Meta this week rolled out two new AI models as it tries to catch up to competitors and assert itself as a top player in the AI race. Muse Image, true to its name, is an AI image-generation feature for advertisers, creators, and influencers with a feature that’s already causing concern about privacy and online safety: It lets users generate AI images using photos from public Instagram accounts without the account holder’s expressed permission. Meta has said it has safety mechanisms and guardrails for the tool, and that private accounts and those of users under 18 are excluded. Other account holders can opt out. On Thursday, Meta followed that by announcing Muse Spark 1.1, a model built for agentic coding with “very aggressive and attractive” pricing, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with Bloomberg.
Meta has ridden on the heels of other tech innovations before, like TikTok (Instagram Reels) and X/Twitter (Threads). And like SpaceXAI, it announced last week it would sell some of its excess compute. Muse Spark is chasing what Anthropic and OpenAI are already doing for developers accustomed to agentic coding tools, and Muse Spark doesn’t show major improvements in coding over its competitors’ models, according to benchmarks.