Meta unveils Glimmer AI model in open AI push

Meta announced a new open-weight AI model called Glimmer on Monday, August 10, as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg argued that the United States should promote widely available artificial intelligence to compete with China.

In a long essay, Zuckerberg said advanced AI should be distributed broadly rather than concentrated in governments, companies or other institutions. He said Meta's goal should be for American open models to be the best globally and argued that regulatory delays could create risks for US leadership.

Open-weight models allow users to download the rules that govern how an AI system behaves, but they do not make all underlying code public in the way truly open-source software does. OpenAI and Anthropic largely focus on closed AI models, which users cannot inspect themselves.

Meta said in a blog post that Glimmer was developed partly from Muse Spark, a closed-source model announced in April and updated last week. The company said Glimmer uses less computing power than other models but is still powerful enough to operate AI agents, or software that can perform tasks without human intervention.

The announcement follows Meta's release of open-weight models designed to run on laptops, and comes as Chinese developers including Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot have built advanced and lower-cost open models. Meta has poured billions of dollars into Meta Superintelligence Labs as it tries to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic, the makers of ChatGPT and Claude.

Zuckerberg also addressed US debate over AI regulation. President Donald Trump in June ordered a voluntary review process for advanced AI models before release, but his administration missed an August 1 deadline to announce details. Zuckerberg wrote that close collaboration between frontier AI labs and government would be more productive than a rigid review timeline in all cases.

A Meta spokesperson said the company would launch a $1 billion fund to support communities around its facilities amid local opposition to data center development. Meta expects to spend up to $145 billion this year as it invests in AI, nearly double its 2025 spending.