A year after Mark Zuckerberg installed young entrepreneur Alexandr Wang to revamp Meta's AI efforts, the company has released its most credible model yet, Muse Spark. The $15 billion bet on Wang, founder of data-labeling startup Scale AI, signals a radical shift in strategy at the $1.5 trillion giant.
Wang, now a powerful internal figure, has assembled an elite research team known as TBD Lab. Housed in a secure area of Meta's Menlo Park headquarters, the group works with unusual autonomy. However, critics describe his leadership as frenetic and the progress as incremental.
"The amount of work the TBD Lab was able to do in a short amount of time is very impressive," said Russ Salakhutdinov, a Carnegie Mellon professor and former Meta VP. But a former Meta AI employee countered: "The other labs are moving fast."
Muse Spark was built using some elements of Meta's older Llama 4 infrastructure, leading to tensions. The model is praised for visual understanding but trails rivals like Claude in coding.
With investors demanding revenue from massive AI spending, Meta’s future models will focus on coding, agentic tasks, and video generation. "It was a rough start," said an associate. "But he’s found his groove."