Meta debuted its first major AI model, Muse Spark, spearheaded by chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, who joined nine months ago and leads Meta Superintelligence Labs.

The enterprise is desperate to regain momentum in the fiercely competitive AI industry following the disappointing debut of its previous flagship Llama 4 family of AI models.

Meta is also experimenting with a recent AI model revenue stream by eventually offering third-party developers access to Muse Spark’s underlying innovation via an API.

Meta is debuting its first major artificial intelligence model since the costly hiring of Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang nine months ago, as the Facebook parent aims to carve out a niche in a marketplace that’s being dominated by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

Dubbed Muse Spark and originally codenamed Avocado, the AI model revealed Wednesday is the first from the company’s updated Muse series developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs, the AI unit that Wang oversees. Wang joined Meta in June as part of the company’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, where he was CEO.

Meta is desperate to regain momentum in the fiercely competitive AI sector following the disappointing debut of its latest open-source models last April. The release failed to captivate developers, leading CEO Mark Zuckerberg to pivot his strategy.

“Over the last nine months, Meta Superintelligence Labs rebuilt our AI stack from the ground up, moving faster than any development cycle we have run before,” Meta stated in a blog post on Wednesday. “This initial model is minor 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.”

Meta’s stock popped almost 9% on Wednesday, and headed for its sharpest rally since January. The shares gained alongside the rest of the industry, which jumped after President Donald Trump noted he was suspending Iran attacks for two weeks, sending oil prices tumbling.

Meta isn’t positioning Muse Spark as a top-of-the-line model, but is instead highlighting its efficiency and “competitive performance” on various tasks. This also touches on aspects of bear market.

While Meta has used advancements in generative AI and its own investments in the software to bolster its advertising business and improve efficiencies across the enterprise, it’s yet to crack the AI model marketplace in a significant way, and its top competitors in the space zoom have zoomed ahead. OpenAI and Anthropic are now collectively valued at over $1 trillion, and Google’s Gemini tech and services have gained traction, particularly in the consumer economy.

The stakes are massive, as the global generative AI economy is estimated to grow more than 40% a year, climbing from about $22 billion in 2025 to almost $325 billion by 2033, according to Grand View Research.

Meanwhile, Meta is ramping up its spending on AI infrastructure, trying to keep up with the other hyperscalers. In its latest earnings report, Meta noted its AI-related capital expenditures in 2026 will be between $115 billion and $135 billion, or nearly twice its capex last year.

The updated Muse Spark will be proprietary, with the business saying there is “hope to open-source future versions of the model.” The corporation had been taking an open-source approach to AI with its Llama family of models.

Meta mentioned in a technical blog about the fresh model that that improved AI training techniques along with rebuilt innovation infrastructure has enabled the enterprise to create smaller AI models that are as capable as its older midsize Llama 4 variant for “an order of magnitude less compute.”

“Muse Spark offers competitive performance in multimodal perception, reasoning, health, and agentic tasks,” Meta commented in the post. “We continue to invest in areas with current performance gaps, specifically long-horizon agentic systems and coding workflows.”

Novel revenue opportunities

Meta is also experimenting with a latest AI model revenue stream by offering third-party developers access to Muse Spark’s underlying innovation via an API. Currently, only unspecified “select partners” can access the AI model’s “private API preview,” but Meta noted it plans to eventually offer paid API access to a wider audience at a later date.

The recent model now powers the company’s digital assistant in the standalone Meta AI app and desktop website. Muse Spark will debut in the coming weeks inside Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, as well as in the company’s Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. Meta also plans for Muse Spark to eventually power the company’s Vibes AI video feature in the Meta AI app. That service currently uses AI models from third-parties like Black Forest Labs.

With Muse Spark, users of the standalone Meta AI app and related website will now be able to alternate between certain modes depending on the sophistication of their prompts. Users can tap one mode to get quick answers to simple questions, and another for more complicated queries related to tasks like analyzing legal documents or gleaning nutritional information from photos of grocery store products.

Additionally, a Contemplating mode “will be rolling out gradually” in the Meta AI app and site for the most complicated queries and tasks, Meta mentioned in the technical blog. For that mode, Muse Spark utilizes a squad of AI agents to help “reason in parallel,” helping it “compete with the extreme reasoning modes of frontier models such as Gemini Deep Think and GPT Pro,” the technical blog remarked.

The revamped Meta AI with Muse Spark will also contain a Shopping mode that the enterprise stated will be able to help the public acquire clothes or decorate rooms.

“Shopping mode draws from the styling inspiration and brand storytelling already happening across our apps, surfacing ideas from the creators and communities humans already follow,” Meta remarked.

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