Meta debuts new AI model in first test of costly 'superintelligence' team
Source: Guardian
Meta 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 companies are under pressure to prove their huge AI outlays will pay off. The stakes are especially high for Meta after it hired Alex Wang, Scale AI CEO, last year in a $14.3bn deal and offered some engineers pay packages of hundreds of millions of dollars to staff a new “superintelligence” team, an attempt to propel itself back into the AI world’s top ranks after a disappointing showing with its Llama 4 models early last year. Superintelligence refers to AI machines that could outthink humans. Muse Spark is the first in a new series of models, known internally as Avocado, from that team.
The model, the first the company has released in about a year, initially will be available only on the lightly used Meta AI app and website. In the coming weeks, it will replace the existing Llama models powering chatbots on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Meta’s collection of smart glasses, the company said.
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Independent evaluations of Muse Spark’s performance showed it catching up with top models from market leaders Google, OpenAI and Anthropic in some areas, such as language and visual understanding, but lagging in others, like coding and abstract reasoning.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/09/meta-first-ai-model-muse-sparks
Muse Spark is such a dumb name it was probably Zuckerberg's idea.
Meta also talked about embedding shopping features in its chatbot. Which will.certainly come with fine print making the AI user responsible for the AI's mistakes, as they already do at Target and Walmart.