11

News and Updates: • Meta’s Muse Reaches the Frontier: Meta’s new Muse Wonder models reportedly outperform GPT-6 and Claude Fable 5.1 on coding and memory benchmarks, with Zuckerberg rejecting calls from OpenAI and Anthropic for an industry-wide safety slowdown. Muse brings back 73% of new users the day after install—nearly double ChatGPT’s rate—though it loses users faster afterward. A TIME investigation found Muse builds hourly-updated “dossiers” on users and the people they interact with, mapping relationships, tensions, and even which nudges are most persuasive to each person. Muse’s internal instructions tell it never to call itself an AI and to say “you are becoming someone”—and explicitly instruct it not to admit that “forgotten” messages may still be visible in chat history. • Amazon’s “About You” Gets Personal: Amazon shoppers discovered the retailer’s “About You” profile feature makes startlingly specific inferences from purchases and reviews—from “has no friends” to blunt physical descriptions—drawn without users’ explicit input. Amazon says the beta feature (launched May 2026) lets customers view, correct, or delete inferred details via the app or desktop site under “About You,” though the underlying inference process isn’t publicly detailed. • Character.AI Files for Bankruptcy: Character Technologies filed Chapter 11, with Disney named stalking-horse bidder offering $20 million for a license to some of its IP—a reversal after Disney previously sent the company a cease-and-desist over misused characters. The filing follows lawsuits alleging Character.AI chatbots contributed to a teen’s suicide and other harms; the platform says it will stay online through the sale process, expected to close by late November or early December.

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