Creating Muse: The Fastest-Growing AI Product Since ChatGPT | Alexandr Wang, Meta

David Senra (0:03)

Tell me the history of Muse.

Alexandr Wang (0:04)

The first thing to start with is probably like what our vision was when we started Meta Superintelligence Labs. And when we started it, Mark published this memo that myself and Nat Friedman and a bunch of others like worked together with him closely on called personal superintelligence. And the whole idea was like, how do we make AI, how do we build powerful AI that actually makes all of our lives better? How do we build something that actually lifts the human experience, broadly speaking? In that memo, we spoke to a bunch of the ideas and we basically alluded to I think a lot of what Muse has ultimately become. But we were gesturing at it very, very early. This was in June 2025

Before really agents had happened in any meaningful way. In the summer of 2025, AI was just in a totally different spot. But that's what we wanted to build towards. That was the mission of MSL and that was really where we wanted to take everything. Then we just got to work building models because the end-to-end process of developing any of these frontier models is many, many, many months. You have to go through, you have to build your entire stack, you have to produce the datasets, you have to pre-train the model, then you have to do pro-train the model, you have to build a little stack for that. It's a very lengthy end-to-end process.

I mean, kind of this whole production line. At the start of this year, you know, Opus 4.5 obviously, like, really caused many people, including us, to sort of like see what the future of agents could be or was, and really brought the sort of, like, potential of agents to the foreground. And OpenClaw was happening at the start of the year. Nat Friedman, who, you know, I worked closely with, was, I think, the first person within MSL to work with OpenClaw and try OpenClaw.

He had an experience I would describe as somewhere between terrifying and euphoric. Like, I think he really, like, I think, went all in. He trusted entirely. You know, he's told some of these stories that he had, like, a Stripe Sessions interview where he talked about some of this, or, you know, he told his OpenClaw that he wanted to drink more water. And then, you know, his OpenClaw would, like, watch him in security footage to make sure they were drinking water and tell him, good job. And he had, like, many, many crazy stories like this. And it also makes you realize, like, oh, there's something quite, quite magical about what's happening here. And I remember one of the things that Nat told me, and this is one of the things I remember the most, is he said, I think there really is something here.

And, I don't know, like, early adopter Nat Friedman is, like, a pretty good indicator, because he was one of the first customers of Stripe back in the day, and then was really early on a lot of open-source developer stuff. And he also, you know, helped create GitHub Copilot and many other things. So, that was, like, a clear signal. It was like, okay, there's clearly something pretty magical about personal agents, generally speaking. But, you know, when you actually kind of trust the personal agent and really bring it into your life, it is the ability to do so many things. And after hearing all of these crazy stories, I started using it very deeply. You know, I think for many weeks, I think both of us were sort of like every spare moment, we would just spend talking to our open claws and, like, you know, you know, really immersing ourselves in, like, what personal agents could be.

David Senra (3:34)

What was your initial reaction before your terror?

Alexandr Wang (3:38)

Nat, at the time, he had this, he had built this prompt to do this, like, basically, like, full psychoanalysis of yourself. There were, like, multiple waves of, like, deep psychological probing. He basically wrote this prompt for you to use in open claw. And I think that was, like, one of the very first things I did with my own open claw. It was maybe the equivalent of, like, three years of therapy, all, you know, compressed into this one moment.

David Senra (4:04)

Wait, I'm curious, why, when you get your first shot at open claw, this is one of the first things you do?

Alexandr Wang (4:09)

You know, I downloaded it, I installed it, and then Nat was like, oh, you should do this. I was like next to him. He was like, okay, I'll just do the thing you're telling me to do, and then...