SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 25 — Meta shares bounced back to their summer 2025 highs this week, riding a wave of investor excitement about Muse, the social media giant’s AI agent which presents an opportunity to generate revenue beyond advertising.

The stock gained 4.5 per cent yesterday after jumping more than 11 per cent on Monday, its biggest single-day rise since April 2025.

At around US$778 (RM3,167), the share price has recovered from a late-March low around US$525 a share, which came after two court rulings over the impact of its social networks on young people’s mental health.

At the end of July, the Facebook and Instagram maker dropped again after earnings were weighed down by its spending on artificial intelligence, which could reach US$145 billion this year. Concerns linger about whether Meta, which generates almost all of its revenue from advertising, will be able to make such monumental investments pay off.

Then Muse launched on September 8 in the US and on September 18 in Canada, the only countries where it is available.

Muse is a multitasking AI assistant, or agent, that is capable of performing tasks on behalf of a user, such as booking trips, sending emails or making purchases.

Restricted to users over 18, Muse is free but has limits on usage. An optional subscription for US$20 or US$100 per month allows for more intensive use.

In less than two weeks, Muse was downloaded 1.8 million times on iPhones in North America, compared with 1.3 million downloads for ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, when its app launched in May 2023, according to Apptopia.

During its annual Connect conference on Wednesday, Meta announced that Muse will soon be available in its smart glasses and that it had struck partnerships with retailers like Walmart, paving the way for it to take commissions on purchases.

However, e-commerce giant Amazon blocked Muse on from using its site on Sunday after accusing Meta’s agentic software of failing to identify itself when browsing and of storing customers’ login details. Meta insists that Muse does not see passwords or payment methods.

Yesterday, JPMorgan raised its price target for Meta to US$920, judging that Muse could become “the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT.”

Other analysts remain sceptical. A recent survey by the firm Oppenheimer found that only eight per cent of Americans would trust Meta to store their passwords for other apps, which are required for agents to act on their behalf, compared with 30 per cent for Google.

Muse’s potential growth benefits from Meta’s user base, which the company says exceeds 3.6 billion daily users.

In 2023 it launched Threads to compete with X, which Elon Musk bought months earlier when it was still known as Twitter.

Threads attracted 100 million sign-ups in five days but growth has slowed. It had around 140 million active daily users in January, according to TechCrunch. — AFP