Meta opens its Muse AI agent to hardware that hobbyists build on ESP32 and Raspberry Pi boards

A Muse subscriber with a spare Raspberry Pi can now load Meta's code onto it and give the agent its own screen or button ^[8]. Meta wrote this release for that person. "Muse gadgets are open source devices you build yourself," Meta said ^[2]. Meta also warns builders: "Proceed at your own risk!" ^[6]

The generous reading is a platform, with Meta's agent running inside hardware that other companies sell. What Meta has actually shipped is a hobbyist kit. According to Nat Friedman, head of product for Meta's superintelligence labs, it consists of open source firmware and a Linux SDK ^[5], and there is a Discord community for builders ^[9]. Neither Engadget nor The Verge reports any licensing or commercial terms for companies ^[16]. Engadget wrote that "It's not clear if Meta has any bigger plans for the initiative," and added that what hobbyists create could inform Meta's own hardware efforts ^[12].

The Home Link is the piece that reaches furthest into a house. Friedman wrote in an October 2 post that it is "a little usb-c powered device that allows Muse to connect to your home network to talk to smart home devices like TVs and speakers and anything else that exposes https." ^[10][13] That covers a lot of devices for a free dongle, and what it can do depends on skills written by other users ^[11]. Units are due to ship sometime this month ^[4]. Whether people keep them plugged in is a question for retention data from the 5,000 recipients ^[3].

A hardware team weighing this on Monday can sort its options along two lines. The first is whether the build is a prototype or a product someone will pay for. The second is whether the device only shows and listens, or acts on other things in the home.

A prototype that shows and listens, like the E Ink reminder screen Meta suggests, is the case the kit was built for ^[7]. A prototype that acts, through actuators or a Home Link that reaches TVs and printers, is fine on a bench under Meta's own risk warning ^[6][11]. A product in either column means betting a launch on firmware that Meta has so far offered only to people building for themselves ^[2][16]. The acting product is the hardest of the four. There, the seller would take the support call when a community-written skill switches the wrong device in a customer's living room ^[6][11].