Meta's Alexandr Wang says a team under 200 built the Muse AI

Alexandr Wang is Meta's chief AI officer. He said on the podcast Founders that Meta's Muse AI shipped only after it passed a long checklist. A team of under 200 people built it. The episode was posted Sunday, Oct. 11.

For most people this is about the AI apps they may end up using. How a company decides a product is ready shapes whether it feels polished or feels stitched together.

Wang described a spreadsheet of more than 100 behaviors. For each row, the team set a level that would block the launch and a higher level that counted as good. He said many early versions of the AI were green on 80 rows and red on 20. Wang put it this way.

"We knew that wasn't good enough."

The first version that was green across the board, he said, went ahead. He also said the team could simply tell it was a lot better than anything before it.

The story behind the moment is a Benzinga on MSN piece. Its headline says Wang brought Elon Musk's lean-team playbook to Mark Zuckerberg, and that it is now a tentpole of Meta's AI strategy.

Wang said Meta kept the team small on purpose, even though everyone knew Muse was important. He thinks big companies, and now some AI labs, end up with products that blend too many people's ideas. Meta sells and runs this product itself, so the account is his own. He did not name which labs he meant.

Watch the 3 minutes where he explains how Muse was ready to launch.21:43