From the phone conversation, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to spend a large amount of money to invite young billionaire Alexandr Wang to lead the AI ​​department.

In last weekend's episode of the Cheeky Pint podcast, Mark Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, Director of the Meta Super Intelligence Laboratory (MSL), shared about their close relationship.

Meta and Scale AI, the company Wang co-founded in 2016 when he was just 19 years old, began collaborating in 2019. At that time, the startup was a data provider serving Meta's artificial intelligence development efforts. In 2024, when Scale AI raised $1 billion in Series F funding, Meta was also among the investors, buying about 500,000 shares of this startup.

In April 2025, Meta's Llama 4 model was released but received not very positive feedback. Soon after, Zuckerberg began contacting Wang for advice.

Wang said that while he was in a staff meeting, his phone rang with a text message. "I got a WhatsApp notification: Do you have time to talk on the phone?. I thought: Oh, that's interesting."

Zuckerberg shared that the consulting call lasted about 44 minutes. Two days later, Wang sent back a long text, describing what he would do if he were in boss Meta's position.

The first principle is to manage talent density. "First of all, you don't need too many people, talent density is really important," Zuckerberg recalled.

The second principle is to be willing to start over. CEO Meta said the company was not satisfied with the then direction of Llama 4 and he was ready to rebuild the team. He needed someone who could recruit the best researchers and convince them to leave their labs and move to Meta.

According to The Information, Zuckerberg and Wang spent more time together that month. CEO Meta invited Wang to his home in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto to meet, and highly trusted the young founder's opinion.

"I've always felt that Wang is the sharpest businessman of his generation, among the people I've had the opportunity to meet," Zuckerberg said, revealing that he has been impressed with Wang for many years.

In the middle of last year, Meta spent $14.3 billion to buy 49% of Scale AI shares to invite Wang to lead the artificial intelligence development team, causing controversy. Wang built Scale AI into a leading data labeling company, but is not a computer scientist and has never trained an advanced model.

Amid conflicting opinions, Zuckerberg did not waver. "I talked to almost every leader of the labs, every head of research. And I always thought: No, Alex is the right fit," he affirmed.

After Wang joined, Meta conducted an aggressive recruitment campaign lasting several months to gather a small, elite group from within Meta and top researchers from rival companies with attractive salaries and incentives. "I think we both slept very little in the first few months," Zuckerberg said.

Currently, the core research team that Wang built at MSL is just over 100 people, supported by larger product and infrastructure teams in the 75,000-employee social networking company. Wang said he has built a culture of "insecure high achievers," researchers who make modest promises but deliver more than expected.

Zuckerberg and Wang's gamble led to the birth of Muse Spark, MSL's first model, in April. The Muse application continued to be launched on September 8 in the US, and can automatically perform tasks such as booking tables, booking airline tickets, shopping, sending emails, filling out forms, looking up information, finding pet sitters or connecting to Spotify, Instagram, OpenTable services.

After a week, the virtual assistant climbed to number one in the free app rankings on the App Store in the US, surpassing ChatGPT and receiving many positive reviews. CNN cited data from the Sensor Tower platform showing that, after two weeks, the application reached 2.5 million downloads. Following this success, early last week, Meta launched Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, which were introduced as advanced AI models.

Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO of Arena - an open platform specializing in evaluating AI models, commented that Meta has made significant progress under Wang's leadership. "They're not as good as the models from Anthropic and OpenAI, but the progress is huge. All thanks to Wang," Angelopoulos told Financial Times.

A person who worked with Wang and Zuckerberg said that the billionaire born in 1997 is reminiscent of a younger version of boss Meta, without the "scars" from a series of legal disputes or not-so-positive Hollywood movies.

"Mark has a much more pessimistic view of his influence and position in popular culture. Alex hasn't been through that much turmoil," this person told Financial Times.

Another person who worked with Wang also commented: "He sometimes considers himself a second-class citizen in the AI ​​field. Now he is proving that he can be on par with Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and others."

According to Financial Times, Zuckerberg has always maintained that Wang is best suited to lead the AI ​​development effort at Meta and gives him freedom of action that few people in the company have. Some experts assess that Wang could be a potential candidate to succeed Zuckerberg in the future.

Thu Thao summary