Meta Releases Open AI Model While Keeping Its Best Tech Closed

(Bloomberg) -- Meta Platforms Inc. made one of its new artificial intelligence models available for developers to download and modify, while keeping its most advanced technology closed in an effort to convert its AI investments into revenue.

On Thursday, Meta announced it's releasing the "weights" — the settings that allow developers to run and adapt a model themselves — to Muse Spark Open. According to Meta, this model, which is designed for coding and to support AI agents, is less advanced than Muse Wonder, which it debuted earlier this week. Releasing a less-advanced open-weight model fulfills a prior Meta commitment to make its technology widely available.

"Because of both safety and capabilities, we will generally not open-source our most powerful models," Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang said in an interview. "But we do think it is important over time to keep open-sourcing great models and we intend to keep doing so."

Chinese companies, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and DeepSeek, have had great success in developing open-source AI models that developers can tweak. Their fast adoption, including in the US, has further intensified the technological rivalry between the two countries.

Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg had long championed making AI models and their building blocks open to the developer community. But last year, after the company's open-weight Llama models disappointed Silicon Valley, Zuckerberg overhauled Meta's AI organization and brought in Wang, who has since helped develop a series of more capable but closed models.

Wang said he believes it's important for American companies to release open-weight models to ensure their dominance over China in the fast-moving AI race. "Most of the world's AI will run on open models," he said. "They should be American."

At the same time, he said he expects Chinese-based AI developers to learn from and build upon Muse Spark Open. "It might even be good if Chinese models adopt some of our principals into their models," he said.

The release of Muse Spark Open also comes as Meta works to stand up its own cloud business, where it would sell access to AI models and computing infrastructure. Wang said giving Muse Spark Open away for free won't undercut that effort. Instead, he sees it as a funnel where developers can experiment on their own, and then pay Meta for additional tools when they need more computing power.