Meta returns to open models with Zuckerberg’s plan to out-copy China and sell compute by auction
After more than a year off, Meta is releasing model weights again. The compact agent model Muse Glimmer holds its own against rivals, and Mark Zuckerberg paired it with an essay that reads like a reply to OpenAI and Anthropic.
Meta has released Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter model with weights available under an Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face. It’s built for AI agents that run locally around the clock on a Mac or PC with a single consumer GPU. It’s Meta’s first open model since Llama 4 in spring 2025. And it won’t be the last. According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta plans to ship an open-weight version of Muse Spark 1.2, its strongest model right now, in the coming weeks. The stretch in between was turbulent. Meta was long the most important source of open models thanks to Llama, but Llama 4 flopped and drew criticism over massaged benchmark numbers. The largest version of the family never shipped at all. Zuckerberg rebuilt the AI group as Meta Superintelligence Labs, poured billions into data provider Scale AI and into poaching top researchers, and reorganized the unit several times. Chief scientist Yann LeCun, the face of Meta’s AI research for years, left the company. Muse Glimmer is the new unit’s first open model. Meta compares Glimmer with Google’s Gemma4-31B and Alibaba’s Qwen3.6-27B, the two leading open models in this size class. Glimmer wins most benchmarks, especially on agent tasks like tool use, web search, and long-context work. Qwen is clearly better at driving a computer desktop and at terminal tasks. On multimodal tasks, all three are even.
