Meta unveils Muse Spark, first model from Zuckerberg’s superintelligence team
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The news: Meta has unveiled Muse Spark, its first AI model since Mark Zuckerberg tore apart and rebuilt his company’s entire AI operation.
The context: Built over nine months under the internal codename “Avocado,” the model is the first from Meta Superintelligence Labs, the new team led by chief AI officer Alexandr Wang. Wang joined Meta as part of the company’s circa USD15 billion investment in his data-labelling company Scale AI.
In the coming weeks, Muse Spark will replace existing models powering chatbots across WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, the company said. It is rolling out a shopping mode.
In a departure from Meta’s prior open-source Llama strategy, Muse Spark is a closed model.
Meta said it plans to offer a private API preview to select partners and may open-source future versions.
What they said: The launch is a test of whether the social media giant’s multibillion-dollar overhaul of its AI operations can close the gap with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
According to Meta data shared with media, Muse Spark outperformed rivals in select benchmarks on reasoning and multimodal tasks but acknowledged gaps in coding and long-horizon agentic systems.
Bloomberg cited an unnamed company executive saying model was not yet as capable as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini in all areas. Meta described it as “an early data point on our trajectory,” adding that larger models were already in development.
The outlet also said the model had been trained using third-party open-source models including Alibaba’s Qwen, as well as ones from OpenAI and Google.
For health-related applications, Meta said it had worked with more than 1,000 doctors “to curate training data that enables more factual and comprehensive responses.”
Meta shares rose as much as 9.5% after the release.
The sources: Meta release, Bloomberg, Financial Times
