I personally have many problems with Meta, but imo the more companies close to the frontier, the better.
If only one company were calling all the shots once they hit recursive self-improvement, it would lead to extreme concentration of power, and their values being enforced across the entire industry. With 3-4 companies at the frontier, there is more urge to cooperate to avoid a catastrophic race condition.
I generally agree with more competition thing, but in this case, you actually should want only one company to race ahead, and not a few.
With a few of these top companies together, you, as a nobody, has no one powerful on your side. But with only one company pretty far ahead, you now have other companies which obviously don't give a shit about you, but for saving their own asses, will align with you.
The current state of affairs seems to be that there is 'one company racing ahead' – but it's a different company every few weeks/months. That seems like a pretty useful (unstable) equilibrium for the general public.
In a neck-and-neck race scenario, I imagine all of the competitors would invest heavily due to sunken costs. In a world with one company far ahead, their competitors have a higher chance of cutting their losses and forfeiting to the hegemon.
Edit: Upon closer inspection, the benchmark scores for "Muse Wonder" on the main marketing page are actually for "Muse Wonder Full," which is only available on the higher-tier subscription plans. This pricing is for "Muse Wonder."
Everyone made fun of Zuck when he acquired Scale for billions and then put Alex Wang, a 20 something to be in charge of Meta Superintelligence and forced out Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner.
Even industry insiders were skeptical when he started hiring top talents from other labs away for 9 figure compensation packages.
And Wall Street definitely hated Meta for their CapEX spending.
Now looking at Muse the consumer product and this new model, I think there is a good chance that Zuck is proven once again as a great executioner, especially when they aren’t innovating in a completely new and unproven product space.
> especially when they aren’t innovating in a completely new and unproven product space.
I have no doubt at all that Muse will turn out as great as the other product space Meta pioneered under Zuck - the Metaverse and it's constellation of devices.
Metaverse was right direction with poor execution. Also, it was early... and is still early (if tried again). The world is not there yet for such a thing.
That’s precisely my point, Muse isn’t a new product space at all. AI agents already exist in enterprises and even in the consumer space, there is OpenClaw and Hermes.
I know people like you will point out Metaverse as a failure, but that’s really the exception instead of the norm.
If this model is not benchmaxxed, I fear it's over for anthropic, openai etc. They are not unique and there will probably be many others with similar models very soon. It'll become a commodity and the price will be driven to the ground.
OpenAI has the largest user base on mobile as far as I'm aware. To a lot of standard users AI is still just ChatGPT. They'll be fine as long as they can effectively monetize their free users (same what facebook will soon try with Muse). The only advantage facebook has is that they already have a fully working ad marketplace ready with all major advertisers set up - OpenAI still needs to scale that up.
Personally, I don't see facebook joining the fray (of fable level models) particularly "needle moving" in the discussion of whether frontier LLMs will be commoditized. Facebook spent hundreds of billions and have better talent than most.
If you can spend your way to Frontier LLMs even if it's a few hundred Billion that means it's a commodity same as nuclear or electricity or telecom.
This is the entire point here, give it a couple years every nation on the planet with 20-40B in funding would have their own champions with post Fable level performance.
I doubt anyone thinks coding is going to be their moat in the long run, it is just the easiest to get (paying) users for at the moment. And software being able to write software will always be useful even in other domains. Longer term will be research in other areas where data might become the moat.
So far only OpenAI has a model that solved a Millennium Problem, while Opus 5.5 is a star at coding. It's exciting to have many more to join the frontier, but I think the top two labs still have a significant lead over everyone else.
I've been a regular user of muse spark 1.3 ... and I can tell you one thing for sure that this model, muse-spark-1.3 in xhigh mode, is between sol-6-medium and high.
This is already so good that 90% of my work has shifted away from codex to this. So, muse-wonder-full coming near opus 5.5 is kinda expected.
Fable 5.5 is around the corner, and 'Bel' will be out by end of year as well. We don't know how good they are, but if the improvements from Opus 5 to 5.5 are any indication, I think Meta will be left in the dust again pretty soon.
Whats gonna happen is that time will compress as more releases happen faster and difference between models will still be significant just at higher time frequencies. I expect in the future continuous releases that span no more then days and maybe even faster. So what will become important is not who is 1st or second place at any given time (which might change often), its who is on average at any given time is 1st or second compared to the competition. So yeah meta sitting second here (if not benchmaxed) doesn't really signal anything if that pattern doesn't persist. The number one consistent lab will be the one that raps the rewards (customer subscriptions and traffic). So yeah I agree with what you stated in a long winded form :P
Nearly two weeks since Gemini 4 Argon was announced and I still haven't seen any pelicans from Simon Willison for it. Nobody is currently using it either. What's the point of announcing Gemini 4 and then throwing it into the black hole?
Interestingly unlike other Meta models this one seems to take a pretty big jump in pricing, as opposed to the prior ones, where they typically came out at a highly discounted price compared to every other model.
Maybe its a signal they think they've now cracked into the frontier and are willing to actually price similarly vs just trying to get users with discounted but maybe slightly worse results?
$4/$20 in vs out making it higher than Sol and on par with Opus.
OpenAI halved the value of their pro subscription, literally. It kicks off on Oct 28. And simultaneously is now two steps back on the frontier? It's a confusing moment for that company as they try to IPO.
I believe they’ve pushed back the ipo. I always figured that frontier labs were going to be very vulnerable against tech giants that had actual profitable businesses to fund their AI work.
The amount of total funding Anthropic or OpenAI has raised individually is like a year of ebitda for Google, meta, or Microsoft. And it doesn’t look like there’s a real moat outside of money
They pushed back the IPO because their finances are a mess and they don't have any models that can give them a decisive edge. Astra was touted as AGI and got crushed by Opus 5.5 two weeks later. That's not the type of thing that fills investors with confidence.
I found it interesting in the example given of a user looking at house listings and the agent contacting the letting agent on it's own on behalf of the user.
Like the good ol' days of viruses and anti-viruses. I wonder if there's two sides that will play out; many agents across many users doing things at scale for their users, thereby creating an admin burden for someone else. However because the task is known there's a framework for how to solve the task, might Meta then provide an agent on the other side for the business owner to use.
Just checked their subscription is still North America only, I guess I will keep myself and my company with claude...
These regional lockdowns are making me feel funky, I feel like I should just use open models if others start playing at this game as well.
I was/am fine with Chinese companies offering cheaper subscriptions in China because ofc. But this is just weird, you could always charge me more let me try the damn thing, atleast it's own open router it seems like.
Initial impressions, interesting, it generated a pretty ok result for my prompt need to run a larger task but don't want to burn money so will wait for someone to burn their subscription and try running some opus 5.5 comparisons.
I don't think they'd have much to gain. People who use open-weights models will just use whatever open-weights model is the best. They'd lose a bunch of money, with little conversion to customers.
I disagree actually, I think zucks original llama thesis is proving more correct by the week. The rent market on intelligence never materialized, and will not materialize.
In software, we've all become accustomed to the idea that the way you make money is by building little blocks of intellectual capital, then charging rent on it. That made sense when developing intellectual capital was a rare and valuable skill/asset and the thing you build was a rare and valuable asset. But now both are not rare. You can still charge rent, but the market is highly competitive, so prices match that.
Durable rents will end up going to those who owns the scarce assets, zuck is building those as we speak.
Dropping open weights will build an ecosystem that makes his valuable assets more valuable.
In the context of Meta trying to get non-technical people to embrace Muse agents to handle personal affairs, their internal metric showing a ~3% violation rate for mishandling personal information seems unacceptably high.
Unlike everyone else, which at least has to pretend not to train on user data, they gave out their model for basically free if you agreed to let them train on it. Opencode shows nearly 40 trillion tokens going through muse spark 1.3 contributor this week alone. That almost definitely helped close the gap a lot.
they started their massive ai capex over a year ago with aquihiring scale ai, so I think it makes sense that their investment is paying off now. in total they've spent in the high 200 billion on ai, though I think most is likely on datacenters.
They added fancy annimations and effects to this specific webpage, which are unnecessary and distracting and lead to bad reading experience. I already suffer astigmatism and floaters. I hate it when I move my cursor and these gray blocks and characters flash and flicker.
Now if only they could fix their coding harness so that it's usable for day-to-day use. I paid them for a month to try out Muse Code, but their sandbox never worked across Mac or Linux (both very stock installs, nothing special).
As an aside: I tested out the $20 Cursor CLI subscription, and it created an excellent little graphical app for my kids to play with. The design it came up with was excellent (compared to the crap I got out of Codex for a parallel implementation). I'm going to try to figure out how to get Cursor into my work rotation, at least around design-related artifacts.
The usage limits on their basic $5 code plan to try things out are ludicrously low?
I blew through 14% weekly usage and I'll I asked:
1. what version of rpcs3 and pcsx2 do I have installed?
2. do any new versions exist?
3. check analytics for my blog (I have a skill for this)
Subscription · Muse Code Everyday Usage
Current 52% used · Resets at 6:58 PM
Weekly 17% used · Resets Oct 18 at 8:00 PM
OpenAI has Dots. I personally prefer the business model of subscription payments funding my AI assistant, instead of skimming a fee off the top whenever my AI assistant completes a purchase for me. The incentives are much more aligned with the user when the user is the customer. That said, based on the history of the web, Meta's approach will likely win out.
To be clear, Meta here is not using "Super Intelligence" the bullshit term Trump wants companies to adopt as a show of submission. They use "superintelligence" the bullshit term that Facebook made up for marketing reasons a few years ago. Both of these are of course entirely unrelated to the long-established meaning of the word (e.g. how Bostrom defines it).
I know, it's... well, it's irritating to see Trump use it. But I could be wrong, I don't know the angle he's going for
I understand the general thing of it. SI might mean every person gets their personalized agent but you could already do this, but maybe the Chinese model works here, where they push the costs down
Super Intelligence refers to intelligence beyond what humans are capable of, which some believers profess is the next step after (and in contrast to) human-level AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Calling pre-AGI AI "super intelligence" is pure vice-signalling and publicly kissing the ring.
I noticed "Superintelligence" as a re-brand of AI and constantly shifting definitions of AGI around 2025. When a bunch of startups started slinging around SI as a marketing term and of course when Meta launched MSI in summer of 2025.
I think it's safe to assume every single model is benchmaxxed. I mean why wouldn't you include training data from common benchmarks? Not only is a higher score good marketing, but these benchmarks are supposed to represent common tasks so training for those should in principle improve performance across a wider range of tasks.
All of them are doing all the benchmaxing they can most likely. Dumb not to when so many people care about those numbers and don’t have the opportunity to try every model out personally.
If only one company were calling all the shots once they hit recursive self-improvement, it would lead to extreme concentration of power, and their values being enforced across the entire industry. With 3-4 companies at the frontier, there is more urge to cooperate to avoid a catastrophic race condition.
With a few of these top companies together, you, as a nobody, has no one powerful on your side. But with only one company pretty far ahead, you now have other companies which obviously don't give a shit about you, but for saving their own asses, will align with you.
Both exploit, but "cartels" survive, not loners.
Input -- $4.00
Cached input -- $0.20
Output -- $20.00
Edit: Upon closer inspection, the benchmark scores for "Muse Wonder" on the main marketing page are actually for "Muse Wonder Full," which is only available on the higher-tier subscription plans. This pricing is for "Muse Wonder."
2nd place model on aa according to them, losing only to opus 5.5 is really really not bad
Even industry insiders were skeptical when he started hiring top talents from other labs away for 9 figure compensation packages.
And Wall Street definitely hated Meta for their CapEX spending.
Now looking at Muse the consumer product and this new model, I think there is a good chance that Zuck is proven once again as a great executioner, especially when they aren’t innovating in a completely new and unproven product space.
I have no doubt at all that Muse will turn out as great as the other product space Meta pioneered under Zuck - the Metaverse and it's constellation of devices.
I know people like you will point out Metaverse as a failure, but that’s really the exception instead of the norm.
How about the Facebook phone then?
This is the entire point here, give it a couple years every nation on the planet with 20-40B in funding would have their own champions with post Fable level performance.
This is already so good that 90% of my work has shifted away from codex to this. So, muse-wonder-full coming near opus 5.5 is kinda expected.
Hamstringing any business that wants to reassure investors with a hype/pump cycle before an egregiously unsustainable IPO?
Maybe its a signal they think they've now cracked into the frontier and are willing to actually price similarly vs just trying to get users with discounted but maybe slightly worse results?
$4/$20 in vs out making it higher than Sol and on par with Opus.
The amount of total funding Anthropic or OpenAI has raised individually is like a year of ebitda for Google, meta, or Microsoft. And it doesn’t look like there’s a real moat outside of money
Like the good ol' days of viruses and anti-viruses. I wonder if there's two sides that will play out; many agents across many users doing things at scale for their users, thereby creating an admin burden for someone else. However because the task is known there's a framework for how to solve the task, might Meta then provide an agent on the other side for the business owner to use.
These regional lockdowns are making me feel funky, I feel like I should just use open models if others start playing at this game as well.
I was/am fine with Chinese companies offering cheaper subscriptions in China because ofc. But this is just weird, you could always charge me more let me try the damn thing, atleast it's own open router it seems like.
Initial impressions, interesting, it generated a pretty ok result for my prompt need to run a larger task but don't want to burn money so will wait for someone to burn their subscription and try running some opus 5.5 comparisons.
In software, we've all become accustomed to the idea that the way you make money is by building little blocks of intellectual capital, then charging rent on it. That made sense when developing intellectual capital was a rare and valuable skill/asset and the thing you build was a rare and valuable asset. But now both are not rare. You can still charge rent, but the market is highly competitive, so prices match that.
Durable rents will end up going to those who owns the scarce assets, zuck is building those as we speak.
Dropping open weights will build an ecosystem that makes his valuable assets more valuable.
How does it work on day-to-day workflows? does it translates well?
Seems they’ve just messed around with cheap and open weight models for years.
Then Muse appears, followed by full suite of frontier models…
Only Muse Wonder is available in the API.
What's next, Sun Shine?
Now if only they could fix their coding harness so that it's usable for day-to-day use. I paid them for a month to try out Muse Code, but their sandbox never worked across Mac or Linux (both very stock installs, nothing special).
(Disclaimer: I work at Cursor/SpaceX)
I blew through 14% weekly usage and I'll I asked:
Beware...Beyond ridiculous
I understand the general thing of it. SI might mean every person gets their personalized agent but you could already do this, but maybe the Chinese model works here, where they push the costs down
It's still stupid to start calling it all SI
that was all before Trump's "edict"