Meta Launches Muse Wonder, Zuckerberg Claims AI Breakthrough
Meta is stepping up its artificial intelligence ambitions with the launch of Muse Wonder, a new model family that CEO Mark Zuckerberg says brings the company to the forefront of AI development. The announcement signals Meta’s renewed push to compete with rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic after months of efforts to narrow the gap.
Announcing the launch on X, Zuckerberg described Muse Wonder as a significant upgrade over the earlier Muse Spark models. “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,” he wrote.
In an interview with a famous publication, Zuckerberg said the model was “going to allow much more sophisticated behaviours that are at the frontier of what is being done in the AI field.”
According to Meta, Muse Wonder, internally codenamed Watermelon, outperforms comparable models, including Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, on certain tasks. The company cited its internal benchmarks and data from Artificial Analysis to support its claims.
Meta has poured billions of dollars into AI development to strengthen its competitive position. “Getting to this point both required a large amount of compute and investment, and a lot of very rigorous scientific work by the group working on it over an extended period of time,” Zuckerberg said.
Last June, Meta invested $14 billion in Scale AI and brought in co-founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI efforts. Wang, who now heads Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, described the launch as “the big moment.” He added “We really think they are competitive with the best models out there, and particularly state of the art on personal and professional agentic work.”
Muse Wonder to power Muse AI assistant
Meta has introduced two versions of the model: Muse Wonder and the more powerful Muse Wonder Full. The standard version will support the paid tier of Muse, the company’s personal AI assistant launched last month.
The assistant uses autonomous agents to handle tasks such as grocery orders and travel bookings. Meta claims the app has become the most downloaded application on both Apple and Android app stores in the US.
Wang said Meta is taking a different approach from competitors focused heavily on coding tools. “I think the rest of the ecosystem has been really focused on coding agents,” he said. “We do genuinely think that we’ve taken a differentiated focus to make the personal-agent use case really sing.”
He also highlighted Muse Wonder’s “active memory” feature, which can retain useful information “across days, weeks, months” and help the system find alternative approaches when it encounters obstacles.
The model is available through the Meta Model API and Muse Code, with prices ranging from $0.20 (roughly Rs 19) per million tokens to $200 (roughly Rs 19,000) a month for Muse Wonder Full. However, launch-day problems affected usage-limit calculations for Meta’s Code subscription. Wang acknowledged the issue on X, writing, “There’s a bunch of bugs right now that we’re looking into.”
The launch also marks a shift from Meta’s earlier open-source AI strategy, as Muse Wonder will be “closed,” with its most advanced versions sold directly to businesses. Zuckerberg said Meta was “already working on the next step up” and suggested that progress would “probably feel like it’ll go quite a bit faster from here.”
Meanwhile, the company continues to face scrutiny over its business decisions. In May, Meta laid off 10 per cent of its workforce, affecting 8,000 jobs. It also faced employee backlash over a proposed system to collect mouse movements and keystrokes for AI training, which was later withdrawn.
In August, Meta agreed to pay $18 billion to settle a legal battle with US states over alleged failures involving child protection and social media addiction.