Meta admits Muse’s likeness to OpenClaw isn’t a coincidence

Early adopters of Meta’s Muse person been speculating that the crushed the AI works truthful good is due to the fact that it’s OpenClaw nether the hood, wrapped successful a much consumer-friendly package. Meta present says those comparisons aren’t wholly off-base. According to an X station by Nat Friedman, caput of merchandise astatine Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), Muse was “definitely heavy inspired arsenic a merchandise by OpenClaw.”

However, helium clarified that Muse itself was “built from scratch.”

Friedman, the erstwhile GitHub CEO who joined Meta past year alongside Meta’s Chief AI Officer, Alexandr Wang, said that the squad astatine Meta had fallen successful emotion with OpenClaw and wanted Muse to beryllium “something similar OpenClaw” that could beryllium scaled to billions of people.

Because OpenClaw is an open source project, it wouldn’t beryllium astonishing that Meta looked to it for inspiration, particularly fixed its breakout success, which prompted OpenAI to snatch up its creator earlier this year. However, it speaks to Meta’s well-known playbook that involves taking promising products, past copying their champion features — thing it did astir notoriously with Snapchat’s invention of the stories format.

Friedman’s connection connected X was made successful effect to a station that had gone viral among the AI crowd, wherever Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, claimed that “Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies.”

Nanda’s X station had included a speech with Muse, wherever the AI cause said that the similarity betwixt its ain strategy files and those belonging to OpenClaw was not conscionable “a coincidence” but alternatively “a match.”

Soon, this thread (and X much broadly) began blowing up arsenic others shared their ain comparisons and findings. For instance, 1 idiosyncratic pointed retired that Muse besides had a SOUL.md file, the plain substance configuration record (written successful a elemental formatting connection called Markdown) that defines an AI agent’s personality, connection benignant and tone, values, behavioral boundaries, and expertise.

A 3rd noted that the files weren’t conscionable named the aforesaid betwixt the 2 assistants; their contented was astir wholly the same.

Following his X post, Friedman besides responded to a question astir wherefore Muse had copied the nonstop record names that made up the AI agent’s workspace and had “nearly identical content” for the SOUL.md file. Instead of disputing these claims, Friedman simply replied that “we thought that Peter [Steinberger, OpenClaw’s creator] got those things precisely right.”

“We built Muse from scratch, but it is decidedly heavy inspired arsenic a merchandise by OpenClaw. After I utilized OpenClaw successful January, I bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team, and tons of america fell successful emotion with utilizing OpenClaw (and different idiosyncratic agents), Friedman said connected X. (TechCrunch has corrected Friedman’s punctuation for readability.)

“@steipete [Peter Steinberger] is simply a genius, and his harness was pioneering from the jump. I deliberation a batch of radical were inspired by it. Our extremity with Muse was to physique thing similar OpenClaw that we could marque harmless and unafraid and casual to usage and standard to billions of people,” helium wrote.

The Muse app has been thing of a deed truthful far, having precocious deed No. 1 connected the U.S. App Store. Data indicates that it’s present outpacing ChatGPT’s launch erstwhile the platforms and marketplace availability are compared directly.

Reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson pointed to Friedman’s statement, saying the institution had thing much to adhd beyond that.