Meta has launched Muse Spark, its first significant artificial intelligence model developed under the leadership of chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, as the Facebook and Instagram parent attempts to close the gap on OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in the intensely competitive AI market.
The model, which had been developed under the internal codename Avocado, is the debut release from the new Muse series produced by Meta Superintelligence Labs, the AI division Wang leads.
Wang joined Meta in June following the company's $14.3 billion strategic investment in Scale AI, the data-labelling and AI infrastructure business where he served as chief executive.
The launch represents a significant shift in direction for Meta, which had previously pursued an open-source strategy with its Llama family of models, making its AI technology freely available to developers rather than locking it behind a commercial licence.
That approach backfired when Llama 4, released last April, failed to generate meaningful traction among developers, prompting chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to abandon the open model and pivot toward proprietary AI products.
Muse Spark will be closed-source, though Meta indicated it hopes to release open-source versions of future iterations of the model.
The company said its teams had rebuilt the AI development infrastructure from scratch over the past nine months, enabling it to produce smaller, faster models capable of handling complex reasoning tasks in science, mathematics and health at significantly lower computational cost than earlier systems.
Meta described Muse Spark as offering competitive performance across a range of capabilities, including multimodal perception, the ability to process both text and images, as well as reasoning and what it termed agentic tasks, where an AI system autonomously works through multi-step problems.
The company acknowledged, however, that performance gaps remain, specifically in extended agentic workflows and coding applications, and said investment in those areas is continuing.
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A next-generation model is already in development, Meta added.
The launch comes as Meta continues to pour investment into AI infrastructure, with the company having committed tens of billions of dollars to data centre expansion over the coming years as it races to establish a foothold in the frontier AI market.
