SAN FRANCISCO - Meta on Oct 12 unveiled two new “frontier” artificial intelligence (AI) models called Wonder and Wonder Full, which the company claims perform at a level comparable to that of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
“Muse Spark was our first family of models, and now Muse Wonder is a much larger and more advanced class of models that brings us to the frontier,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on X.
Zuckerberg has pushed Meta to compete with leading AI labs, particularly OpenAI and Anthropic, over the past year or so amid a race to win over customers and diversify beyond advertising, from which it has historically derived most of its revenue.
In June 2025, the company made a US$14 billion (S$18 billion) investment in Scale AI, an AI startup based in San Francisco, and poached its co-founder Alexandr Wang as part of the deal.
Zuckerberg subsequently made Wang the company’s chief AI officer overseeing its newly formed division called Superintelligence Labs.
Wonder is Meta’s first new model since April, when it launched a frontier model called Spark, marking a departure from its open-source model known as Llama, which lagged behind the rest of the industry.
The new models can be used in Meta’s new personal agent app, known as Muse, for paid subscribers only for now.
Wonder is “our largest and most capable model yet” and “rivals the big (boys),” Wang posted on X, presumably referring to leading labs OpenAI and Anthropic.
In a blog post, Meta touted so-called benchmarking data from an independent firm called Artificial Analysis which appears to show that Meta’s newest Wonder models outperform its own previous models, Spark, as well as various models developed by Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.
Artificial Analysis’s own website shows that Wonder is also among the most expensive models.
Meta has committed billions towards competing in the global race to dominate AI, despite growing concerns about safety and security.
In July, the Facebook and Instagram maker said its spending on AI-related investments could reach US$145 billion in 2026.
The company has more than 3.6 billion daily active users around the world. AFP