Meta updates its Spark model, releases developer version
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Photo illustration of Alexandr Wang: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Facebook's parent company on Thursday updated its Muse Spark large language model and followed through on a promise to make it available to developers.
Why it matters: It's a busy period for model upgrades across the industry, with OpenAI and SpaceXAI also debuting faster models this week.
Driving the news: Muse Spark 1.1 promises improvements in coding and handling longer tasks.
- Muse Spark, the first large language model developed under Alexandr Wang, already powers a wide range of tasks across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Meta AI.
- With this version, developers can also tap the model via an API (Application Programming Interface). Meta says it believes its model is priced attractively given its capabilities, charging customers $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens. (That's cheaper than the new Grok 4.5, and also less than Anthropic's Opus model.)
What they're saying: Wang, who was brought in to reboot Meta's AI effort, told Axios that improving Muse Spark's performance in coding and agentic tasks was a key focus with this release.
- "These were priority areas for us," he said.
Meta is also using the model to power the thinking mode in the Meta AI app and website.
The big picture: Meta is trying to close the gap between it and AI leaders including OpenAI and Anthropic. The company is promising a significantly more powerful version of Spark later this year that uses substantially more computing power.
- Earlier this week, Meta debuted Muse Image, a picture-generating model that has been added to Meta AI and powers new image editing features in Instagram.
- This is not the big leap that Meta hopes to make with its next big release. Code-named Watermelon, that model is still in training and uses vastly more compute and should be released later this year.
What's next: Longer term, Wang said he is working toward a vision where a more agentic Meta AI could handle tasks like planning a party or a vacation and take more direct actions on its own. Wang said Meta's strength is its billions of users and how much the company knows about them.
- "That's really the part that no one else can replicate," he said.
