· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: But how'd you know it was ready to be released? [00:00:00] S1: Part of it was pretty numerical, which is like we had set... Go back to that spreadsheet of 100 plus things. We had set for each of those rows what threshold is launch blocking and above what threshold is good. We had many checkpoints that were green on 80 of the rows, but red on 20 of the rows. We knew that wasn't good enough. And we had our first model checkpoint, which was green across the board, which was a specially trained version of Muse Spark 1.3. So there was the very numerical part of it, and then there was just the experiential part, which is we tried the model. We could tell that it was a lot better than anything we had iterated with before. [00:00:00] S0: So going back to that seven-month period you were talking about, how many people were working on the product? [00:00:00] S1: Between the model work and the product work, like under 200 people total, which I guess sounds like a lot, but in big company land is- [00:00:00] S0: It's actually a lot smaller.
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: It's actually a lot smaller. [00:00:00] S1: It's not very many. It was kind of cool looking back on this and thinking about it is like, we knew this was going to be the most important product that... The whole executive team, everyone knew that this was probably going to be one of the most important products that Meta would ship this year. But we had the restraint organizationally, I think, to make sure that it was a really small, focused team working on it, and that it didn't balloon to this like, "Oh, you have huge swaths of the company working on it," because we knew it was a single work of art. Like, it required strong point of view and strong focus to pull that through into one beautiful experience. [00:00:00] S0: Say more about this. Why did you just call it a single piece of art and that you need a single perspective or point of view?
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: Say more about this. Why did you just call it a single piece of art and that you need a single perspective or point of view? [00:00:00] S1: I think one criticism of products that come from larger organizations, and I think this is even now starting to plague a lot of the AI labs, is that they become kind of this Frankenstein, almost like Cronenberg amalgamation of a bunch of different people's points of view and visions and beliefs. And it's sort of like PM hell in some sense, where every PM has a thing that they're trying to get into the product and jam into the product, and then all of that kind of blends together into this smoothie almost. People feel it as users and consumers. You can feel when a product is just like, it feels like lots of different people worked on it and there were clearly different people who were goaled differently, so they just kind of jammed it all together. Muse had to be the exact opposite, which is like, there's one clear point of view. There is one cohesive experience that we're trying to deliver to the world.
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: I love that you said that, and it just happens to be pure coincidence. I don't know when this is going to come out, but we're recording this on the 15th anniversary of Steve Jobs' death. And when you think of somebody, like consumer products that had a single point of view, you obviously think of Steve first. I've read every single book on Steve and the history of Apple, and I've done, I don't know, 15 or 20 episodes on him for my other podcast, "Founders." But one of my favorite lines to describe Steve's impact was, it says that, "Apple is just Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives." The products are to his taste, his perspective, his point of view. What he wanted to see in the world is exactly what the end user got. [00:00:00] S1: In Muse's case, Nat Friedman deserves a lot of credit. His taste and sensibilities ultimately dictated and shaped what that product became. [00:00:00] S0: Do you talk about how many people are using Muse? Are you guys talking about this publicly or no? [00:00:00] S1: We have said millions, and then I have retweeted other people who have shown graphs where you would imply that Muse is the fastest-growing consumer app of all time, consumer AI app of all time. [00:00:00] S0: So you won't say a number, though? [00:00:00] S1: We've said millions, yeah.
· Alexandr Wang, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: We've said millions, yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Well, millions could be hundreds of millions. That's also millions. So you're just not adding the beginning to that. I want to go into, you've been kind of going, and I mean this in a loving way, unhinged on X. So can you talk about your, is this marketing strategy? What is going on? I feel like there's a distinct difference in your public tweeting since Muse launch. What are you doing? [00:00:00] S1: There's a few pieces of what's happening here. [00:00:00] S0: This has got to be more fun than Scale AI, when you were building Scale AI. It has to be. We're going to talk about that later, but it has to be.
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: This has got to be more fun than Scale AI, when you were building Scale AI. It has to be. We're going to talk about that later, but it has to be. [00:00:00] S1: The past few weeks have been some of my most fun building, yeah, certainly in my career. And I think there's a few things happening. So one is, it felt important that we figured out a way to make Muse break through. It's a pretty torrential, going back to this, it's this torrential stream of updates. For most people, they're just constantly being bombarded with new AI products and startups and releases and things and models, and here's another model, and here's another product, and here's another feature, and it's just this torrential stream. We had actually large meetings where we talked about this as a team, and it was like, "We need to break through." And obviously, Meta, we have lots of distribution. We can make sure everyone knows about it, but that's not enough to make it break through in an interesting cultural or fascinating way for the world to kind of pay attention to. I separately in my life have happened to have met and become friends with memers, and I have these, I affectionately call them my schizo friends, but people who literally they spend all their day thinking about memes and the internet and understanding that. [00:00:00] S0: I have people that are obsessed with Muse, and they're also obsessed with your X feed, and they're convinced that you have like a hundred Muses coming up with memes to meme Muse. [00:00:00] S1: No, they-