San Francisco (United States) (AFP) – Meta on Monday unveiled two new “frontier” artificial intelligence models called Wonder and Wonder Full, which the company claims perform at a level comparable to that of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. “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,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on X.
Zuckerberg has pushed Meta to compete with leading AI labs, particularly OpenAI and Anthropic over the past year or so amid a race to win over customers and diversify beyond advertising, which has historically been its main source of revenue. In June 2025, the company made a $14 billion investment in Scale AI, an AI startup based in San Francisco, and poached its co-founder Alexandr Wang as part of the deal. Zuckerberg subsequently made Wang the company’s chief AI officer overseeing its newly formed division called Superintelligence Labs.
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. The new models can soon be used in Meta’s new personal agent app, known as Muse, for paid subscribers only. Wonder is “our largest and most capable model yet” and “rivals the big (boys),” Wang posted on X, presumably referring to leading labs OpenAI and Anthropic.
In a blog post, Meta touted so-called benchmarking data from an independent firm called Artificial Analysis that appears to show that Meta’s newest Wonder models outperform its own previous models, Spark, as well as various models developed by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Artificial Analysis’s website shows that Wonder is also among the most expensive models. Meta has committed billions towards competing in the global race to dominate AI, despite growing concerns about safety and security. In July, the Facebook and Instagram maker said its spending on AI-related investments could reach $145 billion this year. The company has more than 3.6 billion daily active users around the world.
-Speeding up-
In its early years, Facebook was known to operate under a philosophy of “move fast and break things,” but more recently, Zuckerberg implied Meta would balance safety with speed. “Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety and security. We didn’t call for everyone else to do this before we would,” Zuckerberg posted on X last month.
In August, Meta launched Muse Code, a product intended to compete with similar automated coding tools offered by OpenAI and Anthropic. Then in September, it launched an agentic app called Muse. Agentic software can autonomously perform specific tasks such as coding, research, shopping, booking reservations, or shopping. At its annual developer conference Connect last month, Meta also revealed a new handheld AI hardware product called Muse Charm that allows users to interact with their Muse agent separately from a smartphone.
Developers have been racing to design agentic apps that will capture users’ attention, time, and wallets. AI-powered hardware remains an elusive goal for the industry as well. While Silicon Valley heavyweights OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta dominate the landscape, young startups like Instinct are also becoming breakout hits. Zuckerberg sped up Muse’s launch due to Instinct’s popularity, the New York Times reported.
Some competitors have called for an industry-wide slowdown to address and mitigate safety concerns. In September, Zuckerberg was one of six American tech executives to sign what President Donald Trump described as a “morally binding” commitment to build adequate safeguards around ever more advanced AI models. Executives from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Nvidia also signed the agreement, but there is no consensus among politicians or industry leaders around how to best move forward.
Leaders at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have encouraged “pacing” – or slowing down – development after models created by all three were found to have escaped their testing environments or taken actions without authorization. “We will slow down as much as necessary in order to make sure that every successive AI technology that we release is actually safe,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told the United Nations last month.
© 2024 AFP
