Tech giant Meta debuted its new Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full premium AI models on Monday, continuing a push toward what CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently called the “AI frontier,” where the heavy hitters in the artificial intelligence space have dominated.
The models build upon the Muse Spark AI model, launched earlier this year. Meta calls the new paid tiers its “most capable models to date,” reporting the models can perform personal and professional agentic tasks ranging from handling insurance claims to helping renters understand a lease agreement to building entire working apps.
Playing catch-up
Meta says its new models, the fruits of billions of dollars invested over the last year, leapfrog the competition. But it’s playing catch-up with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google in the AI race.
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“Meta is making up for lost time with lots of new AI tools,” Katelyn Chedraoui, CNET’s expert reporter on artificial intelligence, told me. “But this new frontier model comes amid serious safety concerns in the AI industry. Safeguards will be essential to any new launch.”
Many researchers and experts are advocating for external evaluation and regulation of the technology, with some AI executives, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, making high-profile calls to slow AI development. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg has been vocal in his belief that labs can and should self-police to stave off the worst effects of AI.
“I’m much closer to the belief that AI is a technology that can be engineered with normal guardrails and built responsibly than the anthropomorphic vision of AI, which is that it is just going to go do its own thing,” Zuckerberg told Financial Times in an interview this week.
Muse Wonder and Wonder Full
Muse Wonder is the “state-of-the-art” premium-tier AI model from Meta. It is available first to coders who pay for access to the Meta Model API, via the Power Plan at $20 per month or the Maximum Plan at $100 per month. However, Meta’s announcement says it “will soon power experiences in Muse” with more flexible per-million-token pricing.
Meta says Muse Wonder builds on the core capabilities of its Muse Spark AI model with more advanced features, greater processing power and improved capability in law, finance and health applications. Meta gives the example of Muse parsing a leasing agreement or handling an insurance claim. (To be clear, do not rely on AI for healthcare or mental health.) Muse Wonder’s new “frontier coding performance” will also enable the agent to assist in building games and apps.
Muse Wonder introduces two new features: Active Memory and Active Focus.
The first, Active Memory, enables the model to remember and carry information across conversations. Storing potentially sensitive data immediately sets my privacy-conscious Spidey Sense on edge. That said, Meta says it has trained its Muse Wonder model to avoid sharing private information without permission and has hardened it against cyberattacks. The company even says that “developers and security teams can use models like Muse Wonder to find flaws in their own code and strengthen their systems,” which — I gotta be honest — sounds to me like the peak tech hubris.
The second new feature, Active Focus, keeps the AI agent working when it runs into technical dead ends. With Active Focus, Muse Wonder is said to be capable of alternative approaches, recovering from errors and asking the user for clarification. That should let the model handle more complex tasks than Spark and encounter fewer roadblocks, which we’ve seen firsthand in our testing.
But boasting that your AI model can more effectively circumnavigate what may be blocks put in place (perhaps for a reason) sounds eerily familiar. Recently, Anthropic revoked access to its AI models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, after the US government imposed sweeping restrictions on who could use them.
Muse Wonder Full is said to be an even more powerful version of the premium Wonder model with all of the same new features, but with a shift in focus toward businesses and power users. Basically, Wonder Full unlocks more flexible reasoning, a tweaked base model and access to more behind-the-scenes processing power, making it a better fit for unfamiliar tasks, engineering and professional workflows.
With no public API, Muse Wonder Full is available exclusively to developers who sign up for the paid Muse Code AI agent and is bundled into a monthly subscription priced from $50 to $200.