Meta's Muse turnaround ran on tens of thousands of employee testers under Nat Friedman

The board-deck version of Muse credits an outside leader and a company-wide test program, and it leaves out how late the product came good. Two weeks before launch, the chatbot still struggled to speak good English, according to a person directly familiar with the matter, and passing coherence tests came as a huge relief ^[11]. Earlier this year, some of Meta's top AI employees tried it and found it working poorly, one employee told Business Insider. To that person, it felt like another chatbot with a worse underlying model and extra steps ^[12].

The recovery came from Meta's own staff. Their testing produced the data Friedman's team used to improve tasks such as booking meetings and cancelling plane tickets, the incremental work Silicon Valley calls hill-climbing ^[14]. "Our researchers did a ton of work teaching agents how to choose the right tool for a job," Wang said at Connect ^[15]. Business Insider does not say whether the thousands of employees pulled onto the effort were reassigned or tested alongside their own work, or what Meta paid for the Dreamer team ^[3][4].

The trade-off in putting Muse under one outside leader is speed against friction with the rest of Meta. Zuckerberg brought Friedman in last year as part of a deal to buy a stake in his venture fund, NFDG, and Friedman and Wang cowrote a memo describing a "superintelligent personal sidekick" ^[16][17]. His website says "slow is fake," and he has pushed Meta's AI staff off slow internal tools toward external ones such as Vercel ^[20]. When OpenClaw took off this winter, he wrote a two-page memo titled "The Claw Is The Law" and bought hundreds of Mac Minis ^[21]. He also chafes with other teams across the company, one employee said ^[18]. Meta's communications chief, Andy Stone, recently called him "Nat the Truthteller" after Friedman said a report about Muse's security was written by "dummies" ^[19].

The morale gain is the part of this quarter's result most exposed next quarter. The lift employees describe follows a year of mass layoffs and employee surveillance, and it is attached to a chart position and a share price ^[7][8]. Both are under pressure. Instinct is thriving, OpenAI is widely expected to launch a rival, and privacy concerns have followed Muse's need for broad access to users' accounts ^[5][6].

Business Insider puts the skeptic's case plainly: whether Meta can sustain Muse's momentum is another question ^[22]. I think the answer depends on which part of the turnaround a leader counts on. The testing program and the task improvements it produced are process Meta now has in-house ^[13][14]. The morale gain is tied more closely to the ranking ^[8]. "Muse is busy working for millions of people because of the hard work of a bunch of people at Meta," a Meta spokesperson said, adding, "we're still cooking" ^[9].