Meta found its Muse – finally

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Hello reader,

Whenever I sit down and start the workday, my first move is to fire up Brave. It’s been my browser of choice for years now, helping block online trackers that are particularly egregious on social media platforms. Looking at you, Facebook and Instagram.

But while the social side of Meta has been berated for this incessant tracking for years now, the company is making a massive strike in another arena: AI.

After a relatively quiet year following the lukewarm reception of Llama 4 and the cancellation of its Behemoth project, the Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant has just dropped a bombshell. Now the question on everyone’s mind is: Is Meta back?

The answer seems to be yes, and it comes in the form of Muse Spark. It’s the first AI model to emerge from the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL).

One of Muse Spark’s most hyped features is its Contemplating Mode, which runs multiple AI sub-agents in parallel to reason through complex problems. If you’re planning a family trip, for example, one agent might draft your itinerary while another simultaneously hunts down kid-friendly activities.

Alexandr Wang, who is leading the charge at MSL and previously served as CEO of Scale AI, highlighted that on several benchmarks, Muse’s Contemplating Mode is already competitive with and beats other “extreme reasoning models” like Gemini’s Deep Think and GPT Pro.

Meta is also weaving Muse Spark directly into its ecosystem with shopping and health modes, leveraging its 3 billion monthly active users to offer personalized recommendations that general purpose models can’t easily replicate.

Another interesting part of Muse Spark’s debut is who built it. Wang, whose parents were Chinese immigrant physicists, represents a broader, undeniable shift in the tech ecosystem.

This brings me to the perspective of Kyle Qi, an investor at Llama Ventures. In this week’s guest take on AI, Qi recalls a dinner he had with top Ph.D. researchers from Berkeley’s SkyLab, most of whom were of Chinese origin.

Despite multi-million-dollar offers from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, they all wanted to build their own companies. It turns out, money can’t buy everything – especially not conviction.

Miguel Cordon, journalist

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