Muse Spark was competitive with models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic in language, but lagged in codingSign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inboxMeta 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 race.US tech companies are under pressure to prove their massive AI outlays will pay off. The stakes are especially high for Meta after it hired Alex Wang, Scale AI CEO, last year in a $14.3bn deal and offered some engineers pay packages of hundreds of millions of dollars to staff a new “superintelligence” team, a bid to propel itself back into the AI world’s top ranks after a disappointing showing with its Llama 4 models early last year. Superintelligence refers to AI machines that could outthink humans. Muse Spark is the first in a new series of models, known internally as Avocado, from that team. Continue reading…