Meta's Muse Spark now powers Meta AI on most of its smart glasses, a significant upgrade over Llama 4 that narrows the gap to leading AI systems.
Announced in April, Muse Spark is the first AI model publicly released by Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), the group formed last year by Mark Zuckerberg with billions of dollars in hiring of top talent across the AI industry. It includes employees with the largest salaries in history.
Meta says Spark is the first in its Muse series, which succeeds its Llama series. While Llama models were open-source, Muse Spark is not, though the company says it "hopes to open-source future versions of the model".
The Llama series had fallen significantly behind the AI models of OpenAI (GPT), Google DeepMind (Gemini), Anthropic (Claude), and xAI (Grok), a failure that drove Zuckerberg's decision to lay off much of the team behind it and embark on the series of billion-dollar hires.
Despite being a relatively "small and fast" model, benchmarks suggest Muse Spark rivals larger models from leading AI labs in some areas, though it's still significantly behind in others.
Meta says it matches the performance of Llama 4 Maverick, its previous best model, while using 10x less compute. Its small size makes it suitable for "instant" responses on both traditional platforms and on smart glasses, where response time can be crucial for real-world queries.
On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index , Muse Spark scores 52, compared to the 57 of Gemini 3.1 Pro, 60 of GPT-5.5 and 61 of Claude Opus 4.8.
In May, Muse Spark replaced Llama 4 in powering Meta AI on all Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses – with the notable exception of Meta Ray-Ban Display.