Alexandr Wang, Head of Meta AI: Why I Want to Build Muse

Alexandr Wang, Chief AI Officer of Meta, recently released an open letter elaborating on the core philosophy behind his leadership in building the Muse AI assistant — enabling every ordinary person to realize their own dreams. This letter, together with Muse's strong market performance, has come into public view, further consolidating the external judgment on the value of this acquisition deal worth 14 billion US dollars.

Muse has gained strong momentum since its launch. According to Sensor Tower data, the application recorded a total of 2.8 million downloads within the first 12 days of its launch on the App Store in the United States and Canada, surpassing ChatGPT's 1.3 million downloads in the same period, and set a US record of 264,000 single-day downloads on September 19. Driven by this, Meta's market value has increased by about 234 billion US dollars in the past five trading days.

Wang wrote in the open letter that most people have never spoken out what they really want — not because they have no aspirations, but because dreams often die quietly amid cumbersome real-world obstacles. He positions Muse as everyone's "second brain", an "all-around manager" that can understand half-spoken sentences, help people make plans, send emails, find funding and remove obstacles.

An Open Letter About "Aspiration"

In the letter, Wang describes the predicament of human dreams with an almost literary touch: "Every unfulfilled aspiration is a silent tragedy of human potential." He writes that the world has long been shaped by a small number of "fanatics who somehow turn their aspirations into reality", and Muse's mission is to enable every one of the 8 billion people to truly unlock their own initiative.

In his vision, Muse is not a wish-granting genie, but a pragmatic executor — "telling you, 'This is the thing you have dreamed of all your life, let's make it happen, here's how'", and then taking action.

The release of this letter came shortly after the conclusion of the Meta Connect 2026 conference. At that launch event, Meta unveiled a series of hardware products, including Muse Charm, a standalone pocket device designed exclusively for voice interaction, Meta VR glasses weighing only 100 grams and priced at 1299 US dollars, as well as the third-generation Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 smart glasses with a starting price of 249 US dollars.

From Scale AI to Meta: Returns of a Controversial Acquisition

The way Wang joined Meta is quite dramatic in itself. In 2025, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta, acquired all employees of the popular AI startup Scale AI for 14.3 billion US dollars. Wang, founder of Scale AI, was reported to have received about 5 billion US dollars personally. This deal was regarded as an exorbitant move by some market players at that time.

Wang is the co-founder of Scale AI, a company focused on providing data annotation services for AI model training, which was once one of the highest-valued AI infrastructure companies in Silicon Valley. After Meta completed the acquisition of Scale AI in 2025, Wang took the position of Chief AI Officer of Meta, leading the company's AI product strategy.

Tech investor Adam Khoo wrote on the X platform:

"Back then people thought Zuckerberg was crazy for spending 5 billion dollars to hire Alexandr Wang. Today, Meta's new AI products developed under Wang's leadership have added about 2000 billion US dollars to the company's market value. Suddenly, spending huge sums to lock in top talents doesn't seem so crazy anymore."

This acquisition also has far-reaching significance at the strategic level. This deal effectively reversed the external impression that Meta was lagging behind in the AI field, transforming it from a "chaser" to a "leader".

Camouflage T-shirt and the $30 Outfit Philosophy

If Muse is Wang's expression at the product level, then his outfit on the Meta Connect 2026 stage unexpectedly became the output of another personal symbol.

Wang took the stage to deliver his speech that day wearing a 1990s-style camouflage T-shirt printed with a deer head pattern, paired with camouflage Crocs and black trousers. After the conference, this look quickly sparked heated discussions on the X platform, with some users speculating that the T-shirt was a Hermès item worth 800 US dollars.

Wang immediately came out to "clarify", saying that the shirt came from a second-hand store in Santa Cruz and cost him 30 US dollars, the Crocs cost about 60 US dollars, and the Calvin Klein underwear cost 5 US dollars. He described the outside speculation of luxury goods as "defamation".

According to Business Insider, this is not the first time Wang has appeared in a similar deer/camouflage style — he wore similar outfits during his previous Core Memory interview and important internal meetings. This "anti-elitist" dressing style is highly consistent with his online persona on the X platform, where he calls himself "Tweet Cannon" and continuously promotes Muse with meme-style posts, and is also regarded by some observers as a deliberately built brand image: stripping off the gloss of corporate elites and retaining the chaotic energy of a founder.

This article does not constitute personal investment advice and does not represent the position of the platform. The market is risky, and investment requires caution. Please make independent judgments and decisions.

This article is from the WeChat public account "Wall Street News", Author: Zhao Ying, published with authorization from 36Kr.