Meta unveils first AI model from costly superintelligence team

Meta Platforms on Wednesday unveiled Muse Spark, the first artificial intelligence model from a costly team it assembled last year to catch up with rivals in the AI race.

US tech giants are under pressure to prove their massive AI outlays will pay off. The stakes are especially high for Meta after it hired Scale AI CEO Alex Wang last year under a $14.3 billion deal and offered some engineers pay packages of hundreds of millions of dollars to staff a new superintelligence team.

Muse Spark is the first in a new series of models from that team, which is pursuing machines that can outthink humans.

It will initially be available only on the lightly-used Meta AI app and website, and in the coming weeks, replace the existing Llama models powering chatbots on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Meta's collection of smart glasses.

"This initial model is small and fast by design, yet capable enough to reason through complex questions in science, math and health. It is a powerful foundation, and the next generation is already in development," the company said in a blog post.

It did not disclose the model's size, a key measure typically used to compare an AI system's computing power with rivals. Muse Spark is part of a family of models known internally as Avocado.

The model can help users with tasks such as estimating the calories in a meal from a photo or superimposing an image of a mug on a shelf to see how it looks - features that some rivals already offer.

Meta also released Contemplating mode, which runs multiple AI agents in parallel to boost reasoning power, allowing Muse Spark to take on the extended thinking modes of Google's Gemini Deep Think and OpenAI's GPT Pro.

The company is betting that applying superintelligence to everyday personal tasks will help it tap its more than 3.5 billion users across its social media platforms, potentially giving it an edge over rivals with a smaller reach.