Alexandr Wang wanted to make Meta 'cool again' — and memes were part of his plan

Alexandr Wang said he had trouble focusing during recent Meta meetings.

On his mind: New memes to post about the company’s popular new AI assistant. “I would just like think of a meme and I’d be like ‘Oh God, I have to get this out,'” Wang said in a recent interview with podcaster David Senra, adding that his coworkers were “somewhat surprised” at the buzz his posts were generating. “It actually made an impact on growth,” he said of the posts, “which is kind of hilarious.” Much has been said about Meta’s chief AI officer and his chaotic X feed, which the 29-year-old has crammed with occasionally off-color yet invariably eccentric references to Muse, Meta’s personal AI assistant that sent the company’s stock soaring and redefined the market for AI tools. https://t.co/TXOR8iI4MK pic.twitter.com/NnBHKMdj8X In his interview with Senra, though, Wang said that his often spur-of-the-moment posts served a broader goal — to make Meta “cool again.” “Despite having like these incredible pieces of cultural software like Instagram and Facebook, historically, Meta was not cool,” he said. “I remembered that the internet rewards risk.” After launching on September 8, Muse shot to the top of Apple’s app store 10 days later, surpassing ChatGPT.

Meta says Muse can help users research, fill out forms, buy items online, book restaurant reservations, find a dog sitter, and connect with services such as email, calendars, Spotify, Instagram, and OpenTable.

The app marked Meta’s first successful breakthrough in AI tech, after its Llama and Spark LLM models failed to find niches already filled by widely used models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

With Muse, Meta found a largely untapped gold mine — though competing AI agents from OpenClaw and Instinct already existed in Silicon Valley circles.

Muse, however, had the advantage of coming from a popular company with several billion potential customers already signed up on Instagram and Facebook.

And the internet, weary of staid pronouncements from CEOs who were perhaps once cool but are now entering their 40s (Mark Zuckerberg is 42), welcomed the boundless energy of a young executive newly endowed with power in the AI era. “It was a lot of fun,” Wang said. “There were like a few tweets where I just didn’t think that much about it and just said, ‘Fuck it, post.'” Business Insider wants to know, by the way, how you’re using personal AI agents.