Meta Tests Ambitions With New AI Model

“Meta Platforms announced a new large language model on Wednesday, its first major new artificial-intelligence model in more than a year.

 

The rollout of the model, called Muse Spark, is a critical moment for Meta, which has spent billions of dollars hiring AI talent in a bid to catch up to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.

 

The leading labs have been putting out models at an accelerating pace.

 

In a departure from its previous models, which were open-source, Muse Spark is a closed model that will power Meta's AI chatbot and AI features within it.

 

The company said it planned to release a private preview of the model to a few partners via an application programming interface, or API, which allows developers to build on top of existing software, and at some later point might open-source some versions of the model.

 

Open-sourcing an AI model gives the public access to some parts of the code and other architecture behind the model.

 

According to Meta's internal benchmark tests, Muse Spark outscored Google's Gemini on some tests and was competitive with models from OpenAI and Anthropic on others. Muse Spark significantly outscored xAI's Grok on most tests.

 

The company said the addition of Muse Spark has made Meta AI more effective at answering health-related questions, one of the top consumer uses of AI.

 

"Meta just did a step change from Llama 4 to this," said Rayan Krishnan, chief executive of Vals AI, an independent startup that does testing of new frontier models and tested Muse Spark ahead of its announcement. "They're now a competitive lab. If the rate of progress stays, it's not hard to imagine them producing a state-of-the-art model in a short period of time."

 

However, Krishnan said, "the model is still underperforming on coding, so I would expect that to be a domain where they double down in the future."

 

Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg managed expectations for the model on an earnings call in January.

 

"I expect our first models will be good but more importantly will show the rapid trajectory that we're on, and then I expect us to steadily push the frontier over the course of the year as we continue to release new models," Zuckerberg said.

 

He echoed that sentiment on Wednesday, saying "we plan to release increasingly advanced models that push the frontier of intelligence and capabilities, including new open source models."

 

Meta's stock rose 6.5% to close at $612.42 in trading on Wednesday.

 

Colin Sebastian, a senior research analyst at Baird, called the announcement an important milestone on a longer road to "better monetization and more user engagement."

 

"The next steps are certainly also important. Do we see improvement in the core apps? Are they able to convince users to use Meta AI for things that they're using ChatGPT and Gemini for today?" Sebastian said.

 

The announcement represents a milestone for Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI CEO whom Zuckerberg hired as part of a $14 billion deal and put to work overseeing Meta's new AI efforts last summer.

 

Wang's hiring followed the disappointing release of Meta's previous model, called Llama 4.

 

The company was accused of -- and later admitted to -- gaming a third-party benchmark that is used to rank various models against each other on performance.

 

It also delayed the rollout of its biggest model, called Behemoth, which it never ultimately released.” [1]

 

1. Meta Tests Ambitions With New AI Model. Bobrowsky, Meghan.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 09 Apr 2026: B1.