GoKawiilSign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Email address Sign Up Thank you!
Late last year, news emerged that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta would be shedding its open source roots to instead work on a closed model like the vast majority of its competitors.
Now we’ve finally gotten a first glimpse of the fruit of its labor: Muse Spark, codenamed Avocado and developed by the company’s unbelievably expensive Superintelligence Labs.
But there’s a big problem that could undermine its flashy new announcement. Despite investors buying into the enthusiasm, sending Meta’s shares soaring six percent following the announcement, the company admitted it likely won’t be able to keep up with competing models.
An executive told Bloomberg that the new model won’t be able to keep up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini. In a blog post announcing the new model, the company admitted Muse Spark “is an early data point on our trajectory, and we have larger models in development.
As such, the announcement is a bit of an enigma: if it can’t keep up with the competition, why release it at all?
There’s a good change Meta is just trying to get its foot in the door — or a “seat at the big kid’s table,” as Wired put it. The company has struggled to stay relevant in a rapidly changing landscape, making headlines for being found liable in court for getting underage users dangerously addicted to social media last month instead of its AI efforts.
The company’s decision to train the closed-source model on third-party open-source models, including a Chinese one developed by Alibaba, will also likely raise eyebrows. The practice of “distillation,” or training a “student” model on a more capable “parent” one, has proven controversial in the past.
Meta’s preceding Llama open source models largely failed to catch on, with a major controversy last year finding that Meta may have faked benchmark results to make its Llama 4 model seem more capable than it actually was.
The results of the model, which flopped after being released almost exactly a year ago, “were fudged a little bit,” as former Meta AI head Yann LeCun, who left the company amid the drama, told the Financial Times in January.
... continue reading