Meta's AI Chief On AI Beef, New Models And Life With Zuck - EP 71 Alex Wang

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
All right, Kylie, we've got another big guest this week.

**Kylie Robinson** (0:03)
Huge.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:04)
Alex Wang, the chief of Meta's artificial intelligence efforts. It was how many months ago?

**Kylie Robinson** (0:12)
About 10 months ago.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:13)
About 10 months ago, he was the founder, co-founder, and CEO of Scale AI. Meta sort of quasi-acquired the company, half acquired the company, and fully acquired Alex. And he's been in AI protection program since.

**Kylie Robinson** (0:33)
Yes, we haven't seen much of him whatsoever until today, on the Core Memory pod.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:38)
Yes, I'm not sure exactly why this happened, but here he is. He's going to tell us. Well, we'll find out. He's going to hopefully tell us about, they just released a new model. I'm sure we will get into some of that.
And then there are a little bit of a mystery to me about where they are philosophically on AI. Alex has always been a bit of, when he was at Scale, he always said they were Switzerland, and he was loud on some things, but not always AI itself and how he feels about it.

**Kylie Robinson** (1:13)
And they made a lot of news last year with everyone they hired for millions and millions and millions of dollars and built up this team and everyone's been waiting to see what they're going to do with all of these resources.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:25)
So we will talk about recruiting soup and all these millions of dollars. So this is this is it. This is Alex Wang's, he's emerged.

**Kylie Robinson** (1:36)
Hell yeah, brother.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:37)
I am Ashlee Vance.

**Kylie Robinson** (1:39)
And I'm Kylie Robinson.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:40)
And this is Core Memory. Alex, thank you for being here.

**Alex Wang** (2:02)
Yeah, excited to be here.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:03)
I feel like we were, we kinda texted a little bit pre-Meta happenings. We had like this kinda country music, odd text chain going. For sure.
And then I'm also, I've known Nat Friedman for a long time.

**Alex Wang** (2:22)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:23)
And then I feel like the two of you disappear.

**Alex Wang** (2:28)
Went into the foxhole.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:28)
Yeah, we're very, very quiet there. And now here you are with the new model.

**Alex Wang** (2:33)
Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:34)
Emerging.

**Alex Wang** (2:35)
Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:35)
But you guys went very quiet for a bit.

**Alex Wang** (2:38)
We, yeah, we had a lot of work to do. I mean, I think, turns out building a frontier model from scratch in nine months is a, yeah, it takes a lot of painstaking effort, but yeah, I mean, it's been really exciting to see everyone use Muse Spark, the model we released, and we have better models cooking, so it's exciting.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:00)
And so what you, I mean, you were like a San Francisco, a light San Francisco, I guess. And then, I mean, I assume you work at Menlo Park.

**Alex Wang** (3:10)
Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:10)
So did you, were you, did you have, you had to like-

**Alex Wang** (3:13)
I moved down to South Bay. Did you?
Yeah, I did.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:16)
So you're full on committed.

**Alex Wang** (3:18)
I'm full on, yeah. For me, the city now is Palo Alto.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:21)
Okay.

**Alex Wang** (3:21)
Falcon University Ave. Get a boba.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:23)
Okay. I was wondering about this. And what's like the arrangement between, I mean, the people I know best are you, Nat, Daniel Gross. I've only hung out with Zuck once or twice.
Yeah. I mean, what's the- I'm trying to paint a picture of how you guys are arranged.

**Alex Wang** (3:41)
Yeah. So basically, the whole unit is called Meta Superintelligence Labs, which I oversee, and then there's various pieces of it. So there's a unit called TBD, which is the sort of large model research lab. That I think is somewhat infamous, but that's where a lot of the leading researchers and infrastructure engineers are. They actually all technically report to me, so that's one set up. Then there's also a group called Product and Applied Research, or PAR for short. That's what Nat Friedman heads up. So they're responsible for all the products that we build and the actual deployment of these great models to the world. Then also within the overall Meta Superintelligence Labs umbrella is FAIR, which continues to do exploratory and exciting research. I'm particularly excited about a lot of their scientific research. So we've shown some pretty great work on using AI models to understand the brain, as well as using AI models to understand computational chemistry. We have built a universal model for atoms, UMA for short.