Meta unveils new ‘open’ AI model to rival Chinese competition
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Muse Spark Open “is the most capable US open-weight model to date”, Meta’s chief of AI Alexandr Wang wrote on X.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Published Oct 16, 2026, 07:00 AM
Updated Oct 16, 2026, 07:00 AM
- Meta launched Muse Spark Open, an open-weight AI model it says rivals leading Chinese systems and is its most capable US open-weight model to date.
- The model is built for coding and agentic work, with strong safeguards, and it can run on Apple’s M5 Ultra chips, showing a rare Meta-Apple link.
- The launch follows Meta’s new closed models Wonder and Wonder Full, as Zuckerberg shifts the firm to compete more directly with OpenAI and Anthropic.
AI generated
SAN FRANCISCO – Meta on Oct 15 launched a new open-weight AI model which it claims rivals, and in some cases outperforms, similar products from leading Chinese developers.
Muse Spark Open “is the most capable US open-weight model to date”, Meta’s chief of AI Alexandr Wang wrote on X.
Unlike with so-called closed models – such as Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT – developers can download the parameters, or weights, of an open-weight model and then customise it.
Chinese developers have emerged as dominant players in the open-weight market for AI models over the past couple of years.
Alibaba’s Qwen, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and Z.ai’s GLM models have been considered open-weight frontrunners globally, but Meta claims its new open model now competes on a similar level.
“Built for coding and agentic work”, Muse Spark Open “excels at long-horizon tasks, complex software engineering, and multi-step reasoning”, Meta said in a blogpost, adding that “strong safeguards” have been integrated into the new model.
Muse Spark Open is also “optimised” to run on Apple’s advanced M5 Ultra chips, Meta said, signalling an unusual partnership between the two tech giants.
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Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg wrote on X that the new model “runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work” with Apple and its new chief executive John Ternus.
Ternus, who took over as Apple’s chief from Tim Cook in September, responded that it is “amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open’s calibre and scale this efficiently, right from your desk. Mac Studio keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI!”
Muse Spark Open still requires significant computing power, though.
Users can run the model on two Mac Studios with M5 Ultra chips to create a “supercomputer” on their own desktop, Meta said.
The launch comes just days after Meta announced its newest closed model.
On Oct 12, the company unveiled two new “frontier” models called Wonder and Wonder Full, which the company claimed rival the most advanced versions of ChatGPT and Claude.
Meta’s AI efforts were initially focused on open models, but more recently Zuckerberg has pushed the company to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.
Meta launched its Spark model in April, marking a departure from its open-source model known as Llama, which lagged behind the rest of the industry. AFP
