Meta rolls out Muse Spark

Meta just put its newest artificial intelligence model into the apps 3.4 billion people already use, instead of launching it as a separate lab demo first. Muse Spark is now powering the Meta AI app and website, and Meta says WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and its AI glasses will get it in the coming weeks. (about.fb.com) That tells you what Meta thinks the prize is. OpenAI built a destination app, but Meta is trying to slip a faster assistant into the social feeds, chats, and shopping moments people already open every day. (cnbc.com, about.fb.com) Muse Spark is the first model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit Meta rebuilt over the last nine months after the weak reception to its Llama 4 models in April 2025. CNBC reports the model effort is being led by Alexandr Wang, who joined Meta in June 2025 as part of Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. (cnbc.com) Meta is not selling Muse Spark as the biggest model on earth. It is selling it as a small, fast model that can still handle harder reasoning tasks, which is the difference between a sports car and a city bus when you need replies inside a chat window. (about.fb.com, cnbc.com) Meta says the model can look at images as well as text, so a person can point a camera at an airport snack shelf and ask for the highest-protein option, or scan a product and ask how it compares with alternatives. That is why the rollout is tied so tightly to Instagram, Facebook, and smart glasses: the model is being trained for moments where seeing the world matters as much as reading words. (about.fb.com) The company is also adding a tool Meta calls subagents, which means the assistant can split one job into several smaller jobs and run them in parallel. Meta’s example is a Florida family trip where one agent drafts the itinerary, another compares Orlando with the Florida Keys, and a third finds kid-friendly activities. (about.fb.com) There is a business reason this is landing in social apps first. Meta says Muse Spark will unlock features that can cite recommendations and content people share across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads, which gives it a home-field advantage no outside chatbot has. (about.fb.com) The benchmark picture suggests Meta has moved closer to the front of the pack than it was a year ago. Artificial Analysis says Muse Spark scored 52 on its Intelligence Index, versus 18 for Llama 4 Maverick at release, and ranked behind Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.4, and Claude Opus 4.6 while beating several other major models. (artificialanalysis.ai) Meta is also changing how it ships models. Artificial Analysis says Muse Spark is Meta’s first frontier model that is not being released as open weights, and Meta says outside partners will get it only through a private preview application programming interface, which is a controlled way for other companies to plug into the model. (artificialanalysis.ai, about.fb.com) The spending behind this is even bigger than the launch. On April 9, 2026, CoreWeave said Meta expanded its cloud deal to about $21 billion through December 2032, and CNBC reported that this comes on top of a prior $14.2 billion arrangement. (investors.coreweave.com, cnbc.com) CoreWeave says some of that capacity will use Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, and CNBC says Meta plans to spend between $115 billion and $135 billion on capital expenditures in 2026. Put those two numbers together and the picture is simple: Meta is no longer treating artificial intelligence as a feature for the ad business; it is building the roads, power lines, and toll booths for a new version of the company. (investors.coreweave.com, cnbc.com)