A 44-minute call and a memo: How Alexandr Wang won Mark Zuckerberg’s trust—and a $100 billion-plus AI bet
Source: Fortune ·
Meta’s CEO and his 29-year-old chief AI officer revealed on Stripe cofounder John Collison’s podcast how one phone call became Meta Superintelligence Labs, and why the company’s CFO warned that failure would be “very, very bad in financial terms.”
From the source
Mark Zuckerberg once poured tens of billions of dollars into a metaverse that few people wanted to live in. Now he’s spending even more on Muse, Meta’s personal AI agent—the kind of assistant that, in Zuckerberg’s case, coaches his MMA form between rounds and, in Alexandr Wang’s, hunts down obscure loose-leaf teas from farms in Taiwan and Japan. Those are a couple of the favorite use cases of Zuckerberg and Wang, the 29-year-old MIT dropout and Scale AI cofounder Zuckerberg tapped last year to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs. The Muse app launched in the U.S. on Sept. 8 and quickly became the most popular free app on Apple’s App Store, topping 2.5 million downloads in about two weeks, according to Sensor Tower data cited by CNN. On Monday, Meta followed up with Muse Wonder, the first model from the lab that Meta calls frontier-class. “We’re going to write this check for like, I don’t know, like $100 billion or $200 billion,” Zuckerberg said of discussions late last year, appearing…