Meta unveils Muse Spark, its first AI model since hiring Alexandr Wang and a bellwether for CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar AI push

Meta has unveiled Muse Spark, the first AI model produced by its Meta Superintelligence Labs, the new AI research unit it created last year and has spent billions of dollars to staff and equip.

The model is, according to benchmark tests that Meta published, competitive with leading AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google across many tasks, although it does not surpass them across the board. Still, if the benchmark results hold up when tested by independent experts, Muse Spark seems to put Meta back in the AI race after its last AI model, Llama 4, which was released in April 2025, was widely panned as a dud.

In the past, however, Meta has been caught manipulating the published benchmark results of an AI model to make it appear more capable than the version available to most users actually was. This was the case with Meta’s Llama 4 benchmarks, in which the company later admitted to using specialized, unreleased versions of the model, fine-tuned for specific tasks, to boost benchmark scores in those areas, while the general version made available to all users did not perform as well.

And there’s another catch. Few people will be able to use the new Meta model outside of the company’s own product ecosystem. Unlike Meta’s previous AI models, which were released as “open weight” models—meaning anyone could download the ...