This week a registration tutorial has been circulating in the Chinese developer community: it teaches you to use Google Gemini's Spark or Grok Bot to automatically open muse.ai/join in the browser, then grab 100K tokens through an invite code. We noticed there are two pieces of information in this that are more worth caring about.
What this is
Muse AI is a recently launched AI application (the tutorial doesn't detail its specific features). The so-called "100K tokens" is its usage quota—both the inviter and the invitee get a share, making it essentially subsidy + viral growth—the same playbook as the early cloud-storage wars and bike-share monthly passes, just with the unit of measurement swapped from GB to tokens.
Industry view
Supporters argue token subsidies are a normal cold start for AI products, getting them used in real scenarios, which is more grounded than pure PR. But the opposition is sharper: people coming for tokens aren't coming for the product, and once the subsidies stop, retention becomes the question. Meanwhile, the tutorial specifies that age verification requires an overseas Visa or Hong Kong–issued cards like HSBC or ZhongAn, signaling Muse's stance toward the Chinese market is "accessible but not actively welcomed"—a signal that cannot be ignored when assessing the commercialization of such products.
Impact on regular people
- For enterprise IT: If tools like Muse are on the procurement radar, focus on the pricing model after the subsidy period ends, not the current per-token price.
- For individual careers: The "use AI to sign up for AI" path is worth learning—the entire web registration flow of form-filling, email verification, and cross-site redirects is exactly the tedious work AI Agents excel at replacing.
- For consumer markets: Treat free tokens as a trial period, not a permanent perk; cast your vote with your feet after the subsidy window closes.