It’s turned into a model drop week as Anthropic rolled out Opus 5.5, followed by OpenAI’s GPT-6 model updates just 90 minutes later. But the company that stole the spotlight was Meta, whose personal AI agent Muse is reportedly outpacing ChatGPT’s early numbers and is headed for smart glasses and a tiny Tamagotchi-style device next.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into Meta’s consumer AI strategy and what it means for the startups trying to build on top of this technology, from where the money is flowing to which AI products might actually become part of people’s daily lives. They also get into a16z’s new school for aspiring founders and two very different AI and hardware deals.

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro

3:33 Model drop week: Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta’s Muse

3:58 They said they’d pace the frontier…they didn’t say how fast

7:26 Why Meta is betting on consumer instead of enterprise

9:35 Sean’s Muse Review

15:56 Meta’s glasses and Tamagotchi-style wearable

18:14 a16z launches its own founder academy

27:31 Aura’s $2.2B IPO

30:22 Ema raises $77M for AI agent teams

33:20 Outro