Meta launches open AI model to rival Chinese tools

Meta launched a new open-weight artificial intelligence model on Thursday, saying it can compete with similar systems from leading Chinese developers.

Meta's chief of AI Alexandr Wang wrote on X that Muse Spark Open is the company's “most capable US open-weight model to date.” Open-weight models allow developers to download model parameters and customize them, unlike closed systems such as Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Meta said Muse Spark Open is built for coding and agentic work and performs well on long tasks, complex software engineering and multi-step reasoning. The company said it had added strong safeguards.

Chinese developers have become major players in the open-weight AI market. Meta said Muse Spark Open competes at a similar level with models including Alibaba's Qwen, Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 and Z.ai's GLM.

Meta also said the model is optimized to run on Apple's M5 Ultra chips. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on X that it “runs great on new Mac Studios” after work with Apple and its new chief executive John Ternus.

Ternus said it was “amazing” to run a model of that scale from a desk. Meta said users could run the model on two Mac Studios with M5 Ultra chips to create a desktop “supercomputer.”

The launch came days after Meta unveiled two closed frontier models called Wonder and Wonder Full, which the company said rival advanced versions of ChatGPT and Claude.