Is Meta's Muse assistant actually popular?

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Last week, something very funny happened. For a brief moment on October 13th, Meta’s new AI assistant, Muse, lost its top spot on the iOS App Store. The app that dethroned it was Dave’s Hot Chicken. As in, Dave’s Hot Chicken, the fast food restaurant.

Per data from Appfigures, Dave’s Hot Chicken’s iOS app just narrowly beat Muse on the 13th by about 7,000 downloads in a 24 hour period. If you’re wondering how a fried chicken restaurant could rocket up the app store charts like that, Dave’s Hot Chicken gives away free sliders every year and this year you had to download the app to get one.

As funny as this all is, let’s be clear, Muse is by far the more popular app. It’s been downloaded nearly 10 million times across both iOS and Android App Stores since it was released barely a month ago. While Dave’s Hot Chicken’s iOS app only has about 400,000 lifetime downloads. But it’s still a curious little wrinkle in Muse’s supposed success story.

Another curious wrinkle is Muse’s retention rate. According to a report this month from Sensor Tower, about 30% of users still had Muse downloaded after seven days and around 20% still had it after two weeks. Though, Sensor Tower also noted something that I didn’t know actually. Muse’s retention rates are actually very good for AI assistants. Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok have seven- and fourteen-day retention rates in the mid-teens.

When you look at the data we have available about who is using AI and, most importantly, who is paying for AI, you start to get a better picture of what’s happening here. Menlo Ventures published a report last month that found that, as of 2025, 61% of Americans had used AI and that, this year, after billions and billions were sunk into the AI boom, that amount increased by three percentage points to 64%.

As for how many of those AI users actually seem to like the tech and use it regularly, the same report found that one in five Americans were using AI every day and about half of all AI users were paying for it. This sounds good until you zoom out. According to a June report from Bank of America, about 3% of American households pay for any kind of AI-related service, whether that’s a large language model, a chat app, or an assistant app like Muse. (Which is free, to be clear.)

All of this makes the macro view of the AI industry up for a bit of interpretation. If you were to compare AI to social media, it’d be a little tricky, but we do have the data needed to compare the AI industry, as a whole, to just Facebook and the AI adoption rate in the US in 2026 is basically on par with where Facebook was in 2015. Or if we were to compare AI to adoption rates of the internet in the US, it’s basically on par with where internet access was in 2004.

So from that point of view, that’s actually pretty good. Fried chicken giveaways notwithstanding, consumer AI products have, since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, grown about twice as fast as both Facebook and the internet. But that’s not really that good is it? Nor are those numbers telling the whole story.

As The Wall Street Journal wrote last month, the AI industry has quickly become “the biggest economic bet in US history.” Over the next seven years (if it doesn’t completely implode), data center investment will reach $10 trillion. A little over half of Americans have ever used AI at all, about 20% of Americans use AI every day, and 3% of Americans actually pay for it. Oh, and, to make things feel even more dire, the massive AI push across 2025 and 2026, all the AI features jammed into existing apps, all the hype and buzz and investment, convinced about 300 million new users to, at the very least, try using AI. Not great!

Which brings us back to the fried chicken incident last week. I actually think it’s a useful unlock for what’s going on here, at least in the case of Meta. Though, I suspect the same is also true of Google. The appearance of success is what’s really important. It may also explain why these two companies don’t constantly talk about AI causing the end of world, unlike Anthropic or OpenAI. You probably don’t have to resort to such gauche effective altruist catastrophizing if you have pre-existing non-AI users to market to. What I mean is, thanks to Meta’s gargantuan user base across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — a metric Meta reports as “3.60 billion Family Daily Active People” — they can easily throw millions of users at an AI assistant that 80% of them uninstall after two weeks. But as long as the download number looks healthy and the app stays at the top of download charts, then Meta can keep burning cash on data centers. The hype train keeps on running. Well, until someone else gives away free a chicken slider, I guess.

This week on Panic World, we’re joined once again by PJ Vogt. This time, rather than educating him about a very normal cult surrounding a cutie cartoon mouse, we’re subjecting him to the very tasteful art and history of the Bronies. Come (maybe a bad choice of words?) for the story behind how a bunch of grown men became obsessed with little ponies, their outsized impact on the wider internet, and stay for the… jar.

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