I don't get the comments trashing this. If it slightly beats or even matches Opus 4.6, it means Meta is capable of building a model competitive with the leading AI company. Sure, they spent a lot of money and will have on-going costs. But how much more work would it take to turn that into a coding agent people are willing to try (and pay for) along side their usage of a collection of agents (Claude, Codex, etc)? Also means Meta doesn't have to pay another company to use a SATA model across all their products (including IG and WhatsApp, vr) which will matter to their balance sheet long term (despite the constant r&d spend).

The real question for me, if we assume they once again have a competitive frontier model, is what this means for Meta's strategy now. In particular, have they abandoned all their philosophy of the open ecosystem / open model play they were pursuing before?

While it's true, llama4 sucked, I still can't help feeling they have lost ground compared to where they would have been if they maintained that strategy. Due to llama, they were considered a peer with the other frontier model providers. Now they are not even in the conversation. It would take an incredible shift in performance to make me even consider using their new model. They may have a model, but the other providers have been busy building whole ecosystems around their tech which Meta has none of.

Maybe they could dump $1b into OpenCode or something and reignite the open ecosystem play with an open harness. They need something to get back in the conversation, if that's where they want to be. Otherwise, it will just be another closed, hidden proprietary AI model driving user facing Meta apps, but which nobody else cares about.

Pelicans: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/8/muse-spark/

I also had a poke around with the tools exposed on https://meta.ai/ - they're pretty cool, there's a Code Interpreter Python container thing now and they also have an image analysis tool called "container.visual_grounding" which is a lot of fun.

This really reinforces the idea that the AI race and the Railroad Mania of the 19th century are very similar.

So many different companies are going to have similarly powerful ai that there will be no moat around it and it will be cheap. They will never earn their investment back.

> Muse Spark is a natively multimodal reasoning model with support for [...] visual chain of thought [...].

Do they mean "the chain of thought is visible to the user" (ie. not hidden like ChatGPT), or "the medium of the chain of thought is not text, but visuals" (ie. thinking in images).

I'd guess the former, since it wouldn't be economical to generate transient images, just for thinking. But I'm not sure why they'd highight that in that case. If it were the second thing, that'd be extremely interesting. The first model not to think in text.

Ran some of my internal benchmarks against this and I'm very unimpressed. I don't think this moves them into the OAI v Anthropic v Gemini conversation at all.

Major analytical errors in their response to multiple of my technical questions.

Comes impressively close to GPT 5.4 / Gemini 3.1 Pro / Opus 4.6! Mostly behind OpenAI on coding/agentic benchmarks, behind Google on text reasoning, behind Anthropic on Humanity's Last Exam with tools (surprisingly the only benchmark where Anthropic leads currently).

Meta hasn’t fully caught up, but they came close and I think can solidly claim to be a frontier lab again. I’d call it a 3.5 horse race right now, and hopefully their next model improves. More model competition is good!

Poor Grok 4.2 should probably be dropped from the table.

Personal as in Meta gets your personal data so they can sell you more ads.

Meta is in a weird spot. They caught up late to the game and instead of releasing llama as a chat bot they open sourced it, precisely because they lost the mind share. They thought chatbot is not their product and I am sure they are regretting it now. Mark is obsessed with becoming the android of something and he poured billions into the metaverse thinking he is first and failed. He then open sourced llama and wanted to be the android of llms. He ended up enabling groq but it didn’t benefit meta directly at all. They have no revenue or mind share path from llms but continue to pour billions into it. The only 1-1 mapping is with the glasses but that is a tough fit for the company given they are extremely allergic to privqcy and security.

Not sure what this is now.

The hero image on the linked page, which consists of a muted teal background with the words "Introducing Muse Spark", weighs in at 3,5MB. I don't even...

"Muse Spark is available now, and Contemplating mode will be rolling out gradually in meta.ai."

How does one get their hands on these models? They are not open-source, right? I go to meta.ai, but it's just a chat interface---no equivalent to codex or claud code? Can you use this through OpenCode? Is meta charging for model access, or is the gathering of chat data a sufficiently large tithe?

Kinda off topic but I wonder why they picked this name, knowing of Nvidia's Spark. They're different products, obviously, but the potential for confusion is real as both brands are competing for mindshare in the AI space. I opened this story expecting to read they'd deployed on a cluster made of Spark machines or somesuch.

How is that Meta spent so much money for talent and hardware, but the model barely matches Opus 4.6?

Especially, looking at these numbers after Claude Mythos, feels like either Anthropic has some secret sauce, or everyone else is dumber compared to the talent Anthropic has

We all know it... but I think they were very bold in this warning about using your private messages to train public models. _Your messages with AIs will be used to improve AI at Meta. Don't share information, including sensitive topics, about others or yourself that you don't want the AI to retain and use_

The second paragraph starts "Muse Spark is the first step on our scaling ladder and the first product of a ground-up overhaul of our AI efforts. To support further scaling, we are making strategic investments..."

This article is about Meta, not about the user. Who signs off on these? Is the intended audience other people at Meta, not the user?

Genuine question: Why release this the day after Mythos? It does not appear SOTA (just based on benchmarks). OpenAI will likely release Spud tomorrow.

It is unfortunate that they decided to stop doing open-weight releases.

What could have been interesting has been reduced to simply another subpar LLM release.

This would have been an amazing release 6 months ago. But the industry moves so fast, this is a trite release. Maybe it’s best for Meta to sell their superintelligence division. I don’t think Zuck’s vision is particularly compelling.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but definitely seems to be SOTA. Although looking at it's ARC-AGI-2 score it's reasoning isn't very good. I suspect it's got the benefits of scale but lacks that human added element, understandable considering they claim to be building it from the ground up. This should come in time if they have a good team. In real life, I'd imagine one would worry about overfitting when using it.

(I'm not using it as I'm not agreeing to their ad terms).

Uploading images requires logging in. Logging in is broken. It redirects to https://meta.ai/?error=Token%20exchange%20failed and doesn't show any error message. Impressive.

The "AIME Evolution" graph seems interesting. I wonder if other labs are doing this too to improve the reasoning performance of their models.

> Think longer to solve harder problems > Compress > Think longer again

I would like someone to tell me how stupid I am. If I were Meta/Zuck I'd open source a great model the moment my company developed it. This just looks like a pitch to investors, otherwise.

What is the "BioTIER-refuse" thing mentioned in the "Bioweapons Refusal" graph?

I Googled it and found absolutely nothing.

Well, to be honest, I got 100% of websites containing the French word "boîtier" (box) with a typo.

Even on Google Scholar, the closest match is "BioTiER (Biological Training in Education and Research) Scholars Program", which is at least 10 years old and has nothing to do with that.

Is that an AI-generated image with an AI-generated name that has no physical existence?

Question: since they've rebooted their approach to AI... have they given up on open models? There's no mention of open source or open weights or access to the models beyond their hosted services.

Congrats to the Meta team on being model #800 on the Models Table, I suppose.

https://lifearchitect.ai/models-table/

Will experiment with the model. But I am scared of sharing any information with the Zuck ecosystem.

"we hope to open-source future versions of the model."

Love to see it. Cheers!

Looks like it needs a meta account? As soon you hit enter it wants to log-in. I guess I won't try this any time soon. :)

Looks alright for a "first" but there's no reason for anyone to really use until they open source it.

https://meta.ai/share/pe4HxOfv2Bp

Finding a little bit tricky to evaluate because the harness is unfortunately very, very bad (e.g. search is awful). Can't wait to try this in some real external services where we can see how it performs for real.

Definitely getting ordinary high-quality results, overall. But hard to test agentic behavior and hard to test prose quality, even, when just working off of the default chat interface.

One thing that stands out is that _for_ the quality it feels very, very fast. Perhaps it's just only very lightly loaded right now, but irrespective it's lovely to feel.

I'm quite impressed with the tone overall. It definitely feels much more like Opus than it does, like, GPT or Grok in the sense that the style is conversational, natural and enjoyable.

So this is why Anthropic rushed the weirdest "pre-responsible-disclosure-totally-not-for-marketing" announcement yesterday? To make sure Spark doesn't steal their thunder? (Spark beats Opus 4.6 on some benchmarks...). Or did I become a bitter cynical old man.

> Muse Spark is available today at meta.ai and the Meta AI app. We’re opening a private API preview to select users.

Meta back in the commercial race is actually exciting, despite not being a fan of the company.

Sarcasm aside, tried it (with instant mode), it's an impressive model.

It nailed all the ChatGPT meme gotchas (walk to the carwash, Alice 50 brothers, upside down cup, R's in strawberry, which number is bigger, 9.11 or 9.9?)

I guess all that money poaching OpenAI / Anthropic talent went somewhere...

Now, would I use "Meta Muse Code" or "Muse CoWork" if I have to have a facebook account to all of my developers? Maybe not.

Would I use it via an API key? I might, depends on the pricing!

Saying nothing about the actual performance of this model, it does strike me how .... minimal(?) this announcement is. Their safety section is like 2 paragraphs about bioweapons. Go look at the reports for OpenAI and Anthropic's model releases. It's like 50+ pages of tests, examples, reports, and benchmarks across a bunch of safety and wellfare metrics.

If Meta wants to be seen as a cutting edge massive lab they need to come across as one instead of looking like a school project version of a frontier model.

pelican riding a bicycle (svg): https://files.catbox.moe/u5yc0x.png

Personal Superintelligence made me think this was an open-source model being released and I was excited. Then I continued reading and I'll just wait until the model comes out.

Sounds like a good effort. They are choosing to focus on multi-modality - perhaps they are taking a different route here to Anthropic.

I don't like that I need to login to my FB/Instagram account to access this.

Benchmarks are meaningless until the pelican benchmark comes out: https://simonwillison.net/

Can't login. No error message in the UI. But the URL changes to "https://www.meta.ai/?error=Token%20exchange%20failed".

Kinda crazy, it really felt like Meta had the lead in LLMs, especially during the early LLaMa days. What happened for them to fall so far behind? I don’t get how LLaMa 4 was such a big train wreck and they couldn’t correct the course like Google.

Oh good, if they built a lab, I’m sure they took the time the precisely define what they mean by super intelligence? Right? …

so glad its beating all the others on bioweapons refusal. this is what i most wanted out of the latest SOTA model

Looks like a lightweight article. But memory usage went from 316MB -> 502 MB when I hit refresh. Not sure why? Any one have any ideas? Why does it need half a gig of ram in the first place?

I am already somewhat concerned with companies like Anthropic and especially OpenAI having personal data via chats. Typing that sort of information into a Meta AI product feels completely irresponsible. You could make some very sophisticated ads/psyop attacks with data from daily ai chats.

I doubt its better than Opus and even if it was its not worth the privacy concerns.

I'm cautiously waiting for the feedback from the first users. Meta has produced a lot of great models (LLama), maybe this is a comeback... but I'm cautious, as the jump in the quality is almost too high.

Also, I think people aren't used that using such models requires meta.ai or meta ai app.

https://meta.ai/ this is where you can try it seems like the API is not publicly accessable yet. I feel they are very late to the game and do not show value to customers over other models.

This looks like a very interesting model and very promising, especially after llama lost so much ground recently. I hope they release the weights

So Meta is not releasing open source models anymore?

Litmus test: what % of meta engineers are using muse vs Claude code? Last i heard it was mostly claude code. Tell you everything you need to know about how serious these benchmarks are.

I can't login. It sends me always the same code and it's not correct for them

Sad to see it's not going to be open source.

One word: distillation

I'm struck by all these independent announcements saying "look at our new model that we only spent $N Billion in acquisitions and hardware time to build and operate that's just like those other ones but this one is ours." Because if any of these companies would simply pool resources and work together, and if the government actively participated in providing funds, they'd be able to accelerate AI so much faster. It all feels incredibly wasteful. But I guess that's communism or something.

I have to create meta account to access. No thanks.

Hoping the benchmarks are correct this time...

So does this confirm the end of llama?

NOTHING about this is personal! No weights were released!

did they just copy the chatgpt ui?

Associated Meta news post with consumer-friendly takes: https://about.fb.com/news/2026/04/introducing-muse-spark-met...

Their product could literally teleport gold into my hands and I wouldn't use it.

> Meta AI isn't available yet in your country

Not my loss, will keep using DeepSeek then. Wake me up when my country is no longer in the wrong/right side of history.

Until you actually try the model itself, assume any benchmark presented to you as being part of the marketing material of the model, as it is not independently verified and completely biased.

The same is true with any other model, unless otherwise stated.

In the next few days, we'll see who Meta has paid to promote this model on social media.

The only benchmark they show against SOTA models is in bioweapons refusal.

Edit: nvm I can't read, regular benchmarks against SOTA are there

Meta.ai has muse spark

funny how websites do that thing where it looks like you can use the product but soon as you hit enter, nope login first

How's the metaverse doing? It was the next big thing and how we're all going to be working inside it in... was it like 3 months ago?

Maybe they need to mine more libra coin first? or is it diem now? is that even still part of meta?

I'm sure this new AI is super intelligent and super awesome and will be writing all the code, making all the blog posts, and generating all our youtube shorts in 6 months.

I can remember when AOL was an unstoppable giant. Except it wasn't. People eventually realized they could get a better, cheaper, faster experience with ISPs and search engines. The same path is unfolding before Meta. People have much better options, and plethora of Meta users will slowly leave until the big moat is drained. Zuck, go retire to your NZ bunker before Meta is forced to merge with another media company.