Muse Spark, Meta’s first major latest AI model in over a year, landed this week, the company’s biggest effort yet to show value from its massive investment in Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang.

Meta’s shift from open-source AI to proprietary models comes with business implications, as the firm needs to find a path to recent revenue.

“I think Meta had to show investors and operators they have been working on something of substance,” commented Morningstar analyst Malik Ahmed Khan.

Almost 10 months after Meta spent billions of dollars to bring in Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang as the centerpiece of Mark Zuckerberg’s AI overhaul, the firm finally revealed Muse Spark on Wednesday, its first recent model since the transition. One massive question is — will users pay for it?

While rivals like OpenAI,other services along with Anthropic and Google have spearheaded the artificial intelligence boom with powerful models and popular chatbots, Meta has been a hefty spender on AI but has yet to show any novel revenue streams from it.

In June, Meta shelled out more than $14 billion to hire Wang and some of his top engineers and researchers, soon creating Meta Superintelligence Labs as a novel elite unit. And in January, the organization told Wall Street it plans to pour between $115 billion and $135 billion this year into capital expenditures, nearly double its 2025 capex figure.

“It’s been a year of basically no releases and a lot of hiring, and then the capex worries for this year are pronounced,” stated Morningstar analyst Malik Ahmed Khan, in an interview. “I think Meta had to show investors and operators they have been working on something of substance. That’s the first step.”

Meta’s second step, Khan remarked, is making the model work and figuring out how to monetize it.

Muse Spark, Meta’s newly released model, is proprietary, a sharp change from its predecessor family of models called Llama, which consisted of open-source offerings, though the corporation noted it does plan to eventually release some open-source versions. Zuckerberg shook up his company’s strategy after the April release of Llama 4, which failed to captivate developers.

Arun Chandrasekaran, an analyst at Gartner, described the move as a “major shift” and noted it “signals an intention to move away” from the Llama brand.

Taking a cue from other frontier AI labs, Meta aims to eventually offer third parties paid API access to Muse Spark after an initial “private API preview” with “select parties.”

But Meta is very late to the game. OpenAI and Anthropic are collectively valued at well over $1 trillion, thanks to the popularity of their models and services, and Google has embedded Gemini across its portfolio of apps and products, while also selling access to the Gemini models via its cloud unit.

Meta’s AI software, to succeed, has to be beneficial enough to compete with top models while also providing a novel business opportunity.

‘Crown jewel’ This also touches on aspects of wall street.

Andrew Boone, an analyst at Citizens, commented Meta’s clear advantage is the more than 3 billion citizens who adopt Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp every month. And the business opportunity for Meta has nothing to do with trying to attract developers, who currently swarm to OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and a host of Chinese models, but rather to focus on its core market: advertising.

“That’s the crown jewel, that’s what needs to continue to improve,” mentioned Boone, who recommends buying the stock.

“I believe that would be the killer utilize case from Meta’s perspective,” Khan mentioned, with the goal being to “make ads more engaging and improve targeting.”

Advertising accounted for 98% of Meta’s $200 billion in revenue last year. The business has made numerous efforts to diversify its business, most notably spending tens of billions of dollars to try to construct the metaverse happen. But Meta’s ad model is the one thing that’s consistently worked, and the company’s investments in AI have served to improve its targeting capabilities and provide better tools for marketers.

Khan mentioned that as advertisers see returns on investment from their Meta spending, they reinvest that funds back into more ads on the platform. So it makes sense that they’d be willing to pay for AI services if they can get even better results.

Meta declined to comment about its API plans beyond its initial announcement.

Based on the technical benchmarks Meta released comparing Muse Spark to rivals, the novel AI model appears to excel in areas related to image and video processing, stated Doris Xin, CEO of AI startup Disarray. Those are essential characteristics for advertisers seeking to build dynamic campaigns for an audience that’s grown accustomed to viewing short-form videos on Reels or gawking at cat photos on Facebook and Instagram.

“Compared to like Claude and Gemini, I think it definitely feels like it has more of a consumer bent,” Xin stated about Muse Spark.

Zuckerberg, has long had ambitions that go well beyond advertising. His approach with Llama was targeted at developers and getting the best and brightest minds in AI using Meta’s tools even if they weren’t paying for them.

With the switch to proprietary models, the pitch to developers becomes more difficult. Joseph Ott, CEO of AI startup Samu Legal Technologies, noted he’s unsure about where he would find value.

“The only reason I would leverage Llama is that I could fine, on the other hand-tune it,” Ott mentioned, referring to the practice of customizing AI models.

Many developers utilize so-called open-weight AI models, like those provided by Chinese tech companies, as a basis to train AI models to meet their specific leverage cases. Ott commented it’s unclear what would produce Meta’s Muse Spark stand out against free or cheaper alternatives and the leading proprietary AI models.

Ulrik Stig Hansen, co-founder of AI and data training startup Encord, noted it’s essential for Meta to develop its own AI foundation models to avoid any future dependencies on third parties. As one of the few companies with the resources and computing infrastructure necessary to create and maintain huge AI models, Meta wants to ensure that it remains relevant in the hottest marketplace on the planet.

“It is about AI sovereignty and being a player in the game,” Hansen commented. “They want to be perceived and known as an AI company.”

As for Meta’s massive investment in Wang and his team, Boone stated the latest benchmarks suggest that Zuckerberg got what he wanted, and now it’s “back on Mark.”

“We just gave you a state-of-the-art frontier model,” Boone noted, referring to the team behind Muse Spark. “What are you going to do with it?”

WATCH: Why Meta’s updated AI model, Muse Spark, is such a huge deal

Correction: Advertising accounted for 98% of Meta’s $200 billion in revenue last year. An earlier version mischaracterized the figure.