How Far Is a 'China's Muse' From New Entrances and Old Walls?

Text by Li Zhaofeng | Edited by Zhang Yuxin 10.4 million: that is the cumulative download count for Meta's AI personal assistant Muse in less than two months since its launch. As a result, a wave of Personal Agent products has rapidly swept across China, and who can build a "China's Muse" has become a topic the entire industry is watching. A number of startups are accelerating their entry. Qi Junyuan, who left ByteDance last year as head of the PC version of Doubao, started a new company this year and launched Today AI, which focuses on persistent memory and proactive service. Manus, which became popular for general-purpose task execution, recently launched a personal assistant called Cue, equipping the Agent with tools such as email and computers. Rabbit, which started with the AI hardware r1, has now extended its focus to a new generation OS3: users can access this assistant through a web page or through the r1, and the team is also developing a new generation of AI hardware to go with it... These teams are pursuing different product paths: one is to offer a standalone Personal Agent software on phones or computers, while the other is to deeply integrate with hardware and use the hardware as the entry point. On the software side, some products emphasize continuously understanding users and proactively offering help, some equip the AI with its own computer and accounts to carry out tasks, and others attempt to connect to users' existing computers and receive instructions through multiple entry points, including software and hardware. These approaches are not mutually exclusive, but each company starts from a different point. In China, however, the first challenge for startup Personal Agents is free products from major tech companies. Doubao and Qwen have already gathered large user bases, and ByteDance and Alibaba continue to add task-handling capabilities to them. Big companies can deliver new features directly to existing users. Independent Personal Agents must answer a pressing question: how many users will keep using the convenience they offer, and even be willing to give up big companies' free products and pay for their own? On the other hand, winning users does not mean being able to get things done for them. Shopping, travel, and payment services in China are concentrated within individual platforms, so for a Personal Agent to carry out tasks across apps, it needs permission from service providers. After the second-generation Doubao phone assistant launched the SAEP protocol recently, apps such as WeChat, Taobao, Alipay, and Meituan appeared on the list of platforms that refuse AI operation on their behalf. At this stage, assistants are far from able to move freely across apps.