Meta is back in the LLM game after a year-long break

What Muse Spark tells us about Meta’s new AI strategy.

In the latest episode of the AI Summer podcast, Tim and Kai discuss Claude Mythos Preview with Sayash Kapoor, a computer scientist at Princeton.

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This post originally appeared in Understanding AI.

“I am placing Meta in that category of AI labs whose pronouncements about model capabilities are not to be trusted, that cannot be relied upon to follow industry norms, and which are clearly not on the frontier.”

The April 8 release of Meta’s new model Muse Spark got overshadowed by Claude Mythos Preview, which was announced one day earlier. But Meta’s new model family — and the 158-page safety report Meta released about it last week — are still significant for what they tell us about the company’s future role in the AI industry.

Mark Zuckerberg spent billions of dollars to assemble the team that built Muse Spark. The model’s release gives us our first hints about whether Meta will be able to break into the top tier of AI labs.

Meta has all of the advantages of a well-resourced technology company: lots of AI chips, proprietary data, and lavish salaries. Those resources have enabled the Meta team to produce a model with strong benchmark scores. But I suspect that those scores still overstate the model’s real-world utility.