Meta’s Muse Spark now powers Meta AI on most of its smart glasses, a significant upgrade over Llama 4 that narrows the gap to leading AI systems.
Announced in April, Muse Spark is the first AI model publicly released by Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), the group formed last year by Mark Zuckerberg with billions of dollars in hiring of top talent across the AI industry. It includes employees with the largest salaries in history.
Meta says Spark is the first in its Muse series, which succeeds its Llama series. While Llama models were open-source, Muse Spark is not, though the company says it “hopes to open-source future versions of the model”.
The Llama series had fallen significantly behind the AI models of OpenAI (GPT), Google DeepMind (Gemini), Anthropic (Claude), and xAI (Grok), a failure that drove Zuckerberg’s decision to lay off much of the team behind it and embark on the series of billion-dollar hires.
Despite being a relatively “small and fast” model, benchmarks suggest Muse Spark rivals larger models from leading AI labs in some areas, though it’s still significantly behind in others.
Meta says it matches the performance of Llama 4 Maverick, its previous best model, while using 10x less compute. Its small size makes it suitable for “instant” responses on both traditional platforms and on smart glasses, where response time can be crucial for real-world queries.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs rebuilt our AI stack from the ground up, moving faster than any development cycle we have run before.
Muse Spark is the first model in our new Muse series — a deliberate and scientific approach to model scaling where each generation validates and builds on the last before we go bigger. This initial model is small and fast by design, yet capable enough to reason through complex questions in science, math, and health. It is a powerful foundation, and the next generation is already in development.”
On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Muse Spark scores 52, compared to the 57 of Gemini 3.1 Pro, 60 of GPT-5.5 and 61 of Claude Opus 4.8.
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In May, Muse Spark replaced Llama 4 in powering Meta AI on all Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses – with the notable exception of Meta Ray-Ban Display.
Meta Ray-Ban Display is still powered by a custom version of Llama 4, and is taking extra time because it also generates a visual response for many queries, drawing on web images, not just a spoken text output.
In our review of Meta Ray-Ban Display we described how Llama 4 felt like an anchor on the AI features of the glasses, and noted that the superiority of Gemini could be a major advantage of the upcoming Google-powered smart glasses from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster.
With Meta’s Muse series, that gap may be narrowing. However, Google isn’t resting on its laurels either, with Gemini 3.5 Flash released in May and Gemini 3.5 Pro expected this month. Whether Meta can truly compete and reestablish its place as a fifth leading AI lab remains to be seen, yet this will be crucial to achieve its long-term goals of smart glasses with always-on “contextual AI” before, or at least at a similar time as, Google and other looming competitors.
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I’m actively writing on UploadVR again, and this article is one in a series of “catch up” pieces where I report on some of the interesting things that have been happening in the industry in recent months. And yes, VR Download is coming back soon!
