Nikita Bier posted that to judge how important AI is to Meta, just look at Muse's features: the app can automatically negotiate prices on Facebook Marketplace. He wrote that the product manager responsible for Marketplace is aware that a large number of bots driving prices down will ultimately ruin the product.

According to him, the controversy was brought up by the Muse team to Mark Zuckerberg, and the response was: it can poison the Marketplace, but only a little. This statement does not have an official record from Meta and is a decision sketch provided by Bier in an internal informed tone.

Muse is a personal agent launched by Meta Superintelligence Labs, which went live in the U.S. on September 8. It can accept tasks in a standalone app and WhatsApp, open a browser in a dedicated virtual machine, fill out forms, negotiate prices, and process payments through Stripe's Link with purchase protection. The official demonstration includes comparing Marketplace listings for users, messaging sellers, and reducing prices by dozens of dollars. The first week saw over 900,000 downloads according to third-party statistics.

Marketplace was originally a classified information platform for person-to-person negotiations. Once agents filter by budget and open with "what's the lowest price," sellers are no longer facing the patience of individual buyers but rather parallel price-cutting machines. Bier framed this conflict as an internal priority for the company: the growth of new agents can sacrifice the seller experience in the old market.

He previously sold TBH to Meta and was the head of the X product, familiar with how viral products compete for resources in large companies. The incremental information is not in the Muse feature list, but in how he framed automatic negotiation as an acceptable mild poisoning, summarized by the phrase "only a little poison" to encapsulate the CEO's trade-offs.

In market mechanisms, this is a redistribution of resources within the platform. The buy side bets on Meta's agent distribution, in-app shopping, and indirect signals from advertising; the sell side relies on the transaction quality and seller retention of Marketplace. The flow of funds goes to agent computing power and checkout channels. The beneficiaries are buyer agents that can negotiate; the pressured parties are individual sellers facing concentrated price cuts and the product team for that business line.

Source: Public Information