Alexandr Wang launches Muse as essayists argue AI's bottleneck is desire, not intelligence
ryan_t_lowe · x · 2026-09-26
Alexandr Wang published "Why I'm Building Muse," arguing most people never voice what they truly want and that the product aims to help clarify desire.
Daniel Thorson's Substack essay "The Human Alignment Problem" builds on Nat Eliason's observation that "the limiting factor with AI is no longer intelligence, but desire." Thorson argues that once the bottleneck of the most powerful technology is what we bring to it, the conversation shifts from technical to spiritual: prompts resemble creative speech, and engaging with AI becomes an encounter with our own depths — the same question contemplative traditions have asked for millennia: what do you actually want?
ryantlowe amplified the point, stressing that getting what we want without clarifying our desires is a path to suffering.
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