By Meghan Bobrowsky

Meta Platforms announced a new large language model Wednesday, its first major new artificial intelligence model in more than a year.

The announcement of the model, called Muse Spark, is a critical moment for Meta, which has spent billions of dollars hiring AI talent in a bid to catch up to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. The leading labs have been putting out models at an accelerating pace that have wowed the public with their abilities.

In a departure from its previous models, which were open-source, Muse Spark is a closed model that will power Meta's AI chatbot and AI features within it. The company said it plans to release a private preview of the model to a few partners via an application programming interface and at some later point might open-source some versions of the model. It doesn't have current plans to release the model widely via API as other companies do.

According to Meta's internal benchmark tests, Muse Spark outscored Google's Gemini on some tests and was competitive with models from OpenAI and Anthropic on others. It significantly outscored xAI's Grok on most tests, the company said.

Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 08, 2026 12:09 ET (16:09 GMT)