Who Wins The AI Assistant Wars? + Why Didn’t Google Build Muse?

Siegler and Kantrowitz argue the AI assistant race will hinge on deep email/calendar/messaging integrations and distribution scale, not frontier-model superiority.

• Instinct's rise: The startup leveraged existing messaging apps (iMessage) for proactive assistance, reportedly raising multiple rounds to a ~$10 billion valuation in months.
• Meta's Muse surprises: Siegler says Muse launched with WhatsApp integration and a per-user cloud virtual machine, beating OpenAI's Dots to market despite running on a non-frontier model (Spark).

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