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Signage outside the Meta store in Burlingame, Calif. DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS |
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Good morning. The most interesting thing about Meta’s new Muse Glimmer model, from the enterprise point of view, is its focus on always-on AI agents. As the company emphasizes in its announcement, “Muse Glimmer is…optimized for always-on local agent workflows.” |
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That’s going to matter a lot in the next few years, with implications for the ways in which companies work, as I wrote in an April 2025 column called “AI Is Enabling an Always-On Economy. Companies Need to Pick Up the Pace.” |
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Unlike human workers, the AI agents operating in fields from healthcare to cybersecurity don’t care about work-life balance. They don’t get tired or hungry, call in sick or go on vacation. They don’t fall in and out of love, pick up groceries on the way home, read bedtime stories to their children or separate their recyclables. |
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“AI is reshaping the economy by providing automation that transcends traditional time and capacity constraints, enabling businesses to operate seamlessly around the clock,” Konstantine Buhler, a partner at Sequoia Capital, told me last year. He developed an investment thesis around the topic, and said at the time he expected the dynamic to play out in more and more areas of the economy over the next five to seven years. |
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Meta’s Muse Glimmer advances the foundations of that economy, with a focus on principles such as end-to-end agentic task competition and failure recovery. |
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That technology helps enable new business and operating models in which increasingly autonomous agents can operate 24-7. It has important implications in areas such as sales, where companies strive toward “zero latency” as they tend to customer needs, Stav Levi-Neumark, co-founder and CEO of Alta, told me last year. The company offers companies AI agents to help improve software experiences. |
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The ability to respond to customer inquiries around the clock with the same capability that’s available in the middle of the afternoon is increasingly important, she said. And it’s going to matter in many business settings, from manufacturing and logistics to sales and customer service and more. Going forward, the question will be less about what can be done on a 24-7 basis and more on what can’t be done that way. |
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Is your company becoming more always-on in nature? If so, how is that changing the way it works and goes to market? Let us know. |
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Signals |
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“Meta’s mission since our founding has focused on putting power in people’s hands. If our beliefs and principles lead, then the balance of power will favor individuals and a better future for everyone.” |
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— Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, laying out his AI vision in a 6,500 word essay published Monday |
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8,000 points: JPMorgan’s new S&P 500 target, raised for the second time in two months as strategists cite strong second-quarter earnings and evidence that AI hyperscalers’ massive capex is being monetized through customer demand, Bloomberg reports. |
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On Our Radar |
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A data-center construction site near Abernathy, Texas, JUSTIN REX/AP |
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• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published an essay outlining Meta’s strategy to win hearts and minds by releasing more open-weight models and creating a $1 billion fund for communities hosting Meta’s data centers, the Journal reports. The essay, published as Meta races to catch up with AI leaders Anthropic and OpenAI, also included policy proposals on model safety-testing and a call for allowing AI developers to distill one another’s models. |
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• Feeling left in the cold by an AI-driven memory chip shortage that’s quadrupled prices over the past year, industries from medical devices to consumer electronics are lobbying Washington for proposals to mandate broader allocation, the New York Times reports. Among the ideas: making sales to a wider set of customers a condition of CHIPS Act funding. |
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• Apple is testing chips from China’s CXMT across its product lines, including iPhones and MacBooks, and has held early talks with the supplier about using its components in devices sold in China, the WSJ reports. U.S. export rules bar Apple from ordering custom CXMT chips but permit off-the-shelf purchases. |
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Dispatches |
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• The Dating Scene That’s Suddenly Dominated by Chip Nerds (WSJ) |
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• Historian Jill Lepore Says Silicon Valley Misreads Science Fiction and Undermines Democracy (TechCrunch) |
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• The Bruising Race to Rent in San Francisco Goes Into Overdrive (WSJ) |
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| | The AI Therapist: When People Turn to Chatbots for Mental Health |
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The AI Therapist: When People Turn to Chatbots for Mental Health |
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The WSJ Technology Council Summit |
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This September 14–15, technology leaders will gather in New York City for the WSJ Technology Council Summit to explore how enterprise AI is moving from experimentation to measurable business value. Join the Technology Council and be part of the conversations shaping the future of leadership, as executives tackle AI deployment, cybersecurity, evolving technology policy, enterprise transformation and the strategies driving the next generation of business innovation. |
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About Us |
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Follow Isabelle Bousquette on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and TikTok for more behind the scenes on her tech and AI coverage, and lately, her contributions to the WSJ Leadership Institute’s new Executive Resilience series, where she’s profiling America’s top execs about their fitness and wellness habits. |
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Steven Rosenbush is chief of the enterprise technology bureau at the WSJ Leadership Institute. He also has a column. You can follow him on LinkedIn. |
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Tom Loftus is the editor of The Morning Download. He suggests following Isabelle, Belle and Steve on their various social channels. But if you insist, here’s his LinkedIn. |
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