Meta releases latest update of AI model Muse Spark as tech giant accelerates AI push under Alexandr Wang

Meta released a new version of Muse Spark on Thursday, claiming that the AI model surpasses the capabilities of prior products from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. 

Dubbed Muse Spark 1.1, the new model is proficient across a range of tasks, including coding, video captioning, and reasoning, Meta said in a blog post. The update to Muse Spark beats out Google’s latest release of Gemini in benchmarks measuring coding and reasoning capabilities, according to the tech giant. And Meta’s new AI entry surpasses older versions of OpenAI and Anthropic’s models on some verticals, the company said.

“Our focus is on delivering strong agentic and multimodal models at very low cost,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s cofounder and CEO, in a post on X. “More to come soon.” 

The tech giant did not say how its new AI product compares to OpenAI and Anthropic’s most recent model releases. On one coding metric, for example, the model still lags behind the flagship entries—Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and Fable 5, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6—according to a leaderboard ranking performances on an open-source benchmark.

In the past, the company has also confronted accusations that it manipulated results on tests for a prior AI model release. “We’ve also heard claims that we trained on test sets—that’s simply not true and we would never do that,” a former Meta AI executive said on X in response to allegations in April 2025. 

Superintelligence Labs

The release of Muse Spark 1.1 comes just three months after Meta unveiled its first significant entry into the AI race under a reorganized unit headed by Alexandr Wang, Meta’s first-ever chief AI officer. 

Originally committed to building open-source models, the tech giant pivoted after it spent $14.3 billion in 2025 to acquire a 49% non-voting stake in Scale AI, Wang’s AI data startup that skyrocketed in prominence amid the AI boom. 

Wang reorganized the company’s AI efforts into what it now calls Meta Superintelligence Labs. The organizational changes weren’t without drama. Staffers felt whiplashed as Wang and Zuckerberg rebuilt the company’s AI team from the ground up. Zuckerberg also created an Applied AI unit in March, which pulled in engineers and developers to help on what some saw as mind-numbing data collection tasks.

Still, Meta’s efforts to catch up to OpenAI and Anthropic appear to be accelerating. Muse Spark now powers Meta’s AI assistant in its Meta AI app and developers can access the newest version of the model via an API. On Tuesday, Meta also released Muse Image and Muse Video, the first models released from Superintelligence Labs focused on image and video generation.
The new visual AI models produced impressive results. But Meta’s decision to allow users to apply AI-powered image generation and editing effects to photos that other people had posted to their public-facing Instagram accounts without requiring any explicit permission to do so, sparked outrage from many Instagram users.

Muse Spark 1.1 is now in public preview. Meta did not say when it would fully release the model, but Zuckerberg did state that the model will be lower cost with “aggressive pricing” compared to competing products from OpenAI and Anthropic. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com