---
title: Meta's AI Chief On AI Beef, New Models And Life With Zuck - EP 71 Alex Wang
sha256: 12b21ca0885cb4146ac80dd37610f6020caa6073b6fdf4b8c35bc204f899daf2
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source_url: https://www.corememory.com/p/metas-ai-chief-alex-wang-muse-spark-ai-wars
published: 2026-05-13
review_value: 7
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review_stars: 3
ingested: 2026-05-15
---
Published Time: 2026-05-13T10:03:07+00:00
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# Meta's AI Chief On AI Beef, New Models And Life With Zuck - EP 71 Alex Wang
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SPEAKER 3
 All right, Kylie, we've got another big guest this week.
0:03
SPEAKER 1
 Huge.
0:04
SPEAKER 3
 Alex Wang, the chief of Meta's artificial intelligence efforts. It was how many months ago?
0:13
SPEAKER 1
 About 10 months ago.
0:13
SPEAKER 3
 About 10 months ago, he was the founder, co-founder, and CEO of ScaleA. I met a sort of quasi-acquired Half acquired the company and fully acquired Alex. And he's been in AI protection program since going over.
0:33
SPEAKER 1
 Yes, we haven't seen much of him whatsoever until today on the Core Memory pod.
0:38
SPEAKER 3
 Yes. I'm not sure exactly why this happened, but here he is. He's going to tell us. Well, we'll find out. He's going to hopefully tell us about They just released a new model. I'm sure we will get into some of that. And then they're a little bit of a mystery to me about like where they are
0:57
 philosophically on AI. Alex has always been a bit of a When he was at scale, he was, he was, they said they were Switzerland and he was loud on some things, but not, not always AI itself and how he feels about it.
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## Meta's AI Chief On AI Beef, New Models And Life With Zuck - EP 71 Alex Wang
He's emergent 
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[Ashlee Vance](https://substack.com/@ashleevance)
May 13, 2026
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Last June, Meta pried Alex Wang away from Scale AI, the company he co-founded and ran, in a deal valued at $14 billion. Zuck could feel Meta fading in the AI race and decided that Wang was the rescue plan. He would work full-time at Meta, assemble a super team and hopefully make the company more competitive against the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet.
Wang has basically been in hiding ever since. He moved from San Francisco to the South Bay to be closer to Meta’s headquarters and has been working non-stop. Last month, the world saw the first fruits of the revitalized AI effort in the form of Meta’s new Muse Spark model. And now Wang is speaking for the first time about the model, Meta’s grand AI ambitions and all the happenings over the last year in an exclusive interview here on the Core Memory podcast.
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Wang arrived at our studio sporting a mullet and a powerful whitetail deer camouflage shirt. He was in good spirits and tried his best to convince us that Meta can catch up to its rivals.
We hit on his personal beef with Sam Altman, Zuck delivering soup to AI recruits, the incredible pay packages Meta has been handing out, the vast amount of work Meta still has to do and the Meta AI hierarchy that includes all-stars like Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Shengjia Zhao, who seems to have blocked me on X for reasons I know nothing about.
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Core Memory is a podcast about science and technology hosted by best-selling author and filmmaker Ashlee Vance. 
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Core Memory is a podcast about science and technology hosted by best-selling author and filmmaker Ashlee Vance. Vance has spent the past two decades chronicling advances in science and tech for publications like The Economist, The New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek. Along with the stories, he's written best-selling books like Elon Musk’s biography, made an Emmy-nominated tech TV show watched by millions and produced films for HBO and Netflix. The goal has always been to bring the tales of complex technology and compelling people to the public and give them a path into exceptional and unusual worlds they would not normally have a chance to experience.
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0:57
 philosophically on AI. Alex has always been a bit of a When he was at scale, he was, he was, they said they were Switzerland and he was loud on some things, but not, not always AI itself and how he feels about it.