Meta

Meta has acquired Conductor, a young artificial intelligence startup whose software lets developers run several coding agents at once, each working on a separate part of a project in its own workspace. Meta confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch but declined to comment further, and the financial terms were not disclosed. The deal was first reported by Axios, and Conductor announced it on its own blog on Wednesday.

October is ending as the month the AI trade finally met its skeptics. Reuters reported on Friday that more than 2 trillion dollars in market value is set to be wiped from the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 this month, a loss slightly larger than the entire market value of SpaceX. The index has fallen more than 5.8 percent so far in October, as a week of big tech earnings intensified investor scrutiny of whether the billions being poured into artificial intelligence can generate returns quickly enough.

Meta delivered a record quarter on Wednesday, and investors spent Thursday worrying about what it will cost to keep going. Shares in the Facebook and Instagram owner fell sharply, shedding more than 100 billion dollars in market value and dragging the Nasdaq down 2.6 percent, its biggest one-day fall since June. Nvidia slid 4.4 percent as the sell-off spread. The trigger was not weak business. It was the scale of Meta's artificial intelligence spending, and a new plan to help pay for it.

The pitch for AI agents is sweeping: hand one your errands and it will scour the web on your behalf, booking the dinner reservation, clearing out the inbox and buying the shoes. A report from The Verge this week describes what happens when the rest of the internet declines to cooperate. In recent weeks, users of Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots and Instinct's agent have run into blocks that stop their agents from completing tasks across major websites, and the companies behind several of those sites say the restrictions are deliberate.

Meta released Muse Spark Open on Thursday, October 15, calling it the most capable United States open-weight model to date. Unlike a closed system that stays behind a company API, an open-weight release lets developers download the trained parameters, adapt the model, and run it on their own hardware. Meta is aiming this one squarely at coding and agentic work: long, multi-step software tasks that require reasoning, tool use, and sustained context rather than a single quick answer.

The AI agent wars are coming to the Windows desktop — and Microsoft just gave stage time to a rival.

At its Windows and Surface event in San Francisco on October 7, Microsoft announced that Meta's Muse personal AI agent is coming to Windows as a native app. Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's executive vice president of Windows and Devices, said Muse for Windows would arrive "coming soon" with MXC integration — a notable move from a company that is simultaneously pushing its own Copilot agent.