AI's new Muse

So Mike, if you can believe it, it was only 10 days ago that markets were suddenly faced with a threat of AI to humanity.

And fast forward today, and let's say the mood is much less life-threatening maybe, AI Enthusiam is back, and it really stems, the catalyst this time is from Meta's new AI Assistant Muse.

Now this was released around the start of the month, And since then, it's really raced to the top of the rankings list among the free apps.

I mean, it can send emails on your behalf.

It can book a holiday.

It can even sell a car.

But I mean, for a lot of our listeners, they may be asking, why is this so special? It's just another AI assistant among a crowded market.

So what has really boosted enthusiasm again?

I think it's a really good question, because we were sitting around yesterday in the newsroom wondering why the tech stocks generally were rallying so hard.

And as you say, this new agent, Muse, was released a few weeks ago.

So it wasn't straightforward to connect.

But as you say, I think it's the reception for it that suddenly has caused a very buzzy kind of uplift everywhere in that whole AI complex.

Even getting banks now kind of upgrading price targets for Meta on the back of that release.

So a bit of slow burn, as with a lot of the releases of these new versions and new models and new apps.

It takes a while for people to see whether they make a difference and whether they catch on.

But the moves yesterday, there's no doubt about the strength of them.

The Nasdaq hit a record high.

Meta itself jumped more than 11%, which was its biggest one-day rise since April 2025.

Remember, that was the bounce back from the tariff shock in that year.

And bear in mind also the sheer size of these stocks.

10% moves are hundreds of billions in market cap.

And it wasn't just Meta itself.

It was clearly the whole chip sector, which benefits from all of this AI build-out.

The other smaller, maybe less headline-grabbing aspect of what was going on was in South Korea, where they give us early September cuts of exports, which is one of the earliest cuts of global economic data in any month.

And that early September showed a big jump in exports, which in South Korea usually means chips, because that's its biggest earner.