Meta wants you to love its AI assistant so much that it gave it a fuzzy, Labubu-esque mascot named Jolly.
At last week's Connect conference, Meta introduced Muse, an assistant it says you'll be able to reach 'in more places throughout your day,' alongside a Tamagotchi-style wearable called Muse Charm and a headset the company insists isn't quite a VR device. Users can customize their own Muse avatars, but the default face of the whole product is Jolly, a rounded, fur-covered creature that CEO Mark Zuckerberg, per NBC News, described as having a 'jolly and completely customizable character and personality.' Zuckerberg even had his own avatar dress up in a toga onstage. Wired noted the resemblance to a Labubu doll and asked why an assistant marketed to adults looks built for a toy aisle.
That resemblance is the point. System1 chief growth officer Andrew Tindall told Business Insider that cute, infant-like features are a deliberate way to make unfamiliar AI technology feel safer and easier to accept, and VaynerX CMO Avery Akkineni said humanizing Muse is meant to pull it past early adopters into the mass market. That push for broad appeal lines up with reports that Meta has excess AI data center capacity it needs to justify.
Dressing a data-hungry assistant in a cuddly suit is an old trick: Clippy wore a tie, this one wears a toga, and both exist to distract you from asking what the assistant actually does with your day.