Post Content Meta’s new AI model puts the company back in the race, though industry insiders will be closely watching how the market reacts to Muse Spark. (Image: Meta)
Meta on Thursday unveiled a new artificial intelligence model called Muse Spark after hiring Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, as the company looks to become more competitive in the AI space dominated by the likes of Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. It is the first AI model to be launched under the new AI division that Mark Zuckerberg spent billions building last year.
“Over the last nine months, Meta Superintelligence Labs rebuilt our AI stack from the ground up, moving faster than any development cycle we have run before,” Meta said in a blog post. “This initial model is small and fast by design, yet capable enough to reason through complex questions in science, math, and health. It is a powerful foundation, and the next generation is already in development.”
Called Muse Spark and originally code-named Avocado, the new AI model outperforms Meta’s previous AI models in writing and reasoning and comes close to top competitors like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, but still lags in coding. The announcement comes a day after Anthropic’s latest model, Mythos, was deemed too powerful to release due to cybersecurity risks.
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Meta’s new AI model puts the company back in the race, though industry insiders will be closely watching how the market reacts to Muse Spark. Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT, and Anthropic’s Claude currently lead the development of foundational AI models.
Meta has spent billions to create a highly specialized AI team to form a “superintelligence” lab last year under the leadership of Alexander Wang, the 29-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur whom Zuckerberg hired as chief AI officer.
Although Meta is committed to investing $600 billion and has, in recent months, used generative AI to improve its advertising business and set up new data centers to compete in the AI race, the company is nowhere near its rivals in capturing the market. OpenAI and Anthropic are now collectively valued at over $1 trillion, and Google’s Gemini technology and services have gaineda significant traction, particularly in the consumer market.
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Muse Spark will be a proprietary model, though Meta says it may open-source future versions, unlike its earlier Llama models. The company also claims improved training methods and infrastructure now allow it to build smaller AI models that match the performance of older mid-sized models while using significantly less computing power.
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Muse Spark will be available through Meta’s standalone AI app and will be coming to WhatsApp, Instagram, and its AI smart glasses in the coming weeks. The AI model has been unveiled after a series of internal delays. For a change, Meta will be experimenting with a new AI model revenue stream by offering third-party developers access to Muse Spark’s underlying technology via an API.
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