Meta admits Muse’s likeness to OpenClaw is not a coincidence

Early adopters of Meta’s Muse have been speculating that the rationale the AI works so effectively is as a result of it’s OpenClaw underneath the hood, wrapped in a extra consumer-friendly bundle. Meta now says these comparisons aren’t completely off-base. According to an X submit by Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), Muse was “undoubtedly closely impressed as a product by OpenClaw.”

However, he clarified that Muse itself was “constructed from scratch.”

Friedman, the previous GitHub CEO who joined Meta last year alongside Meta’s Chief AI Officer, Alexandr Wang, mentioned that the group at Meta had fallen in love with OpenClaw and needed Muse to be “one thing like OpenClaw” that may very well be scaled to billions of individuals.

Because OpenClaw is an open source undertaking, it wouldn’t be stunning that Meta appeared to it for inspiration, particularly given its breakout success, which prompted OpenAI to snatch up its creator earlier this yr. However, it speaks to Meta’s well-known playbook that includes taking promising merchandise, then copying their best features — one thing it did most notoriously with Snapchat’s invention of the stories format.

Friedman’s assertion on X was made in response to a submit that had gone viral among the many AI crowd, the place Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, claimed that “Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies.”

Nanda’s X submit had included a dialog with Muse, the place the AI agent mentioned that the similarity between its personal system information and people belonging to OpenClaw was not simply “a coincidence” however fairly “a match.”

Soon, this thread (and X extra broadly) started blowing up as others shared their very own comparisons and findings. For occasion, one individual pointed out that Muse additionally had a SOUL.md file, the plain textual content configuration file (written in a easy formatting language known as Markdown) that defines an AI agent’s character, communication type and tone, values, behavioral boundaries, and experience.

A third noted that the information weren’t simply named the identical between the 2 assistants; their content material was virtually completely the identical.

Following his X submit, Friedman additionally responded to a query about why Muse had copied the precise file names that made up the AI agent’s workspace and had “practically equivalent content material” for the SOUL.md file. Instead of disputing these claims, Friedman merely replied that “we thought that Peter [Steinberger, OpenClaw’s creator] obtained these issues precisely proper.”

“We constructed Muse from scratch, however it’s undoubtedly closely impressed as a product by OpenClaw. After I used OpenClaw in January, I purchased lots of of Mac minis for the MSL group, and many us fell in love with utilizing OpenClaw (and different private brokers), Friedman mentioned on X. (TechCrunch has corrected Friedman’s punctuation for readability.)

“@steipete [Peter Steinberger] is a genius, and his harness was pioneering from the leap. I feel lots of people had been impressed by it. Our aim with Muse was to construct one thing like OpenClaw that we might make secure and safe and straightforward to make use of and scale to billions of individuals,” he wrote.

The Muse app has been one thing of a success up to now, having not too long ago hit No. 1 on the U.S. App Store. Data signifies that it’s now outpacing ChatGPT’s launch when the platforms and market availability are in contrast immediately.

Reached for remark, a Meta spokesperson pointed to Friedman’s assertion, saying the corporate had nothing extra so as to add past that.