Muse Spark is designed to be fast and efficient, capable of handling complex tasks in areas like science, math, and health.
| Photo Credit:
Carlos Barria
Meta Platforms on Wednesday
unveiled Muse Spark, the first artificial intelligence model
from a costly team it assembled last year to catch up with
rivals in the AI race.
Shares of the company extended gains to trade up nearly 7%.
U.S. tech giants are under pressure to prove their massive
AI outlays will pay off. The stakes are especially high for Meta
after it hired Scale AI CEO Alex Wang last year under a $14.3
billion deal and offered some engineers pay packages of hundreds
of millions of dollars to staff a new superintelligence team.
Superintelligence refers to AI machines that could outthink
humans. Muse Spark is the first in a new series of models from
that team, and is part of a family of models known internally as
Avocado.
The model will initially be available only on the lightly
used Meta AI app and website, and in the coming weeks, replace
the existing Llama models powering chatbots on WhatsApp,
Instagram, Facebook and Meta’s collection of smart glasses.
“This initial model is small and fast by design, yet capable
enough to reason through complex questions in science, math, and
health. It is a powerful foundation, and the next generation is
already in development,” the company said in a blog post.
It did not disclose the model’s size, a key measure
typically used to compare an AI system’s computing power with
rivals.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had tempered expectations for
performance, telling investors in January that he thought the
team’s first models “will be good but, more importantly, will
show the rapid trajectory that we’re on.”
“I expect us to steadily push the frontier over the course
of the year as we continue to release new models,” he had said.
FOCUS ON EVERYDAY TASKS
Muse Spark can help users with tasks such as estimating the
calories in a meal from a photo or superimposing an image of a
mug on a shelf to see how it looks.
Meta also released Contemplating mode, which runs multiple
agents at one time to boost reasoning power. For instance, while
planning a family vacation for a user, one agent can draft a
travel itinerary and the other can look up kid-friendly
activities.
The company is betting that applying AI to everyday personal
tasks will help boost engagement with the more than 3.5 billion
users across its social media platforms, potentially giving it
an edge over rivals with a smaller reach.
Published on April 9, 2026
