Meta debuts the Muse Spark mannequin in a ‘ground-up overhaul’ of its AI

Meta released an AI model on Wednesday called Muse Spark, which marks its “first step” toward an “overhaul of [its] AI efforts.”

Muse Spark is the inaugural model to come out of Meta Superintelligence Labs, which was created last year because CEO Mark Zuckerberg was reportedly unhappy with the progress of Meta and its Llama models and how they lagged behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Meta recruited former Scale AI co-founder and CEO Alexandr Wang to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs and invested $14.3 billion in the data labeling company for a 49% stake.

Now, it’s time for Zuckerberg to see if his reconfigured AI team can woo users.

Muse Spark, which is now available on the web and the Meta AI app, is expected to improve over time. The company plans to roll out a “Contemplating” mode, which allows it to tackle more complex problems. Meta’s model uses multiple AI agents at once to work on the same problem, which it says will generate faster results for its Contemplating mode.

“To spend more test-time reasoning without drastically increasing latency, we can scale the number of parallel agents that collaborate to solve hard problems,” the company wrote.

Meta’s competitors have historically placed these more capable models behind a paywall. It’s unclear if Meta will follow the same strategy.

The company has jumped on one AI industry trend, though. Meta said in its blog post that Muse Spark could be applied to help users with health questions, something that competitors are also working on as well.

Meta’s push into health — and even the more basic function of logging into Muse Spark — could raise privacy concerns. Muse Spark users will need to log in with an existing Meta account such as Facebook or Instagram in order to use it. Meta doesn’t explicitly say that personal information from a Facebook or Instagram account will be used by the AI. But it is likely considering that Meta generally trains on public user data and the company has positioned Muse Spark as a personal superintelligence product.

Meta also said that Muse Spark performs especially well with visual STEM questions which can lead to “interactive experiences like creating fun minigames or troubleshooting your home appliances.”

Aside from its investment in ScaleAI and hiring of Wang, Zuckerberg’s company has recruited researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The upshot: if Meta’s going to be a real competitor in the AI industry, it’s now or never.

“Looking ahead, we plan to release increasingly advanced models that push the frontier of intelligence and capabilities, including new open source models,” Zuckerberg wrote on Threads. “We are building products that don’t just answer your questions but act as agents that do things for you.”