meta – Teknotum

Meta releases Muse Spark Open, that can run on dual $10,000 Mac Studios

You need the biggest guns in Apple’s universe to run this. (Picture: Meta)

Apple and Meta teams worked together on making the new model run on two 512GB Mac Studios with Ultra chips, Zuckerberg and Ternus said.

Meta claims the new model is «the most capable US open-weight model to date,» built with 816B parameters and 42B active ones, with a 1M token window, and comes on a license that allows commercial use.

It scores very well on agentic benchmarks against other open models, but often falls short of the leading Chinese ones even on Meta’s selected evaluations. This also holds up on Artificial Analysis’ tests.

The Mac angle seems a nice addition, but this isn’t your garden variety Mac Mini. It needs two Ultra-equipped Studios with 512GB RAM, which isn’t even available on the Apple Store (it’s coming in late October), that will cost you more than $10,000 each.

Compared to running a server farm, it does rather keep the costs down and competes in a whole other league than «will run on your Mac.»

For mere mortals, the model is available through popular API platforms like OpenRouter and Nebius, and it can be downloaded from Hugging Face today.

Read more: Meta’s presentation, on Hugging Face and Apple’s MLX runtime. Axios, MacRumors, and The Verge. Discussion on Hacker News and r/Singularity and r/LocalLLaMA.

Meta releases Muse Wonder, a model for agents that pushes the frontier

Muse Wonder tests Meta’s subscriber model, and might offer some return on their massive AI investments. (Picture: Meta)

Meta says the Muse Wonder model will soon be powering their popular Muse agent, and will be available for paying customers first.

The model moves the frontier on Metas selected benchmarks, especially on agentic ones, where it is slightly ahead of GPT-6 Astra and Opus 5.5, and it also leads in the professionally minded Vals Harvey’s Legal and Vals Finance Agent v2.

Artificial Analysis has it on par with GPT-6.1 Sol and behind Astra, Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 with a score of 52.

Meta also claims Muse Wonder to be its safest model yet, with very strong safeguards against cyber «misuse,» yet leaving defensive capabilities intact. They also say that «alignment is central to how we build personal superintelligence,» and this carries through on this model.

When Meta launches new models, it is usually significant because of their huge user base – these models would get exposed to billions of people through Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Muse Wonder will however go to subscribers first, then it will power the Muse agent and later go on to be the basis for specialized models. It is unclear whether it will be released widely, opened to Facebook users or get open-sourced.

It is also getting released in the API at a price of $4 per million input tokens, and $20 for output, which is comparable with other frontier models.

Read more: Meta’s presentation, Artificial Analysis ranking. More on CNBC, TechCrunch, Axios, and Reuters. Discussion on r/Singularity and Hacker News.

Zuckerberg sidesteps safety debate, saying alignment is consumer issue

Meta says they already follow «best practices» and urges the industry to follow their lead. (Picture: Shutterstock)

After days of silence and people wondering about Meta’s stance on slowing down frontier AI that was agreed to by almost all labs, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has weighed in with an X post, saying that market pressure will prevail on safety:

— People won’t want to use agents that are misaligned with them and that don’t do what they ask, so labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned, he says, while not engaging with the innovation pressure and catastrophic risk at the high-end frontier labs.

— My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models. Any lab that doesn’t focus on alignment will fall behind, he adds.

He also says that Meta delayed their new Muse agent for «several months» in order to «focus on safety and security,» says they engage with «independent evaluators and advisors» as «industry best practice,» and says matter-of-factually that «other labs can just do this too.»

He then adds that a majority of industry compute should go towards «serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement,» like Meta says they do and that «other labs can do this as well.»

On a more positive note for the ongoing debate, he does say that «it would be helpful for there to be a larger and more diverse ecosystem of evaluators,» which might hint at support for an industry standards body.

Zuckerberg also links up his August The Future is for Everyone-manifesto that says «Any policy that slows American model releases — even by a month — could add significant risk to American leadership while letting foreign models race ahead.»

Read more: Zuckerberg’s X post, Reuters, Business Insider and CNBC.

Meta releases open source Muse Glimmer, promises weights for Spark

Meta is making open source models central to its AI vision, says Zuckerberg. (Picture: Meta)

Meta claims to have squeezed a 30 billion parameter model onto a «consumer GPU» through clever 4-bit compression, making it weigh just 20GB, needing only 24 GB VRAM.

It not only runs agents, they say, but at a speed and responsiveness that feels natural without long thinking breaks.

At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg is out with a lengthy essay extolling the virtues of open models as central to their strategy, and presenting a «positive vision» for personal superintelligence as a tool for «individual empowerment.»

The selling point for Muse Glimmer is that it can run on a Pro- or Max-level MacBook Pro with sufficient memory, or on the GTX 4090/5090 GPUs from Nvidia on PCs.

These are high-end tools you likely won’t find in a corner store in Kampala, but run significantly below the cost of infrastructure-level Nvidia chips.

As an open model, Meta is only showing comparison benchmarks for Gemma 4-31B and Qwen 3.6-27B, which it seems to beat handily. It’s only barely showing on the LMArena leaderboards, however, at 97th for text and 77th for WebDev, below Gemma 4 and DeepSeek v3.2, but above Qwen 3.5.

You can fetch the model at Hugging Face under an Apache 2.0 license.

Read more: Meta’s presentation, launch post on X. Writeups on CNBC and TechCrunch. Discussions on Hacker News and r/LocalMMaMA.

Meta releases Muse Code in beta, competing on price and performance

Muse code competes primarily on price and general «good enough» quality. (Picture: Meta)

The new coding model from Meta comes close to Opus 5 in Claude Code while costing less than half as much to run, at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 in output. It is available today in beta.

— Muse Code takes on complex software engineering tasks across large repositories: planning changes, writing code, and validating the results, Meta says.

It can coordinate subagents that are persistent and run in the background through each session, instead of respawning for individual tasks, reducing latency and feedback loops.

The agents also use advanced logging of every call, tool run, approval and edit, meaning they should run directly after restarts and crashes, picking up from the latest log entry like nothing happened.

The underlying model, Muse Spark 1.2, scores well on benchmarks for its price point. It clocks in just behind Opus 5’s 86.7% on Terminal-Bench with 82.9%, beating GPT-5.6 Terra and Gemini 3.6 Flash. On DeepSWE it scores 59.3%, ticking in behind GPT Terra and Opus 5 Max. On Artificial Analysis, a more general benchmark, it scores a little behind GPT-5.5.

— Muse Spark 1.2 was extensively trained on long-horizon coding tasks, including whole-repository generation, large end-to-end projects, and auto-research, Meta says on the model.

Muse Code is available with a «one-line install» from the terminal on macOS and Linux, and is available on dev.meta.ai on the web.

Read more: Meta’s launch page, X post by Zuckerberg, X post from Artificial Analysis. Writeups on CNBC, TechCrunch, and Reuters. Discussion on Hacker News and r/Singularity.

1,134 employees and chiefs of top labs sign petition to «pace the frontier»

The frontier labs think we need more time to develop laws and systems before AI begins improving on itself. (Picture generated)

— AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed, the petition ominously opens, before warning that leading frontier labs are «close to automating AI research.»

That would radically speed up development of frontier models, but it could also «accelerate beyond our ability to understand and control the resulting systems.»

The petition is signed by top names, including Anthropic boss Dario Amodei, followed by chief scientists from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google DeepMind along with over 1,100 other employees from frontier labs. Even OpenAI’s Sam Altman is agreeing, though he doesn’t sign petitions, and official X accounts for Anthropic and OpenAI have posted in support.

The petition’s main point is that industry, government and the society at large needs more time to «address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight.»

Continue reading “1,134 employees and chiefs of top labs sign petition to «pace the frontier»”

Meta kills the Instagram tagging feature on Muse Image after criticism

Letting anyone tag Instagram profiles for AI images had some obvious implications. (Picture: Meta)

The feature letting users take content from any public Instagram feed in AI mashups through newly released Muse Image promptly received backlash from concerned users, pressure groups and actors’ unions.

The idea was that you should be able to tag friends, but celebrities instantly started thinking about protecting their livelihoods and likeness — crucial to their success.

Even the National Center on Sexual Exploitation got on with the criticism, saying it was an obvious tool for sextortion and scammers, spotted by The Verge.

The actors union SAG-AFTRA quickly posted a guide to opting out, pointing to toggles deeply buried in the Instagram settings, while the Creative Artists Agency urged Meta to take a more «reasonable» approach and at least make the feature opt-in, instead of free-for-all.

After a tumultuous week online, Meta finally ceded to its critics, putting out this statement:

— Our intent was to provide a useful creative tool and to give people control over whether their public content could be referenced in this way. We’ve heard the feedback that this feature missed the mark, so it’s no longer available.

Read more: Updated Muse Image blog post, Deadline, Variety and The Verge.

Meta launches new Muse Spark, a «significant upgrade» on par with frontiers

The new Muse is not just dirt cheap, but sometimes matches the top tiered AIs. (Picture: Meta, generated)

The new Muse Spark 1.1 performs on level with, and sometimes surpasses, GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 in benchmarks.

It is specifically built for agents and coding, being able to write, debug and refactor large codebases and add features on the fly.

The agentic capabilities are very competitive, Meta says. It can work with little human intervention and sometimes scores better than Fable on these tasks.

On computer use, Meta claims it understands workflows and can write scripts when it’s faster and work directly when it’s simpler.

Perhaps the biggest selling point is the cost, and just like Grok 4.5 yesterday, competition on price and speed is picking up. Muse Spark 1.1 is only $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million out, and is, as Zuckerberg puts it, at a very low cost.

The new Spark is available in Thinking mode on Meta AI through meta.ai and the app, while U.S. developers can access it in public preview through the new Meta Model API, where there is a waitlist. There is no word on when it is coming to Europe.

Meta launches Muse Image generator, teases video model

A sample from Muse Image, Alexandr Wang as a plushie. (Picture: Meta)

Muse Image catapulted directly to the second place on Arena.ai’s leaderboard in the categories for Text-to-Image and Image Edit, ahead of Nano Banana 2 and just behind GPT-Image-2.

It’s the first image generator from the Superintelligence Lab and pairs with Muse Spark to reason, search the web, and plan before it generates an image.

Meta also says it knows you from your Facebook and Instagram feeds, giving it a layer of contextual awareness, and it lets you tag any Instagram account for inclusion in your images.

The latter is automatically enabled, meaning anyone on Meta.ai can tag your Instagram content in AI generations, unless you explicitly opt out.

Continue reading “Meta launches Muse Image generator, teases video model”

Meta’s AI fallback plan: Forming a cloud computing company

Meta could soon be renting out excess compute, as it continues to build out capacity. (Picture: Adobe)

Already sitting on one of the world’s largest compute clusters with plans to add some $145 billion worth more just this year — Meta is making contingency plans.

Bloomberg (paywalled) is reporting that they are now planning to form a cloud computing company to compete with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, aiming to sell «excess capacity» to paying customers.

The idea is a hedge against overcapacity, Axios reports, quoting Zuckerberg as saying in May: «that is an option that we have, and that is partially what gives us confidence in investing in building this out.»

The new unit would offer raw compute to companies looking to train models, or could offer access to models from other AI labs and rent out the infrastructure to power them. This would be similar to services from Amazon and Azure.

SpaceX, now incorporating X.ai, faced a similar problem when their compute power got bigger than their needs, and struck deals with Anthropic and Google to sell excess compute access, Reuters notes.

It is estimated that Meta currently sits on 20 gigawatts of capacity, and it plans to add another 14 GW over the next years, Axios says.

Read more: Bloomberg (paywalled), Axios, Reuters, CNBC, and Engadget.

Meta to record screens, keystrokes, and mouse movements from employees

US workers for Meta will have to contend with most of their daily work being monitored for the training of future AI agents — in an initiative called Model Capability Initiative, according to internal memos seen by Reuters.

They will now get software installed on their computers to track basically everything they do, and take the occasional screenshot, to help train Meta’s agents, which are currently «struggling to replicate how humans interact with computers.»

This includes the use of keyboard shortcuts, clicking buttons, and using pull-down menus, Reuters says.

The idea is definitely to train their successors, according to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, who sent a memo to employees on Monday saying that «the vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve.»

Just yesterday, OpenAI debuted a tool to take constant screenshots of users’ computers in order to customize Codex to their usage.

Read more: Reuters exclusive, TechCrunch and Gizmodo.

Meta is building a custom, photorealistic AI avatar of Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg will be able to handle a lot of outreach by turning himself into an AI avatar. (Picture: Shutterstock)

The idea is that the new tool can attend meetings, manage interactions, and provide feedback to employees when Zuckerberg is unavailable, according to The Financial Times (paywalled).

The avatar is training on his image and voice, mannerisms, tone, and public statements, writes The Verge.

Meta has been building photorealistic, 3D animated AI characters «for some time,» Engadget reports, but now seems focused on finishing the Zuckerberg character first. Then the technology might appear as a tool for creators on Meta platforms.

Zuckerberg himself has taken a keen interest in creating the avatar, the FT says. The thought behind the avatar is that «employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it.»

Read more: The Financial Times (paywalled), The Verge, and Engadget