Mark Zuckerberg predicts billions will have personal AI agents in five years

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1:39Mark Zuckerberg predicts billions will have personal AI agents in five years. I'm Imran Chaik and your Friday Daily Crunch featuring three big tech headlines starts right now. Martha Stewart's entering the AI software era in the most Martha Stewart way possible. You see, she's joined the co-founding team at Hint, an app that leverages AI tech to manage the tasks surrounding home maintenance and management. Now, with the Hint app, which launches today, by the way, homeowners can tackle challenges around maintenance schedules slash tasks and energy management, learn about their soil and air quality, weigh insurance claims and more.

2:19It can also serve as storage for various contracts, files, and invoices related to the home and its upkeep, which can be queried through the built-in AI assistant. Because, of course. Co-founder and CTO at Hint New York-based Kyle Rush says the home and hospitality empire founder lives nearby and is very involved with the startup, but is not a financial investor. She's a real co-founder with a serious stake in equity, and she does work for the company and the app. She's not a figurehead, he says. The app joins others in the AI ecosystem that are working to expand AI beyond chatbots to apply the technology to solve real-world problems, while also adding Martha Stewart's personal expertise to refine the experience.

3:03Hint can tell you things about your soil below the foundation and how that may affect lawn drainage or foundation risk movement. You can also learn about the air quality surrounding your home or how climate or drought information could impact the potential for floods, your home insurance rates, or your energy usage, among other things. The iOS app is currently available for free without subscriptions or ads. Long before Spotify, Winamp was the music player of choice for millions of music fans, including the one you're listening to right now. Well, now the nostalgic brand's preparing for yet another comeback.

3:41You see, WinApp and Deezer announced a partnership on Wednesday that'll see Deezer power WinApp's upcoming premium music subscription service. Under the agreement, WinApp will leverage Deaver's white-label technology and global-licensed music catalog while maintaining its own branding and user experience. The partnership is part of a larger relaunch centered around the next-generation WinApp player scheduled to arrive in the first half of 2027. Now, according to the companies, the new player is designed to reinvent the music player for the streaming era by combining premium music streaming with users' local music libraries, internet radio stations, podcasts, personal cloud-based collections, and other audio sources within one single app.

4:24While a lot of the details remain under wraps, Winamp promises an emphasis on personalization through a customizable interface, social features, and ways to discover, organize, and enjoy music. The company asserts that its subscription service will deliver a fundamentally different experience from today's traditional digital streaming platforms. While Winamp has undergone several revamps over the years, this, well, this may be its most deliberate return to its core audience, i.e. me. Meta founder and CEO The Zuck is trying to sell investors on his prediction for the future, one where billions and billions of billions, excuse my Carl Sagan impression there, of people will have their own personal AI agents in the next five years.

5:11Let's hope that future also comes with data centers efficient enough to power all those agents without triggering a fresh wave of climate disasters. I think that it's extremely unlikely if you look out five years from now, for example, whatever period of time you want, that you don't have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals and that is just working on your behalf 24-7 to achieve your goals in whatever the domain is that you care about, the Zuck said on Wednesday's quarterly earnings call with investors. He added that he could see people using these agents to help them with their finances, health, interpersonal relationships, and household management.

5:49And Meta's not alone in setting high expectations for AI systems that can act on a person's behalf rather than just answer questions. Google emphasized custom AI agents as a key new feature in its search overhaul, which sparked outcry from users who felt bogged down by the constant onslaught of AI results on Google. Meanwhile, subscriptions to Anthropics Cloud have skyrocketed as engineers fawn over the agentic coding assistant Cloud Code. Compared to its competitors, however, Meta may not enjoy as much confidence from investors as it continues dumping cash into innovative projects that may or may not pan out.

6:27Cough, cough. The metaverse. Cough, cough. Meta's stock dropped almost 10 % after posting this quarter's earnings. So far, Meta's business agents, rolled out globally on WhatsApp and Messenger this quarter, have been adopted by more than 1 million businesses. It may be harder to get people to adopt consumer AI agents, but the road to billions has to start somewhere. The company ain't getting there on enterprise agents alone. And folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories were reported by Lauren Forrestal, Amanda Silberling, Sarah Perez, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists. We'll see you here tomorrow.

7:00Same tech time, same crunch channel. And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.

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