{"id":806136,"date":"2026-10-18T02:00:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-18T02:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/806136\/"},"modified":"2026-10-18T02:00:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-18T02:00:14","slug":"how-alexandr-wang-won-mark-zuckerbergs-trust-and-a-100-billion-plus-ai-bet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/806136\/","title":{"rendered":"How Alexandr Wang won Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s trust\u2014and a $100 billion-plus AI bet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Zuckerberg once poured tens of billions of dollars into a metaverse that few people wanted to live in. Now he\u2019s spending even more on Muse<\/a>, Meta\u2019s personal AI agent\u2014the kind of assistant that, in Zuckerberg\u2019s case, coaches his MMA form between rounds and, in Alexandr Wang\u2019s, hunts down obscure loose-leaf teas from farms in Taiwan and Japan.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs. The Muse app launched in the U.S. on Sept. 8<\/a> and quickly became the most popular free app on Apple\u2019s App Store, topping 2.5 million downloads in about two weeks, according to Sensor Tower data cited by CNN<\/a>. On Monday, Meta followed up with Muse Wonder<\/a>, the first model from the lab that Meta calls frontier-class.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to write this check for like, I don\u2019t know, like $100 billion or $200 billion,\u201d Zuckerberg said of discussions late last year, appearing alongside Wang on the latest episode of Cheeky Pint<\/a>, the podcast hosted by Stripe cofounder John Collison. \u201cI\u2019m like, Alex, you sure this is going to work?\u201d<\/p>\n

The figure was off the cuff, but the scale is real. Meta now expects 2026 capital expenditures of $130 billion to $145 billion<\/a>, nearly double the $72.2 billion it spent last year\u2014and investors have flinched<\/a> at each increase.<\/p>\n

Wang said he heard a version of Zuckerberg\u2019s question from Meta\u2019s CFO, Susan Li, at an executive gathering in Hawaii at the end of last year. \u201cSusan pulled me aside many times,\u201d Wang said. \u201cI just want to tell you if this doesn\u2019t work, this is going to be really, really bad. It\u2019s going to be very, very bad in financial terms. I really need to impress on you that this model has to work. It has to be good. If it\u2019s good, it\u2019s all good. We\u2019re great. But if it\u2019s bad, it\u2019s really, really, really bad.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 44-minute call and the memo<\/p>\n

Between sips of Guinness\u2014a moment of apparent wincing by Zuckerberg went viral<\/a>\u2014the pair recounted how their partnership began. In April 2025, shortly after Meta\u2019s Llama 4 models landed to a lukewarm reception, Zuckerberg started reaching out for advice. (Fortune previously reported<\/a> that the two began spending more time together that month.) Wang was in a staff meeting when his phone pinged. \u201cI got the WhatsApp notification, like, \u2018Have time for a call?’\u201d Wang said. \u201cI was like, huh, interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

That call ran about 44 minutes, by Zuckerberg\u2019s recollection. Two days later, Wang sent him a long memo laying out, as Zuckerberg put it, \u201chere\u2019s what I think I would do if I were in your position.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first principle was talent density. \u201cThe very first thing is that you don\u2019t need a lot of people, and talent density is the thing that matters,\u201d Zuckerberg recalled. The second was a willingness to start from scratch. Zuckerberg said Meta was \u201cnot happy with the trajectory that we were on with Llama 4,\u201d and he was prepared to rebuild the team. He needed someone who could recruit the best researchers and convince them to leave their labs.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg said he had been quietly impressed by Wang for years. \u201cIt always felt to me like he was the sharpest entrepreneur of his generation, of the ones who I had had a chance to meet,\u201d he said. The pick still raised eyebrows. Wang had built Scale AI into a data-labeling powerhouse, but as Collison pointed out on the show, he had never trained a frontier model. When Meta named him chief AI officer, Fortune noted<\/a> that the company had chosen someone who isn\u2019t a computer scientist to lead all of its AI efforts\u2014a choice that might not sit well with its deep bench of AI PhDs.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg wasn\u2019t swayed. \u201cI talked to like all the leaders of all the labs, like all the heads of research,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I was like, no, Alex is the guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u2018supernova\u2019 recruiting push<\/p>\n

What followed was a recruiting push Zuckerberg described as \u201csupernova\u201d\u2014a frantic, months-long effort to assemble a small, elite team from inside Meta and to poach top researchers from rivals. Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI<\/a> to bring Wang aboard and reportedly dangled $100 million compensation offers<\/a> to OpenAI researchers. Zuckerberg cleared his calendar for two months. \u201cI don\u2019t think either of us slept that much for the first couple of months,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The core research team Wang built inside Meta Superintelligence Labs numbers fewer than 200 people\u2014\u201dcloser to 100,\u201d Wang said\u2014backed by larger infrastructure and product teams, at a company with roughly 75,000 employees. Wang said he cultivated a culture of \u201cinsecure overachievers,\u201d researchers who consistently under-promise and over-deliver. <\/p>\n

That bet produced Muse Spark<\/a>, the lab\u2019s first model, in April, followed by a string of updates<\/a>, and now Muse Wonder, which Wang said is state-of-the-art \u201cbased on our measurement\u201d for personal and professional agent tasks. Independent scorekeepers are a bit more measured. On Artificial Analysis\u2019s Intelligence Index, the flagship Muse Wonder Full lands roughly level with top models from OpenAI and Anthropic but a couple of points behind the leader, according to AI Weekly<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Wang also spoke to Zuckerberg\u2019s unique qualities as a leader. <\/p>\n

\u201cMark has fully internalized power laws in a way that many people have not,\u201d Wang said. \u201cOnce he internalizes certain beliefs, the speed and magnitude of willing to change prior actions and pivot towards the worldview that is consistent with those beliefs is pretty unusual.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mark Zuckerberg once poured tens of billions of dollars into a metaverse that few people wanted to live…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":806137,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,5625,1965,8658,7203,1324,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-806136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-career-advice","tag-hiring","tag-management","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-meta","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=806136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/806137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=806136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=806136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=806136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}