Reflecting on Meta’s big week, where US open-weight models now stand, and the outlook for meaningful competition to Anthropic & OpenAI. Meta feels like they’re going from strength to strength, but can they close the last bit of the gap to Claude?

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The story so far

Meta released downloadable weights for Muse Spark Open, a multimodal model for coding and agentic work that Artificial Analysis ranks first among US open-weight models on its Intelligence Index, scoring 39 at the xhigh setting. The model has approximately 816 billion parameters, with 42 billion active per token, and supports up to one million tokens of context. It accepts text, images, audio and video and generates text. Artificial Analysis’s initial AA-AgentPerf testing reports throughput of up to approximately 150 million tokens per second per megawatt of power used on four NVIDIA GB300 or B300 GPUs. Meta says the model can run on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios using MLX; Baoyu reports that this configuration uses 512GB of unified memory per machine. vLLM says its support is verified on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs and TPUs. Ollama Cloud offers access through Pro, Max, Pay-as-you-go and Teams plans. Amazon SageMaker JumpStart offers BF16 and NVFP4 variants in US East (N. Virginia) and US East (Ohio) at launch, charging for endpoints whenever they run, including while idle. The license carries conditions: The Decoder reports that free use requires the label “Built with Muse Spark Open.” Baoyu reports that attribution and usage restrictions apply, and that businesses selling API access to the model or modified versions must notify Meta and sign a separate agreement if their combined revenue with affiliates exceeded $20 million over the preceding 12 months.