Meta shakes up the frontiers, open and closed

This has been a week where the balance of American open-weight models took a step change back toward the frontier. Meta took the lead of this charge with Muse Spark Open (research.meta.ai/blog/muse-spark-open), which is now the strongest American-made open model by quite some margin, but the addition of Reflection’s first model Beam (reflection.ai/blog/introducing-beam) is also relevant. Without these two models, there would be 20+ open-weight models built and released by Chinese companies better than the best Western models. At the time of writing this, Mistral has also announced a strong model, Mistral Large 4 (mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-4), with an index score of 38 (see below), but its weights are not yet released. There are rumors of a few more strong American open-weight models coming from other organizations too!
In many ways, the gap between the best American and Chinese models has been reduced roughly by half. We’ve gone from the best American open models being largely irrelevant to consumers who require the cutting edge of performance, to them being behind but relevant.
This paints the picture of the cut-throat, competitive nature of the frontier model business. Reflection and Mistral announced their model scores and Meta dropped the weights of a smarter model before these other two labs could get their own weights out. All of these models are competing with Chinese models released months ago, where the industry is collectively asking — where have Kimi and Zhipu AI been since the releases of GLM-5.3 and Kimi K3 on Aug. 18th and Jul. 16th, respectively?
That is a very nuanced question, which I’ll dig into another time. Today’s piece is focused on Meta’s turnaround, what Muse Spark Open means for the ecosystem, and the balance of power across Western frontier labs.
Why Muse Spark Open should take off — and why it may not
One thing we see again and again at Interconnects through our open model analysis is that Western open-weight models get astonishingly more adoption than Chinese models with the same performance-to-size footprint (even though the Chinese models usually come out first)! Muse Spark Open is landing into this environment, at the same time as when open-ended LLM agents are finally real (~GLM 5.2 capabilities and on (interconnects.ai/p/glm-52-is-the-step-change-f…)).
Riding off a rapid increase in performance of Chinese models, the open ecosystem has been living through an acceleration in demand. The inference providers are rapidly scaling, the open post-training economy is forming, and countless enterprises are looking to own their intelligence. Muse Spark Open’s performance falls somewhere above GLM 5.2, near DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, and behind GLM 5.3 or Kimi K3. It should be squarely “good enough” to slot right into this.
For some background, from the Muse Spark Open model card (huggingface.co/meta-models/Muse-Spark-Open-816…) on Hugging Face:
Muse Spark Open is an 816B total/42B active parameter open weights model with a context window of 1M tokens. Built for coding and agentic work, Muse Spark Open is natively multimodal. This open weights version has additional safety post-training to make it more robust against misuse as a standalone model without system guardrails. We recommend deploying Muse Spark Open as part of a broader AI system, with additional guardrails suited to the specific use case.
Here’s the distribution of the various Muse models on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.
This is included to loop back to the original model card snippet. It was shared that this open-weight model underwent additional safety training to prepare for this open release. Many observers saw this release as potentially a model that was “broken” during the safety training, as it came out after Muse Spark 1.3.
In reality, this was much more likely a safety tune of Muse Spark 1.2, which would only be a 1 point drop on Artificial Analysis to shore up safety behaviors. When Meta released Muse Glimmer (huggingface.co/meta-models/Muse-Glimmer-30B), the 30B agentic model, Alex Wang said (x.com/alexandr_wang/status/2086756152034066792) that they were preparing to release the Muse Spark 1.2 model as open weights, which fits with the above.
If anything will hold Muse Spark Open back, it’ll be the specific license (huggingface.co/meta-models/Muse-Spark-Open-816…) they designed for it. In summary, this custom license has pretty much all of the restrictive license behaviors we’ve seen (and criticized here) in the last few years of building with open models. They are as follows:
* Users of the models in products must display “Built with Muse” on their products. Meta did this with Llama, and Kimi has tried it, but almost no one complies.
* There is a revenue-gating factor, where companies that make more than $20M per month across their entire business deploying the model need a separate license with Meta. Other prominent open model providers are doing this too, in order to set up revenue share agreements (interconnect.substack.com/p/kimis-tightrope-op…) for re-selling inference.
* Muse Spark Open makes you agree to an acceptable use policy, which in the true “open source software” corner of the world makes this model extremely not open-source.
* All of the above applies to outputs from the model as well, and derivatives, so there is legal ambiguity if you can safely use the model for synthetic data.
The license does permit using Muse Spark Open for internal research and applications.
We’re at a weird equilibrium where this license is complex and unproven in court, but many players will likely ignore it. Many, many people will build on this model from various inference providers, and Meta will only likely go after egregious violations.
For now, licenses haven’t been the determining factor of AI adoption, but this could change in the future. This is why we think it’s an unnecessary strategic risk for labs trying to compete and regain adoption to have complex, non-standard open licenses for their models.
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Is Meta a tier 1 (OpenAI/Anthropic) or tier 2 (Gemini/xAI) frontier lab?
Just a few days before Muse Spark Open, Meta unveiled their closed frontier models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full (research.meta.ai/blog/muse-wonder). On traditional benchmarks, these are very strong models only behind Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 and similar to OpenAI’s GPT-6-Astra or Google’s Gemini-4-Argon.
These major releases are coming just over a year out from Meta’s massive AI redirection, characterized by CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Personal Superintelligence (meta.com/superintelligence/?srsltid=AU7gw4XKcg…) post, which got a lot of criticism at the time. Meta is the only American company with frontier open and closed models. Alibaba’s Qwen has followed a similar strategy, but with a far more open-leaning approach.
The vibe checks across all of these models have been solid, but the expectations were for them to not immediately challenge the level of refinement of the most recent Anthropic and OpenAI models in real-world usage. I’m excited to try them more — time to sign up for another AI subscription.
I like this recent run of form from Meta, driving their own products and directions in the popular Muse agent, taking wins like the leading US open-weight crown when useful. Whether or not it’s financially successful, it’s a unique perspective that fits their history as a business.
It often feels like there’s a revolving door of which lab is nipping at the heels of the Anthropic-OpenAI leading duo. It’s not clear that in the long run Gemini and xAI are out of it, but those two are much more muddled in their offerings than Meta today. If you listen to Zuck and Alexandr Wang on The Cheeky Pint …