// ARS TECHNICA — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
With new open models, Meta pitches another reboot of its struggling AI strategy
Meta has been trailing competitors. Zuckerberg thinks he’s found a way forward.
Meta has announced its intention to focus on open-weight large language models. Additionally, the company announced the release of an open model called Muse Glimmer and a promise to open the weights for Muse Spark 1.2, its more powerful model, in the next few weeks.
Alongside these announcements, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a more than 6,000-word essay outlining the company’s philosophy about AI systems and governance moving forward. The essay aims to differentiate Meta from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, which develop proprietary models and which have lobbied the US government for help competing against large-scale distillation—which involves using an existing model to train a new one—or open-weight models by Chinese labs.
Muse Glimmer is a 30 billion parameter model with a 128,000-token context window by default. It is distilled from Muse Spark, the larger and more capable model that Meta launched earlier this year. Glimmer is meant to run on users’ local machines, rather than via a cloud service or an API. Glimmer’s weights are open source under the Apache 2.0 license.
Muse Spark was introduced in April as a closed, proprietary, frontier-class model—Meta’s first major model release after a significant shake-up of the company’s AI teams last year, and a departure from its focus on models that are, by some definition, open. When Meta released Muse Spark 1.1 in July, it introduced its first paid service—again, a departure from its previous strategy. Muse Spark 1.2 was released on August 5 and was accompanied by Muse Code, a terminal coding agent.
Developers have generally found that Muse Code doesn’t quite match the frontier models from Anthropic or OpenAI in capability, but it competes well on cost—meaning it has similar positioning to many open-weight models from Chinese labs.
As a smaller model designed to run on consumer GPUs, Muse Glimmer won’t compete on that level at all—but it reflects a growing movement to bring some inference to local devices to reduce reliance and spending on the models produced by the big labs like Anthropic and OpenAI.
Alongside the model releases, Mark Zuckerberg is credited as the author of a lengthy open letter that details Meta’s corporate strategy with AI, and a broader argument for how AI should be developed, distributed, and regulated.
It follows several statements by other Big Tech and AI company leaders debating the merits of open-weight models, proprietary labs, and the practice of distillation—something that some Chinese labs have reportedly done to build models that compete with the latest efforts from Anthropic and others.
On July 24, several companies including Nvidia, Hugging Face, Meta, Mistral, Mozilla, OpenAI and others co-signed an open letter titled “Open Weights and American AI Leadership” that argued for the value of open-weight models as opposed—or at least in addition—to proprietary ones, and defended distillation as a legitimate practice, even as it carved out a distinction for “unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models.” It advocated for “targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation.”