· 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.
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: Disappeared. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. It didn't persist, and I think a lot of people kind of had this experience, which was it was just like you would have these magic moments, but for the most part didn't like work that well, and there were all these problems, and then you know it just kind of like died down. And so part of I think the building the product, a lot of the focus of the product was just like, how do you make this into an actual reliable consumer experience that you feel comfortable putting in front of, over time, billions of people, and you can feel confident that like most of those people have an amazing experience? [00:00:00] S0: Why were you able to do that and the developers of OpenClaw were not? [00:00:00] S1: Well, first of all, I think we respect Peter Steinberger and everyone who's contributed to OpenClaw immensely. Like I think Peter is definitely a visionary. I think whatever happened in his beautiful brain that created OpenClaw is magical, and I think maybe the unglamorous part of what made Muse so magical was just really grinding out and sanding out all of the details to make the combined model plus product experience really amazing. And we did many, many iterations on the model itself. We aimed the overall model roadmap towards building towards personal superintelligence, broadly speaking, but certainly personal agents as like- [00:00:00] S0: Say more about that and how that differentiates between your other competitors. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. Well, this is kind of- [00:00:00] S0: That's actually really interesting.
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: That's actually really interesting. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. It's actually useful to go back to the moment because if you go back to the start of the year, February, Opus and Claude were way ahead in coding, way ahead of anyone else, and they were exploding. It was the beginning of the sort of like you know Anthropic takeover in the whole industry. And it was a very scary moment, I think, generally speaking, which is like, "Oh, wow, they're so ahead on coding." And then obviously they had Mythos, and they had like this clear lead. I think the conventional wisdom in the industry was that coding agents were the only form factor that mattered, or maybe the only technology that mattered, or only like capability that mattered for advanced AI. You know, there's this incredible force in the industry to just like go and crowd that use case and compete with Anthropic on coding agents. Because of our experiences and our conviction that I think formed around this idea of personal agents and the sort of taking a step back, I think the reason why we did personal superintelligence in the first place was that it was also what we believed Meta was uniquely positioned to do. And we can talk more about that, but like I think because of that- [00:00:00] S0: Well, let's talk about that now. [00:00:00] S1: Okay. [00:00:00] S0: We'll just do the weave.
· Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S1: I think one of the first things I told Mark, even before the whole Scale and Meta deal happened and everything, one of the first things I told him was, "I think Meta is actually a really special company if we have AGI or ASI or whatever you want to call it, because part of the promise of AI is that for all of us, we have a mix of things that we want to do and things that we have to do. And the promise of AGI is that we're going to spend almost none of the time doing things that we have to do because the AIs will just start doing a lot of that for us, and we can spend all of our time on things that we want to do." And for me, Meta's products represent the things that we all want to do. Like my use of Instagram or WhatsApp or Facebook, like these are products that represent what I follow my interests, I follow my hobbies, I follow people that I like, my friends and the people I care about. Like the product span of Meta encapsulates the sort of like what we want to spend our times doing sort of realm. I think on a long arc, Meta's an incredible winner through all this. That's like one of the first things that I believed about Meta and superintelligence, and then ultimately a lot of those ideas made its way into this concept of personal superintelligence. You know, you can kind of look at it a few ways. One is, what's the heritage of the company? The heritage of Meta is connecting people with their friends and family, helping them discover their interests. Like these are things that are very human. And then there's also the sort of like you can take the business lines, which is Meta has distribution to three and a half billion people using the apps every day, and the natural area where Meta was going to be successful is consumer AI.
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: It's not work, it's not coding, it's personal. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, exactly. So- Personal agents and personal AI and consumer AI, broadly speaking, were always the zones where we always felt that Meta was going to be able to do something very special. So that brings us to early 2026. [00:00:00] S0: Now you have the prototype, you have the buy-in, everybody knows, Mark's on board, and now you're doing the seven months of the difficult work of refining this product.