Meta wants your next gadget to be Muse-infused

Meta's decision to make Muse freely available is less an act of generosity and more a calculated land grab for the emerging "ambient computing" era. The company has learned from both its successes and failures: owning the operating system or the flagship device is hard, as Google and Apple have proven, but owning the underlying AI layer that runs on everything is a far more subtle and potentially lucrative position. By giving away the code, Meta shifts the cost of adoption to developers and device makers while positioning itself as the connective tissue of the smart home. As reported by TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/02/meta-wants-you-build-your-own-muse-gadget/), the strategy is explicitly designed to make Muse ubiquitous—but ubiquity, in Meta's playbook, has always been a precursor to monetization. The "toaster" framing is worth unpacking. It suggests a deliberate move away from the smartphone-centric view of computing toward a world where AI is threaded through mundane objects. This is not a new vision—Amazon and Google have chased it for years with Alexa and Assistant—but those platforms have stalled, partly because they were tethered to specific hardware ecosystems and partly because their utility plateaued. Muse, by contrast, is being positioned as a raw substrate: something developers can mold to fit any form factor. That flexibility is compelling, but it also raises a thorny question: if every device is running Meta's code, where does the data go? Meta's track record on privacy is not exactly spotless, and the company's business model has historically depended on harvesting user behavior. Giving away the code may be a way to win the adoption battle while quietly collecting the telemetry that will fuel future ad targeting or AI training. There is also a strategic dimension to consider in the competitive landscape. Apple is notoriously closed, Google is increasingly pulling its AI capabilities closer to its own hardware, and OpenAI is racing to embed its models in devices through partnerships. By going open source, Meta differentiates itself as the "democratic" option—the one that lets any manufacturer, no matter how small, add intelligence to their products without licensing fees or platform restrictions. This is a powerful narrative, and it has worked before: Android's open-source foundation allowed it to dominate the smartphone market outside of Apple's walled garden. But Android's openness was also a trap, fragmenting the ecosystem and making it difficult for Google to enforce quality or consistency. Meta will face the same tension with Muse, and how it balances openness with control will determine whether this becomes a thriving platform or a chaotic free-for-all. Ultimately, the success of Muse will hinge on whether Meta can resist the urge to pull the strings behind the scenes. Developers are wary of building on platforms that change terms arbitrarily, and consumers are increasingly aware of how their data is used. If Meta can genuinely stand behind its open-source commitment—letting the community fork, modify, and deploy Muse without hidden conditions—it could reshape the device landscape. If not, the "free" code will simply be a trojan horse, and the industry will treat it as such. Either way, Meta has thrown down the gauntlet, and the rest of the tech world is now forced to respond.