· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: Tell me the history of Muse.
· Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S1: The first thing to start with is probably 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 worked together with him closely on, called "Personal Superintelligence." And the whole idea was, 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 kind of 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-training the model, you have to build a whole stack for that. It's a very lengthy end-to-end process, kind of this whole production line. At the start of this year, Opus 4.5 obviously really caused many people, including us, to sort of see what the future of agents could be or was, and really brought the sort of potential of agents to the foreground. And OpenClaw was happening at the start of the year. Nat Friedman, who I work 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. I think he really went all in. He trusted it entirely. He's told some of these stories that he had a Stripe sessions interview where he talked about some of this, where he told his OpenClaw that he wanted to drink more water, and then his OpenClaw would watch him in security footage to make sure that he was drinking water and tell him, "Good job." And he had many, many crazy stories like this. And it also makes you realize, oh, there's something quite magical about what's happening here.
· Alexandr Wang, David Senra
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, early adopter Nat Friedman is 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 helped create GitHub Copilot and many other things. So, that was a clear signal. It was like, okay, there's clearly something pretty magical about personal agents, generally speaking. But when you actually kind of trust the personal agent and really bring it into your life, it has the ability to do so many things. And after hearing all of these crazy stories, I started using it very deeply. I think for many weeks, I think both of us were sort of like, every spare moment we would just spend talking to our OpenClaws and really immersing ourselves in what personal agents could be. [00:00:00] S0: What was your initial reaction? Euphoria or terror? [00:00:00] S1: Nat, at the time, he had built this prompt to do this basically full psychoanalysis of yourself. There were multiple waves of deep psychological probing. He basically wrote this prompt for you to use in OpenClaw. And I think that was one of the very first things I did with my own OpenClaw. It was maybe the equivalent of three years of therapy all compressed into this one moment. [00:00:00] S0: Wait, I'm curious. Why, when you get your first shot at OpenClaw, this is one of the first things you do?
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: Wait, I'm curious. Why, when you get your first shot at OpenClaw, this is one of the first things you do? [00:00:00] S1: I downloaded it, I installed it, and then Nat was like, "Oh, you should do this." I was next to him. He was like, "Okay, I'll just do the thing you're telling me to do." And then- [00:00:00] S0: Okay. [00:00:00] S1: ... and then it was this crazy experience. [00:00:00] S0: Wait, say more about the crazy experience, though.
· Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S1: Oh, well, it was just very intense. Again, it was like three years of therapy, because it was just successive rounds of deep psychological probing, because it had other information about me. It had access to my email and access to a bunch of my photos, and it could go and look up other information and sort of pull it all together. I was very vulnerable through that process. This was in February. Both of us, I think, had come to this joint conclusion that there's clearly something really special happening here. And we both wrote memos at that time. I wrote a memo about, and both of these we kind of sent up through the Meta board, because for whatever reason, it was board season. I wrote a memo about how I felt that in many ways this was the final consumer product, and that the superagent was something that was, as far as consumer products went, a clear endpoint in many ways. And then he wrote one called, he wrote actually two, which had very memorable names, "The Claw is the Law" and "Trust is a Must," which ultimately defined a lot of the core of how we built these products. So we came to this conclusion, this was in February, there was something very important here. And then we built, our teams, we built a prototype within a week, maybe two weeks, and demoed it to the board. It was this very fast cycle. And many of the decisions that made its way into the final Muse product were present in the first prototype. The Jolly Bot was there. The early version of the Muse Charm was in that very first meeting. Not all of the ideas and not all the tabs were there, but a lot of them were present. Then from there, obviously that was February, we launched the product seven months later, was the really, really hard process of taking- This you know prototype where it like sometimes worked and was magical, but most of the time didn't work and would constantly break. And like going from there to something that would be highly reliable like you know kind of like a beautiful crafted consumer product that we felt confident as a contribution to the consumer world. And that was like this very lengthy and quite painful process. And I think-
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: Before we get there, I want to go back to the idea that you wrote the prototype. You guys created the prototype in like one to two weeks. You show it to the board. What's Mark's role in all this? [00:00:00] S1: He was like experiencing the sort of like euphoria/terror of the product at the same time as all of us. I think he's talked about this in various interviews, but like I think he used it for a bunch of things around the home, and he was using it with his kids, and he used it in his MMA training. Like he had it watch videos of himself doing MMA training and like we would give him tips on like how to improve. There were like some staff meetings. And by the way, like you know this kind of became a thing for much of the the Meta team was like having a staff meeting and saying like, "What were the crazy experiences that you had with your agent?" Again, this was back in February. It's very interesting to kind of think back to this whole cycle because obviously the OpenClaw phenomena, it peaked and then- [00:00:00] S0: Disappeared.