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A month after Meta's launch of Muse, the personal agent that quickly turned into a viral sensation, a group of companies is coming together to try to simplify the process of bringing the technology into the business world. Meta, Walmart, Stripe and a handful of other companies are publishing what they're calling a "personal agent protocol." It's an open standard meant to dictate how artificial intelligence agents can interact with businesses. Enterprise AI startup Sierra, co-founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, is part of the group. Taylor, who's also chairman of OpenAI and is leading the initiative, told CNBC in an interview that companies have a lot of work to do to figure out how and when personal agents are able to access information. "Companies will know when it's a personal agent versus an actual person. For a lot of companies there's a risk: you don't want just a random bot that isn't acting on behalf of a person to have access to this service," Taylor said. “It is kind of chaos until such a standard exists." Meta's Muse has become the most popular and buzzy version of personal AI agents since hitting the market in early September. It soared to the top of Apple's App Store and remains there, ahead of ChatGPT. However, Amazon is among the companies that have blocked Meta's agents, citing worries of website scraping. Amazon also blocked Perplexity's AI agent and sued the startup in November, alleging the company took steps to "conceal" its AI agents so they could continue to scrape Amazon's website without approval. Perplexity called the lawsuit a "bully tactic." For the new standard, Taylor compared it with the experience of logging into other websites with Google or Facebook credentials, technology he worked on when he was tech chief at Facebook. He said the practice will help with authentication so that businesses know if they're dealing with a bot, and will provide visibility into what personal agents are actually doing through these websites. David Singleton, vice president of engineering and consumer products at Meta Superintelligence Labs and former technology chief at Stripe, highlighted security. In order for agents to work well, he said, customers need to share credit card and personal information, and the new standard creates some level of visibility and control. "We're defining rails that we hope personal agents and business agents can run over for the future," Singleton said, comparing it to email. "If you think about email, it works great because it is a standard that everyone can use to talk to each other, and we think this is going to be quite similar." Singleton said Muse already has millions of users in the U..S and it's "growing rapidly." "What we're finding is that people love using Muse for all kinds of things, things like signing their kids up for classes, finding and buying the best gifts, scheduling that dentist appointment that you have been putting off for six months," he said. "We need a mechanism to have it go faster and smoother." While OpenAI and Anthropic aren't on board now, Taylor said he expects the AI giants to participate, and indicated he will be "really disappointed" if it's not being used by competitors. "The whole point of this is to be an open standard," Taylor said.
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