By Guardian staff reporter
Publication Date: 2026-04-09 16:47:00
Meta on Wednesday unveiled Muse Spark, the first artificial intelligence model from a costly team it assembled last year to catch up with rivals in the AI ​​competition.
U.S. tech companies are under pressure to prove their massive AI spending is paying off. The stakes are particularly high for Meta after the company hired Scale AI CEO Alex Wang last year in a $14.3 billion deal and offered hundreds of millions of dollars in salary packages to some engineers to staff a new “superintelligence” team, an attempt to catapult itself back into the top echelons of the AI ​​world after a disappointing performance with its Llama 4 models early last year. Superintelligence refers to AI machines that could outperform humans. Muse Spark is the first of a new model range from this team, known internally as Avocado.
The model, the first the company has released in about a year, will initially only be available on the little-used Meta AI app and website. In the coming weeks it will replace the existing Llama models that power chatbots…
