Mark Zuckerberg has revealed the moment he nearly second-guessed the biggest bet of his career. Appearing on the Cheeky Pint podcast with Meta's chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, the Meta CEO recalled weighing the spending ahead and putting a blunt question to Wang.
"We're gonna write this cheque for like a hundred billion dollars or two hundred billion dollars," Zuckerberg said. "I'm like, 'Alex, you sure this is gonna work?'"Wang didn't pretend he was. The Scale AI founder, who now runs Meta Superintelligence Labs, said that towards the end of 2025 he had little more than "a vibe report" on research progress and "some plots" to back it up. "I was feeling good about it, but it was certainly not clear at all that it was going to work," he admitted.
The admission comes just as Meta has unveiled Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, the most capable AI models to come out of Wang's lab so far.
Meta CFO Susan Li warned Wang that a failed AI model would hit hard
The pressure wasn't only coming from Zuckerberg. Wang recalled a Meta leadership offsite in Hawaii at the end of last year, where the whole executive team had gathered. On the Cheeky Pint episode, he said CFO Susan Li pulled him aside "many times" with the same warning."I just want to tell you if this doesn't work, this is going to be really, really bad.
It's going to be very, very bad in financial terms," Wang said, recalling Li's words. "If it's good, it's all good. We're great. But if it's bad, it's really, really, really bad."Zuckerberg didn't push back when Wang joked that Li had scared him a bit too. He put it down to the reality of starting a frontier AI lab from scratch, where "the ante is extremely high." Among the executives, Wang added, the running joke was simply that they hoped it would all work out.
The $14.3 billion Scale AI deal made Wang the face of Meta's AI reset
Wang's arrival was a gamble in itself. After Llama 4 fell flat with developers in April 2025, Zuckerberg paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI that June and brought Wang in to lead the new lab. Wang reportedly received around $5 billion as part of the deal.The first year was rocky. Muse Spark, released in April as Meta's first proprietary foundation model, drew a lukewarm response from developers, with one startup CEO dismissing it as a "yawn".
Meta's stock spent much of the year near the bottom of the megacap pack, and around 8,000 jobs were cut in May. The ad business kept the company steady, with first-quarter revenue up 33% to $56.3 billion.
Muse app and Muse Wonder models show Meta's AI bet is gaining ground
The mood shifted in September. Meta's Muse AI agent app climbed to the top of Apple's App Store, crossing 2.8 million downloads in its first 12 days across the US and Canada, according to Sensor Tower. It also set a US daily record of 264,000 downloads on September 19.
Days later at Meta Connect, the company showed off Muse Charm, a pocket device built purely for voice chats with the agent.On Monday came Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full. Meta says both scored nearly as well as Anthropic's most advanced models on reasoning, writing and coding tests, though those numbers come from its own data. Muse Wonder Full is limited to subscribers of Meta's Muse Code tool, while Muse Wonder is also available through the Meta Model API.
Internally codenamed Watermelon, the models were held back after Meta paused pre-training in July.
Zuckerberg teased them over the weekend on an Instagram livestream, while barbecuing.Wang once called Muse Spark an "appetizer" for bigger models. Those models are here now, and he has more than a vibe report to show his boss. Whether they earn back a cheque that size is the question Susan Li will keep asking.