Muse Spark: The Future of AI at Your Fingertips
Meta on Wednesday unveiled Muse Spark, the first artificial intelligence model produced by its superintelligence division, marking the company's most substantial AI release in over a year as it races to close a gap with rivals OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The model, developed over roughly nine months under the internal codename Avocado, is now powering the Meta AI app and website in the United States, with a broader rollout planned in the coming weeks across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Meta's smart glasses.
A Costly Bet on Catching Up
Muse Spark is the debut product of Meta Superintelligence Labs, the division CEO Mark Zuckerberg established last year and staffed through an aggressive — and expensive — talent acquisition campaign. The lab is led by Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI chief whom Meta recruited under a deal valued at $14.3 billion, and co-led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Some engineers on the team were offered pay packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Reuters.
The model is described by Meta as "small and fast by design, yet capable enough to reason through complex questions in science, math, and health". It supports multimodal inputs including text and images, and offers users a choice between an "Instant" mode for quick responses and a "Thinking" mode for more deliberate reasoning, according to The Verge. Meta also said Muse Spark can run multiple AI sub-agents to handle queries more efficiently.
Acknowledging the Gap
The launch comes after a turbulent stretch for the project. In March, The New York Times reported that Avocado had underperformed models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic in internal tests on reasoning, coding, and writing, prompting Meta to delay the release from its original mid-March target. Meta's AI division had even weighed temporarily licensing Google's Gemini models to bolster its products while its own technology matured.
Meta has not claimed that Muse Spark matches the frontier capabilities of its competitors. Instead, the company is positioning the model as a foundation for what comes next. "The next generation is already in development," Meta said in a blog post announcing the launch. The company said it plans to eventually release an open-source version, though the initial release is proprietary — a departure from Meta's previous open-source approach with its Llama model family. Muse Spark is the first entry in what Meta is calling the Muse series, its second major line of AI models alongside Llama.
