SAN FRANCISCO: Meta on Thursday launched a new open-weight artificial intelligence (AI) model that it claims rivals, and in some cases outperforms, similar products from leading Chinese developers.
Meta chief of AI Alexandr Wang said on X that Muse Spark Open was the company’s “most capable US open-weight model to date”.
Unlike so-called closed models, such as Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, developers can download the parameters, or weights, of an open-weight model and customise them.
Chinese developers have emerged as dominant players in the open-weight AI model market over the past couple of years.
Alibaba’s Qwen, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and Z.ai’s GLM models have been considered among the leading open-weight models globally, but Meta claims its new model now competes at a similar level.
“Built for coding and agentic work”, Muse Spark Open “excels at long-horizon tasks, complex software engineering, and multi-step reasoning”, Meta said in a blog post, adding that “strong safeguards” had been integrated into the model.
Muse Spark Open is also “optimised” to run on Apple’s advanced M5 Ultra chips, Meta said, signalling an unusual partnership between the two technology giants.
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on X that the new model “runs great on new Mac Studios” thanks to work with Apple and its new chief executive, John Ternus.
Ternus, who took over as Apple’s chief from Tim Cook in September, responded that it was “amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open’s calibre and scale this efficiently, right from your desk. Mac Studio keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI!”
Muse Spark Open still requires significant computing power, however.
Users can run the model on two Mac Studios equipped with M5 Ultra chips to create a “supercomputer” on their own desktop, Meta said.
The launch comes just days after Meta announced its latest closed model.
On Monday, the company unveiled two new “frontier” models, Wonder and Wonder Full, which it claimed rival the most advanced versions of ChatGPT and Claude.
Meta’s AI efforts initially focused on open models, but Zuckerberg has more recently pushed the company to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.
Meta launched its Spark model in April, marking a departure from its open-source model known as Llama, which had lagged behind other models in the industry.