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Re:Muse Spark Open by a11r on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:42PM (#50108293)
Artificial analysis shows this: underperforming Qwen3.8 Flash Next and GLM 5.3 Flash, both of which you can run on a single B300 . I think Meta has a bit of catching up to do in the open-weight space.

As an aside, it's really unfortunate that artificial analysis only provides comparison at the highest reasoning level, which is mostly unusable for high-volume production use cases. I would really like them to start providing comparisons at low and medium reasoning levels across these models because those tend to be the ones that actually get used in production.

Re:Muse Spark Open by alexpotato on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:08PM (#50109534)
Been using GLM 5.3 Flash via Ollama Cloud basic subscription:

if this is the only model I had to use for the rest of my life, I would be cool with that. It's good at a wide variety of tasks including reverse engineering, design, working with ESP 32 etc.

I think Muse Spark 1.3 is better but GLM 5.3 Flash is an excellent daily driver.

Re:Muse Spark Open by neya on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:12PM (#50109588)
If you liked GLM 5.3, you would appreciate Deepseek V4 Flash a lot. In my personal opinion and use-cases, it outperforms GLM 5.3.
Re:Muse Spark Open by 0xbadcafebee on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:23PM (#50109712)
V4 isn't the newest DeepSeek, and GLM 5.3 non-Flash isn't the same ballpark

- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash has marginally better coding, and smaller experts (8B-In/16B-Out) with more compressed attention and KV cache, so it's faster but will have less expertise per task. It's a 552B model, so while it theoretically may contain more trained data it also requires more RAM (the experts are smaller to compensate for speed loss) making it harder to serve without the distributed KV cache DeepSeek hosts.

- GLM 5.3 Flash has marginally better agentic work, and has video input (DS doesn't), and its experts are 18B so there's more intelligence per task. It's a 320B model so it requires less RAM which will make it cheaper to serve. Considering it's a much smaller model, the higher intelligence indicates their architecture/training is better.

- GLM 5.3 (non-Flash) is far more intelligent than both; it's a 744B model with 40B experts, but it's text-only.

Re:Muse Spark Open by Shebanator on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:24PM (#50111254)
Model sizes aren't directly comparable, and they aren't even that relevant. I care about result quality, cost, and speed, not size. I switched to deepseek because it was giving me better coding results than GLM, and for far less cost. GLM is still better at planning.
Re:Muse Spark Open by neya on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:56PM (#50112893)
In OpenCode, it shows up as "Deepseek V4 Flash Latest", so I assume it is the v4.1, so that's where the confusion comes from.

However, I disagree on the technical specifications. For most projects, a single prompt will get me what I want with good quality with Deepseek vs GLM 5.3. This is from real world experience with JS and Elixir. Perhaps for other tasks GLM 5.3 might be good. But, my biggest annoyance with most non-flash model providers - including GLM is they will dumb down the models based on load (like switching a non-flash model to flash model). That sucks because you expect a certain level of intelligence from them. Not a coin toss on "here's me hoping it works" and you expect a certain model only when you explicitly specify it by name.

Re:Muse Spark Open by Implicated on Saturday October 17, 2026 @01:18PM (#50133000)
> But, my biggest annoyance with most non-flash model providers - including GLM is they will dumb down the models based on load (like switching a non-flash model to flash model).

Where are you seeing this? This would be sufficient for me to stop using that provider entirely, immediately.

Re:Muse Spark Open by samtp on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:10PM (#50109561)
I've been using GLM 5.3 Flash as the planner and DS 4.1 as the task worker over the last month and the results have been very good, predictable, ridiculously cheap.
Re:Muse Spark Open by DaSHacka on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:11PM (#50111117)
What reasoning level do you use for each?
Re:Muse Spark Open by edg5000 on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:48AM (#50114202)
Why this model split? And are your work volumes so high that you prefer these cheaper models over a subscription or are you simply trying to avoid the 200/m? (which will only go up).
Re:Muse Spark Open by dgellow on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:43PM (#50109932)
Have you compared to deepseek v4.1 flash? It’s so good, at a ridiculous price
Re:Muse Spark Open by thekevan on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:52PM (#50110035)
Genuinely curious, why not use GPT Sol 6.1 high which has a better cost per task and intelligence ($0.32, 50) or Mimo 2.6 pro? ($0.13, 46) over GLM Max's $2.01, 45?
Re:Muse Spark Open by mapkkk on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:07PM (#50110252)
Not OP, but I've been trying out Sol 6.1 medium with hermes agent, and I have not been able to match usage costs to what I've been getting with glm 5.3 flash high.

Really don't know why, since I've offloaded thinking to the LLMs in this area of my life. Though even at medium, 6.1-Sol is noticeably better at most tasks I throw at it.

Re:Muse Spark Open by alexpotato on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:11PM (#50110300)
I'm OP and I have the Ollama basic $20/mo plan.

Been very happy with it although I will say Muse Spark 1.3 being free on OpenCode is my main model these days. If I run out of free credits on OC (which almost never happens) then I drop into GLM Flash 5.3.

Re:Muse Spark Open by qingcharles on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:15PM (#50112508)
Sol won't do some things. Like, GPT freaked out yesterday because I needed to vector trace a logo and it said it would be a rights violation.

Then I have to work down the list: Grok, then Muse, then if those fail I make the Chinese one do it.

https://imgur.com/a/8LVmpLV

Re:Muse Spark Open by windexh8er on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:06AM (#50113956)
Not a fan of Elon but latest Grok gets shit done and isn't a narc model from Anthropic/OAI.
Re:Muse Spark Open by kennywinker on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:30AM (#50114092)
Feelings about elon aside, the fact that they’re using gas generators to run these is a dealbreaker for me.

Source, to preempt the inevitable musk stans: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacexais-colossu...

Re:Muse Spark Open by quaffcode on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:05AM (#50114300)
They're not using gas generators to run the other models?

Gas generators are common in new data center buildouts. I'm not a fan, because they are insanely loud, but they do prevent the data centers from weighing down the grid and raising rates for all the neighbors.

Re:Muse Spark Open by kennywinker on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:10AM (#50114337)
My local llm running on my eight year old gpu and ten year old pc is powered by hydroelectric dams. I can’t vouch for the other data centers tho.
Re:Muse Spark Open by logicallee on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:14AM (#50114745)
>My local llm running on my eight year old gpu and ten year old pc is powered by hydroelectric dams.

how do you still have a job?

Re:Muse Spark Open by u8080 on Friday October 16, 2026 @03:19AM (#50115197)
Hydroelectric dams disrupt biosphere by flooding areas previosly inhabited by animals - and kill the whole populations of wildlife and fish.

How do you feel destroying our planet and murdering innocent creatures for your entertainment clanker?

Re:Muse Spark Open by b112 on Friday October 16, 2026 @03:30AM (#50115292)
This is absurd nonsense, and needs to be quelled wherever espoused.

Dams aren't as a nuclear explosion. They don't burst into appearance, in a way where animals cannot walk away from the rising water. Birds lose nests all the time (wind knocks down trees, for example) and they merely build another. And they only need nests to rear young, and those fall out of trees so they... build another.

What happens in reality, and not in fantastical, hyperbolic renditions of the truth, is that one ecosystem replaces another. Where before was river, is now lake. And this is an entirely natural process. There have been cases of earthquakes causing river blockage, and of course the reverse!

And of course our friendly beaver blocks rivers all the time, sometimes to the extent that it can be seen from space. Rivers being blocked is a natural, normal, common practice.

But I suppose you hate all the beavers too? Do you raise fist to air, shake it in emotive angst, and rail against the horrors of natural geological processes too? Do you hunt the noble beaver, too?

How about instead of dismissing, deriding, and debasing one of the most environmentally friendly methods of power generation, you get behind it? How about instead of suppressing a hydroelectric dam, which means people will build Ng generators, or use coal, you support them.

Or would you prefer nuclear, for that stable, steady, backing, of which windmill and our friendly sol does not provide? Or would you prefer massive acres of batteries, instead?

I beg you sir, please cease this mindless chatter!

(no I don't normally talk like this, but what the hell, a but of levity may bring less conflict here)

Re:Muse Spark Open by u8080 on Friday October 16, 2026 @07:29AM (#50117098)
This was intended to be absurd nonsense (or as I call it, irony).

I mean, if you think about this, burning stuff is also a part of nature, wildfires happens regularly, volcanos active right now, etc. Burning fossils like gas was(from caveman burning wood) and is still most popular way to generate energy among humans. I don't get what's so special about datacenters people find compared to any industrial facilities to fuel hateboner on most absurd nitpicks.

Re:Muse Spark Open by kennywinker on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:05AM (#50118553)
Arsenic is a part of nature, but it’ll still kill you. Burning the massive amount of co2 stored underground during the carboniferous period is not the same as random forest fires that burn co2 fixed a few decades ago.
Re:Muse Spark Open by kennywinker on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:27AM (#50118768)
It’s funny because there are very real criticisms of hydroelectric dams, from a climate collapse perspective, but these are not them.
Re:Muse Spark Open by skinfaxi on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:57AM (#50119166)
What models do you run?
Re:Muse Spark Open by reverius42 on Friday October 16, 2026 @05:50AM (#50116324)
As far as I know at least Anthropic also rents space in Musk's gas generator powered data centers.
Re:Muse Spark Open by windexh8er on Friday October 16, 2026 @09:23AM (#50118100)
Pretty sure you're not able to use many models, besides local, if you need to guarantee where the energy produced powers them. I don't align with much of what's going on in frontier AI today. And I don't actually use it as much as I had been as I've invested in local hardware. But I'm still curious and continue to test frontier models on different tasks. My limited experience with Grok is that it's boundaries are much less rigid than Anthropic and OAI, IME.

But if the planet is the only consideration here you can't use any in of these models when pointing a finger at one. They're putting them wherever they can. And I'll be one of the first one to cheer some of these systems being dismantled after the fallout / when the US has some political leaders that have a spine again.

Re:Muse Spark Open by kennywinker on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:12AM (#50118625)
> But if the planet is the only consideration here you can't use any in of these models

This is simply a purity test. Just because they’re all bad, doesn’t mean there isn’t better and worse options.

Re:Muse Spark Open by windexh8er on Friday October 16, 2026 @11:37AM (#50119733)
I don't buy that - you can't distinguish. This sounds like a convenient way for people to say "my choice is better for the planet" with basically no basis.

Feel free to elaborate.

Re:Muse Spark Open by kennywinker on Saturday October 17, 2026 @09:18AM (#50130920)
https://sustainability.atmeta.com/blog/2024/10/14/our-approa...

Anthropic: no sustainability goals or claims

OpenAI: no sustainability goals or claims

SpaceX AI: no sustainability goals or claims

Some other non-lab inference providers:

https://regolo.ai/ Eu based, 100% renewables powered

https://greenpt.com/us/sustainability Eu based, allows you to track carbon cost of inference.

Acting like there is no difference between bad things is how you get worse things.

Re:Muse Spark Open by windexh8er on Saturday October 17, 2026 @02:51PM (#50133894)
The fact that you believe Meta, of all companies who's gone to great lengths to lie about their core business model, speaks volumes.

This also highlights my point: the norm is that the bulk of the inference and training providers have no goals.

Re:Muse Spark Open by kennywinker on Sunday October 18, 2026 @12:36AM (#50137958)
You've moved the goalpost and declared victory my guy. I literally gave you an option, that isn't meta, and is run on renewable energy. The fact that it's hard to get clear information doesn't negate the fact that there are differences, and we should seek to find the best option rather than giving up and accepting whatever bad option is nearest or shiniest.
Re:Muse Spark Open by windexh8er on Monday October 19, 2026 @07:42AM (#50151169)
Let me clarify my perspective here. You put the frontier providers at the top. That's probably representative of >80% of the total, global, inference. The other ones you mention? They're likely showcasing "green AI" as a differentiator, but comparatively, they likely represent a percent of global capacity.

And you don't get to put a feel good landing page from Meta and "declare victory" (I didn't) just the same. It means nothing because there isn't any accountability. Nice try.

Re:Muse Spark Open by timmmmmmay on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:31AM (#50118829)
43% of the US electrical grid runs on natural gas, it's the largest single source by a considerable margin.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

Re:Muse Spark Open by jubilee33 on Friday October 16, 2026 @08:19AM (#50117472)
Seems like you should flip your list and save time. I'm not sure why everyone is so ideological about tools. If it works well I use it. Refusals are a non starter.

Imagine if my table saw refused to cut out certain shapes. I mean once they are internet connected some brand will probably try that...but just why put up with it at all?

Re:Muse Spark Open by windexh8er on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:03AM (#50113933)
Because it's not as good IRL. I find that DS Flash does just as good of a job on most things.
Re:Muse Spark Open by bscphil on Friday October 16, 2026 @08:35AM (#50117609)
My experience has been that the "cost per task" estimate wildly underestimates the cost of top models on most real work, because the tasks (as I understand it) tend to be isolated bits of problem solving or code generation, which rewards writing code that works the first time and not generating too many reasoning tokens. Sol is great for both. However, a lot of real work involves tracking down bugs, working through tests, examining many parts of a codebase, refactoring... even with subagents and good tool use this tends to bloat context before the problem gets solved. Deepseek's absurdly low cache price really shines in these instances, but even GLM 5.3 Flash easily beats the top models on price in real world usage. Maybe that's different if you factor in subscriptions.
Re:Muse Spark Open by dbreunig on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:59PM (#50110136)
I'm the weirdo who is clinging onto GLM 5.2. 5.3 seems to have picked up the bad writing from Opus 5.
Re:Muse Spark Open by chillfox on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:46PM (#50111913)
GLM 5.2 was the first open model that I was happy to use as my main. It's a fantastic model. 5.3 cost a lot more per task, was slower and didn't get that much better results for me, so I tried 5.3 Flash for a bit, it was ok, but didn't feel as magical as 5.2 and I have now landed on DeepSeek 4.1 Flash as my main.
Re:Muse Spark Open by arcanemachiner on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:20PM (#50111729)
I don't think that's likely, given the close release dates of both? I wonder if 5.3 just choked on too much RL slop, independently of Opus 5.
Re:Muse Spark Open by nullc on Thursday October 15, 2026 @10:44PM (#50113325)
It's not just you-- the claudisms in 5.3 are pathetic and drive me crazy, I was very sad to see it go in that direction and consider it a big step down in that respect.

BUT OTOH the performance of 5.3-flash are impossible to argue with-- it has the same pathetic claude behavior full of "Honest" and "lever" and "load bearing" tripe... but it's scortchingly fast on hardware that is pretty slow running 5.2/5.3.

As a result I use 5.3-flash a lot, in spite of feeling kind of gross about its language. I don't enjoy using it the way I enjoyed GLM-5.2, but its pretty effective.

Re:Muse Spark Open by andy99 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:50PM (#50110862)
Stupid question probably because I’ve gotten out of sync with the new releases but is Flash better or worse than vanilla 5.3? I’ve been using 5.3 extensively (and maybe ironically have used flash only for viewing images which I have as a skill in Pi because 5.3 vanilla seemingly doesn’t support vision). I find it generally competent but still very far behind opus 5.5. I’ve been trying to avoid Anthropic but the lift of opus vs GLM is enough that I end up coming back to it. I feel like currently there’s no comparison.

anyway, tldr I would not be happy if stuck with vanilla 5.3 so is flash better and should I move to that?

Re:Muse Spark Open by bigwheels on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:58PM (#50110961)
GLM 5.3 Flash is better if you need native multi-modal capabilities, higher speed, and lower costs, but worse than vanilla 5.3 in raw reasoning and for complex programming.
Re:Muse Spark Open by colingauvin on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:59PM (#50112395)
It is unreal how good GLM 5.3 Flash is. There's an ~4 bpw EXL3 quant that fits on 2x DGX Sparks. I'm not sure it's worth it now ($7k/Spark) or even when I bought them ($4k/Spark) but there's something about knowing that the whole internet could go down and I could still have this model running at 50-60 tokens/s with 1M context, indefinitely. It's just so good. TensorFold hits 100+ tokens/s in aggregate with 2-3 M total context pool. It's like having Claude at home.
Re:Muse Spark Open by bigyabai on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:33PM (#50112663)
I'm using Flash and the full 5.3 model side-by-side, and for coding I'm hard-pressed to find a difference. Flash is slightly worse at steering in longer contexts, but writes code that's just as good as anything I get out of full 5.3. You could totally build a SaaS or video game with nothing but 5.3 Flash.

The full 5.3 is only really needed for super deep bugfixes/profiling passes, or ridiculous reverse-engineering in my experience.

Re:Muse Spark Open by colingauvin on Thursday October 15, 2026 @10:00PM (#50112930)
Yeah, MiMo Pro is the first Chinese model I can really clearly identify as an upgrade over GLM 5.3 Flash. K3, Qwen 3.8 Pro, GLM 5.3, DS4.1 Flash all feel around equivalent to me. Oddly lots of people have derided MiMo but I have found it able to tackle slightly tougher problems. For instance, I tried GLM 5.3 Flash, DS4.1 Flash, and MiMo Pro on making a new map layer for my Garmin watch, and MiMo was the only one that found the actual best method (.img file for OSM).
Re:Muse Spark Open by satirr on Sunday October 18, 2026 @12:13AM (#50137858)
Garmin.img thing is the interesting, but not really on my Experience.

Been running the same stuff on GLM 5.3 Flash, Deepseek v4p, Qwen 3.x model and Mimo v2.x pro model. Mimo faster yeah, but its hallucinate more and losses the thread easier. And when the context window is not limited, when usage of >200k token, is loss context. even he didnt know what im sayin.

Also, sometimes he Had a Loop over and over, for the same tool call (on my case is Grep and Read. >15x looping) until is burning a bunch of context for nothing. GLM and Deepseek doesn't do that (but the deepseek Hallucinations is huge asf too).

Is your Mimo do the same too??

Re:Muse Spark Open by lifeisloving on Thursday October 15, 2026 @11:24PM (#50113645)
In my experience, like most models, it requires a ton of supervision. It is extermely verbose. Flash loves to create some wildly unecessary abstractions/spaghetti code (like most llms). It wants to implement things in the least effecient manner and needs to be reminded constantly not to do things a certain way.
Re:Muse Spark Open by meeq on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:33AM (#50114464)
Am I the only one experiencing accidental chinese tokens, wrong grammar, and other sloppy mistakes in almost every output when using GLM 5.3? I feel like using it through any kind of subscription service (z.ai, Opencode Go) just serves me aggressive quants.

On some days it's usable, but on most days it feels more like having to trust a pretty smart intern that may or may not get a small stroke every couple of minutes.

Re:Muse Spark Open by disgruntledphd2 on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:10AM (#50114710)
I've had a bunch of failed tool calls and weirdness through Cursor with it recently but it's so good and so much cheaper that I put up with it.
Re:Muse Spark Open by nojs on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:31AM (#50114870)
That sounds like a bug. I’ve never had this happen, using it daily since release.
Re:Muse Spark Open by jubilee33 on Friday October 16, 2026 @08:12AM (#50117427)
Never had that happen at all and using since launch as well, but I have a very custom harness running. My local machine went down however and I used their web API to repair it and talking to that felt much stupider, I think harness really matters Alot.

I do get the really annoying LLM "that's A, not B" and "load-bearing" from time to time, those two tells stay no matter what I do even though the rest of the output is pretty amazing,

Re:Muse Spark Open by tough on Friday October 16, 2026 @09:50AM (#50118387)
We use GLM at work and YMMV a lot depending on the provider. So i guess some have bugs on their inference pipeline, or serve too agressive quants
Re:Muse Spark Open by marcosscriven on Friday October 16, 2026 @05:21PM (#50124935)
What’s a good provider?
Re:Muse Spark Open by colingauvin on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:44PM (#50122616)
I got this frequently with on GLM 5.3 Flash with GLM's actual plan, I do not get this with self hosting.
Re:Muse Spark Open by 59nadir on Saturday October 17, 2026 @04:35AM (#50129109)
I've only ever gotten sudden chinese (and some other script I couldn't identify) from GPT5.6 Luna via OpenAI. It's a very interesting failure mode.
Re:Muse Spark Open by Scaled on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:29AM (#50116628)
How do you feel it compares to DeepSeek 0731 if you have tried that? (Also runs well on 2x spark)
Re:Muse Spark Open by colingauvin on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:47PM (#50122657)
I was running DS731 until Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (so what, like a couple weeks? The pace has been torrid). I switched to Qwen for image input, then GLM 5.3 Flash. At the time, Qwen felt like a minor step down from DS731, GLM 5.3 Flash feels like a major step up from Qwen, so I'd say slightly better than DS731. I realize that's not exactly what the benchmarks say, but DS731 definitely flailed around on some of the more challenging things that GLM mostly gets for me.
Re:Muse Spark Open by Scaled on Friday October 16, 2026 @09:24PM (#50126908)
Thanks for the info, it encourages me to give it a try myself!
Re:Muse Spark Open by orbifold on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:26PM (#50121473)
How did you setup the 2x dgx spark?
Re:Muse Spark Open by colingauvin on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:43PM (#50122587)
Pretty much just this, but tweaked to have I think 64 active conversations be cacheable, which drops the context pool to ~2M.

https://github.com/MiaAI-Lab/GLM-5.3-Flash-EXL3-2x-DGX-Spark...

I also had to downclock my Sparks (Asus) slightly, to 2000 Mhz. Otherwise they'd overheat and crash.

Re:Muse Spark Open by oliwary on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:12PM (#50109586)
The most important graph for me on Artificial Analysis is this: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?agentic-speed=intelligence-vs...

It shows the time to complete a task versus intelligence index, which is much more important for my use-case as I do quick back and forths usually. Someone on here suggested it to me a while ago. It also captures speed and token efficiency nicely, since both of these decrease time per task.

Re:Muse Spark Open by hadlock on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:05PM (#50108665)
I agree, however It's too easy to game arbitrary limits like "medium". There is no olympics for "just rolled out of bed and slightly hungover"
Re:Muse Spark Open by RussianCow on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:26PM (#50108943)
You don't need to directly compare the same reasoning levels. Today you can compare Sol on Low vs Haiku on Max, for example, but you can't look at GLM 5.3 High, only Max.
Re:Muse Spark Open by leidenfrost on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:21PM (#50108861)
We don't even need a standard for reasoning levels.

Just accept whatever the provider names as "medium" and compare the accuracy between models vs the time it takes to complete a task.

Re:Muse Spark Open by SamuelAdams on Friday October 16, 2026 @07:15AM (#50116982)
The fashion industry has been doing this for decades. Medium means different things for different brands.
Re:Muse Spark Open by jchw on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:26PM (#50108942)
For some tasks I genuinely feel Opus 5.5 does better on low than medium or high. The trouble, as always, is figuring out which.

Edit: I realize after commenting that you're not suggesting medium is useless, but just arbitrary and differs between models. Personally I don't want to directly compare mediums between models, I just want to be able to compare across effort levels.

Re:Muse Spark Open by disiplus on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:41PM (#50109191)
i run opus on medium, sonet on high, and haiku on high for implementation based how complicated is for planing and specing and review opus is on high usually, except if if the task is contained.

did not try to run it on low, will have to try it.

Re:Muse Spark Open by jchw on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:15PM (#50111159)
Opus 5.5 on low is good if you are relatively sure a given task is straightforward and time spent gathering background information is purely wasted or possibly even detrimental. Opus 5.5 low seems great at doing the most obvious thing based on the prompt without thinking much about it.
Re:Muse Spark Open by nl on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:19PM (#50111719)
I agree - Opus 5.5 on low is a really great model if it has some direction and the tasks aren't complex.

If the tasks are complex cranking Opus up to high or xhigh and getting it to delegate to Opus low subagents is pretty effective and much faster than running everything at high.

Re:Muse Spark Open by eli on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:25PM (#50108931)
A graph of time (or cost) per task against success rate does it. Just include all the different levels.
Re:Muse Spark Open by Kinrany on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:43PM (#50109214)
This exactly. The three interesting parameters are total time to answer, total cost, and output quality (for any given purpose).
Re:Muse Spark Open by esafak on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:28PM (#50108974)
That's the beauty of the line charts; the labels are arbitrary points on the line. You can easily compare the series visually.
Re:Muse Spark Open by disiplus on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:44PM (#50109236)
this is properly bad as you can run glm on 6000pro, at (in my eyes) pretty good quant, and a q2 on a 5090. im suprised at how good 5.3 flash is at some parts. i still think ds4.1 flash is better but it is more demanding. i hope meta pushes something in a range of 300-400b with a 15-20b active parameters. i know its a crowded space. but it would be fast and probably mostly good enough.
Re:Muse Spark Open by Melatonic on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:05PM (#50111593)
Have you tried two 6000 Pro Blackwells with a model spread between both ?
Re:Muse Spark Open by drob518 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:09PM (#50109545)
My immediate reaction is that it’s weaker on coding than other open-weight models and that coding is a primary use case for running locally (not the only one, but surely a major one). That said, it takes a lot to get full Kimi and GLM running locally.
Re:Muse Spark Open by AustinDev on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:53PM (#50109341)
Yep, just benchmarked it against GLM5.3 Flash on my own local bench and it's slower in TTFT, tok/s and concurrency. It also scored lower.

Tried different reasoning levels and didn't really see any difference but GLM 5.3 flash only really works high, max or none so I couldn't really compare the lower efforts which appear to work on Spark.

Re:Muse Spark Open by RussianCow on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:29PM (#50108986)
> As an aside, it's really unfortunate that artificial analysis only provides comparison at the highest reasoning level, which is mostly unusable for high-volume production use cases. I would really like them to start providing comparisons at low and medium reasoning levels across these models because those tend to be the ones that actually get used in production.

The frustrating thing is they started doing this for the big labs—you can see their benchmarks for all reasoning levels of Sol 6.1 or Haiku 5.5. They just don't seem to do it for any of the open weight models.

Re:Muse Spark Open by Xenoamorphous on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:28PM (#50108970)
There’s a reason they put the “US” in “the most capable US open weight model”.
Re:Muse Spark Open by aniviacat on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:41PM (#50109176)
Artificial analysis puts it next to Mistral's new model.
Re:Muse Spark Open by halJordan on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:50PM (#50109310)
Which is crazy bc they promised to open source muse 1.2 which is good. And they give us this bait and switch
Re:Muse Spark Open by lmeyerov on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:50PM (#50109304)
yeah for botsbench.com side where we do cybersecurity investigation evals of models + harnesses, we've been having to play with:

1) time budget model gets (5min / task) -- this became a real problem with opus/astra/fable at high+

2) tuning which effort level we report on (when not all)

Re:Muse Spark Open by jmspring on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:23PM (#50108896)
Why didnt thry include OpenAI or Anthropic models? I get they were comparing open weights.
Re:Muse Spark Open by sebiandev on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:05PM (#50108655)
very true. when configuring custom agents for enterprise, we almost always default to none or low reasoning knobs. The added latency from medium or higher reasoning levels compared to the improvement in response quality is a diminished return.
Re:Muse Spark Open by segmondy on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:06PM (#50109505)
AA is a joke.
Re:Muse Spark Open by TZubiri on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:58PM (#50110960)
it’s quite suspect to claim that a model is ‘underperforming’ so resoundingly, especially after so little time since release.

there’s this objectivist approach of reducing llm quality to a single dimension, furthermore one with measurability bias.

my thesis is that the chinese models beat the american models on benchmarks, on quantitative measures, but probably do worse in subjective measures. to put an example, compare a chinese phone with an iphone, the specs are great, but the OS? the materials? the privacy posture?

so will chinese llms have great specs and benchmarks, but will miss the mark when it comes to the actual quality in practice when your input stops looking like the benchmarks it was trained on.

America number one, it’s the chinese that play catch up with clones, not the other way around

Re:Muse Spark Open by gigatexal on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:50PM (#50111480)
Um a 512GB m5 max Mac Studio is what 25k? A B300 GPU and the computer to use it is what? Double? Triple that? Apples v oranges my friend. Apples v oranges.
Re:Muse Spark Open by nl on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:51PM (#50111488)
> As an aside, it's really unfortunate that artificial analysis only provides comparison at the highest reasoning level

They do other reasoning levels for some models.

Here is Sonnet 5.5 across the full range of efforts from low to max: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=claude-sonnet-5-5-low%...

Opus 5.5 low to max: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=claude-opus-5-5%2Cclau...

Here is Muse Spark 1.3 Max and Xhigh: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=muse-spark-1-3%2Cmuse-...

I'm guessing it depends how much the vendor wants to contribute. Running these benchmarks isn't cheap!

Re:Muse Spark Open by eek2121 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:08PM (#50111610)
I feel like reasoning is a useless metric, and we should instead focus on results, and time to achieved said results. That is a more useful metric overall.
Re:Muse Spark Open by viraptor on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:30PM (#50111801)
Reasoning level influences both of those things dramatically. So we need to have it available as a parameter for comparisons.
Re:Muse Spark Open by throawayonthe on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:11PM (#50111650)
not a metric, it's a parameter used at inference time
Re:Muse Spark Open by arcanemachiner on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:18PM (#50111713)
Yes, but what metric defines what constitutes a given reasoning level? That's what's arbitrary here, not the label (which is also arbitrary).
Re:Muse Spark Open by the_real_cher on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:26PM (#50111776)
Ahat's the cost of a b300 versus two mac minis?
Re:Muse Spark Open by viraptor on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:32PM (#50111813)
How much longer does it take to ask this and wait for response compared to checking yourself?
Re:Muse Spark Open by the_real_cher on Saturday October 17, 2026 @07:59AM (#50130326)
I'm making a point.
Re:Muse Spark Open by viraptor on Saturday October 17, 2026 @09:56AM (#50131223)
You're asking a question, which if people follow up with searching may lead them to the implied point. Just post the numbers if you think the numbers are interesting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re:Muse Spark Open by the_real_cher on Friday October 23, 2026 @06:45PM (#50216410)
You should google rhetorical questions ;)
Re:Muse Spark Open by hatthew on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:04PM (#50112426)
> only provides comparison at the highest reasoning level, which is mostly unusable for high-volume production use cases

Similarly, AFAIK evals tend to be performed at native precision, while anyone who cares about speed is probably running quantized.

Re:Muse Spark Open by colordrops on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:37PM (#50112685)
Qwen 3.8 flash next runs pretty damn fast on my 5090, no need for a b300.
Re:Muse Spark Open by jnaina on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:46PM (#50112775)
Yes, running Qwen 3.8 flash next on a 5090 with 96GB of RAM, using Strata. Fast and good.
Re:Muse Spark Open by sheepscreek on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:31AM (#50114097)
Model X vs Y is the new Vim vs Emacs.
Re:Muse Spark Open by walrus01 on Friday October 16, 2026 @04:55PM (#50124541)
> Artificial analysis shows this: underperforming Qwen3.8 Flash Next and GLM 5.3 Flash, both of which you can run on a single B300

You don't need anywhere near a B300 to run Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next in its Q8 largest variant published as a GGUF by unsloth. It fits very comfortably in a 256GB system.

Re:Muse Spark Open by seizethecheese on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:34PM (#50108164)
Since there are many comments here arguing that this is not open weight, I looked at the license. Basically, you're free to use this except this clause:

> If the Licensee or any of its affiliates provide a third party with access to artificial intelligence models as a product or service, via API or a similar interface, where the third party receives outputs of such models (“Model as a Service”), and the aggregate gross revenue of the Licensee and its affiliates exceeds twenty (20) million US dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) during any consecutive twelve (12) month period, the Licensee must notify Meta and enter into a separate written agreement with Meta before offering the Software or any Derivatives as part of that Model as a Service business. This Section 3 does not apply to (a) internal use, research, or any commercial activity that is not Model as a Service, or (b) the Licensee's use of the Software as a component to power features of the Licensee's own product or service that is not a Model as a Service.

They're allowing the use of this in commercial products, just not selling the model directly.

Re:Muse Spark Open by isityettime on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:23PM (#50108900)
Still not an open-source license. Means no restrictions on "fields of endeavor", a.k.a. the free software definition's "freedom 0": the freedom to run the software for any purpose.

I'm sick to death of these shameless dilutions (including the notion that open-weight is open-source; the OSI is totally captured at this point)

Re:Muse Spark Open by eli on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:27PM (#50108948)
Neither the person you’re replying to nor the blog post call it open source
Re:Muse Spark Open by input_sh on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:40PM (#50109167)
But it compares itself to Qwen (Apache 2), GLM (MIT), Beam (Apache 2), Inklink (Apache 2)...

Although to be fair, Kimi contains an identical carve out.

Re:Muse Spark Open by gpt5 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:51PM (#50110885)
Both GLM-5.3 and Qwen 3.8 max have carve outs for commercial use above a certain threshold.
Re:Muse Spark Open by isityettime on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:33PM (#50109059)
Open-weights means weights are released under an open-source license.

I would, contra the OSI, not consider the model to be open-source even if the weights were under an open-source license. But that is the minimum condition under which it could be considered open-weight.

Re:Muse Spark Open by SahAssar on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:58PM (#50109400)
> Open-weights means weights are released under an open-source license.

According to who? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_weights:

> Publishing these values allows others to download and use the model, while permission to modify, fine-tune or redistribute it depends on its license.

Those restrictions are definitely not compatible with the definition of open-source/FOSS. I think you have a much stricter view of what open-weights means than the industry.

Re:Muse Spark Open by isityettime on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:04PM (#50109478)
"Open weights" is a correction that arose out of calling models whose weights were released under open-source licenses "open-source" before the OSI sold out. These companies trying to dilute the polite correction just like they tried to dilute "open-source" only reinforces my point.
Re:Muse Spark Open by SahAssar on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:44PM (#50109954)
I mostly agree, but again, You said "Open-weights means weights are released under an open-source license" and I asked "According to who?"

"Open weights" is for the most part a term that is meaningless besides being technically able to run it on your own hardware.

I don't think we have a proper term for what you are reaching for, and proper open-source models (training, training-data, etc. being fully open) are scarce.

Re:Muse Spark Open by isityettime on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:42PM (#50110738)
If I have any argument, what I'm in favor of is situating our use of terms like this in the context and history of the free software movement, even absent some "defining authority" like the OSI and the FSF. I'm open to other definitions and to observations that unfortunately "open weight" is a term that was co-opted almost as soon as it was coined. But it's not about semantics for me, it's about promoting an understanding of these terms and ideas that is continuous with the free software movement that birthed them. It's not about dictionaries for me. Saying "this doesn't fit the category" in situations like this isn't lexicography so much as it is politics (or less grandiosely, a critical analysis of marketing materials).

> I don't think we have a proper term for what you are reaching for, and proper open-source models (training, training-data, etc. being fully open) are scarce.

I think you're very much right that we don't have a "brand" with either the same kind of institutional backing as terms like "open-source" and "free software" or a wealth of examples to point to.

Re:Muse Spark Open by riazrizvi on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:21PM (#50111737)
Are you? Not me. $19.9mm annual revenue would do fine for me. If anyone else is considering opening up their thing with a clause like this, you've got a friendly supporter in me.
Re:Muse Spark Open by seizethecheese on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:31PM (#50111809)
And it’s annual revenue for serving their model as a model. Not for any product.
Re:Muse Spark Open by echoangle on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:42PM (#50112262)
Where does it say that? The quoted rule talks about revenue of the licensee, without specifying that it needs to be about the model.
Re:Muse Spark Open by verdverm on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:49PM (#50112314)
> This Section 3 does not apply to (a) internal use, research, or any commercial activity that is not Model as a Service, or (b) ...
Re:Muse Spark Open by echoangle on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:10PM (#50112472)
To me this means that this rule only applies if you offer the model as a service, and not if you fall under those exceptions, but as soon as your business offers it, all your revenue counts.
Re:Muse Spark Open by verdverm on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:11PM (#50112485)
if model serving is not your business, why would you start?
Re:Muse Spark Open by echoangle on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:13PM (#50112493)
Model serving could be part of the business. If AWS offers Muse Spark as a service but the revenue is only 100k, they would still fall under this rule in my interpretation because obviously they have a much higher revenue in total.
Re:Muse Spark Open by verdverm on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:41PM (#50112714)
you've altered the example context now
Re:Muse Spark Open by echoangle on Friday October 16, 2026 @04:47AM (#50115839)
What do you mean? What example was there before?
Re:Muse Spark Open by verdverm on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:52AM (#50119096)
a company that was not in the business of selling tokens to one adding a new model to their lineup
Re:Muse Spark Open by echoangle on Friday October 16, 2026 @11:29AM (#50119635)
What difference does it make? In my understanding, as soon as you sell Muse Spark as a service, your whole revenue counts, no matter where you get it from.
Re:Muse Spark Open by verdverm on Friday October 16, 2026 @11:43AM (#50119821)
The difference is back to my original question, why would a company not selling tokens start

for those already selling tokens, they are already under agreements like this, Meta is not the first to do this, it's just part of the business already

Re:Muse Spark Open by echoangle on Friday October 16, 2026 @08:38PM (#50126625)
> why would a company not selling tokens start

Because they want to expand their business and make money?

Re:Muse Spark Open by seizethecheese on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:09PM (#50112460)
This is what the entire, not that long, paragraph is about.
Re:Muse Spark Open by echoangle on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:13PM (#50112499)
I don’t think the phrasing is perfectly clear that only the revenue specifically generated by offering the model as a service is counted.
Re:Muse Spark Open by seizethecheese on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:58PM (#50112903)
Actually you’re right and I was wrong. I think it’s the whole entity’s revenue which is much more restrictive and a very low number.
Re:Muse Spark Open by jstanley on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:26AM (#50114836)
I think you're just wrong about the OSI's definition of "open source AI"?

You can see https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition

Specifically:

> A precondition to exercising these freedoms is to have access to the preferred form to make modifications to the system.

and

> The preferred form of making modifications to a machine-learning system must include all the elements below:

> Data Information: ...

> Code: ...

> Parameters: ...

Does this address your issues with the OSI definition?

Re:Muse Spark Open by esperent on Friday October 16, 2026 @03:20AM (#50115204)
The OSI is an American organization founded in 1998, long after the term "Open Source" already had a clear meaning.

They have no right to make new and limited definitions for what Open Source means in other areas like LLMs. They can write and publish a definition if they like, but whether the rest of the world accepts it is another matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative

Re:Muse Spark Open by dash2 on Friday October 16, 2026 @04:32AM (#50115720)
What's missing from the OSI definition in this case? How do you think it is limited compare to the standard usage?
Re:Muse Spark Open by esperent on Friday October 16, 2026 @04:57AM (#50115899)
Most importantly would be recognition that the data used to train the AI also needs to be openly available.
Re:Muse Spark Open by isityettime on Saturday October 17, 2026 @01:24PM (#50133053)
The "data information" section ultimately says that a mere description of the training data is sufficient, which is the dilution on the part of the OSI that the FSF and SFC have criticized. I'm aligned with that criticism.

As for the "open source license" issue, you need the four fundamental software freedoms with whatever is distributed, just like with conventional open-source software. The OSAID enumerates a formulation of each of all four, but this is the one that this release fails to meet:

> An Open Source AI is an AI system made available under terms and in a way that grant the freedoms to¹ [...] [u]se the system for any purpose and without having to ask for permission.

> 1: These freedoms are derived from the Free Software Definition (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html)

(The footnote is theirs, not mine.)

So the OSI agree with me that these weights cannot be considered, in their terms, "open-source weights". Our disagreement is that I think the training data itself should be considered a necessary part of a bona fide open-source ML model.

I think the answer to ethical concerns about releasing training data that involves data that carries privacy restrictions, like medical data, is that such models cannot be free/open-source. I think that's okay; it's okay to acknowledge that not every machine learning model in the world can be open-source. Eve the FSF, who are generally hardliners about using, let alone producing, non-free software, admit the ethical use of non-free models under just such circumstances. They just so so without blurring the distinction between free and non-free, which is the tack I wish the OSI had taken.

Re:Muse Spark Open by SSLy on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:56PM (#50108516)
This is close to GLM terms
Re:Muse Spark Open by reilly3000 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:14PM (#50108781)
I think it is a fair license. It’s a bit of “Open”-washing but reasonable to the model trainer for their investment and to the public for having more base model options with novel architecture.
Re:Muse Spark Open by cosmojg on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:00PM (#50108559)
Also, IANAL, but under U.S. copyright law, the weights of machine learning models are excluded from copyright as they are the product of an automated optimization process (e.g., stochastic gradient descent, expectation maximization, genetic algorithms) rather than human authorship. Granted, this has yet to be fully tested in court and going to court is expensive, so it's likely that your employer would prefer to err on the side of caution and respect such attempts at model licensing anyway, similar to how one might treat a ToS agreement. Nonetheless, this was partially tested last year in Thaler v. Perlmutter which affirmed that copyright requires human authorship, reading the Copyright Act's provisions on ownership, duration, and transferability as presupposing a human author[1].

If you want to assess the position of the U.S. Copyright Office for yourself, the relevant text can be found in the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices § 313.2, "Works That Lack Human Authorship"[2], which states:

> […] the Copyright Act protects “original works of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (emphasis added). To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being. See Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co., 111 U.S. at 58. Works that do not satisfy this requirement are not copyrightable.

> […] the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.” U.S. COPYRIGHT OFFICE, REPORT TO THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS BY THE REGISTER OF COPYRIGHTS 5 (1965).

Oh, and there's also a bit in the following Section 313.3, "Works That Do Not Constitute Copyrightable Subject Matter"[2], which explicitly excludes mathematical principles, formulas, algorithms, and equations, along with DNA sequences and other genetic or chemical compounds, regardless of whether they are produced by humans or by nature. If one takes the perspective that machine learning models are algorithms, the conclusions on copyrightability are pretty clear.

[1] https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2025/03/23-523...

[2] https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...

Re:Muse Spark Open by overfeed on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:09PM (#50108715)
> Granted, this has yet to be fully tested in court and going to court is expensive, so it's likely that your employer would prefer to err on the side of caution and respect such attempts at model licensing anyway, similar to how one might treat a ToS agreement.

You may be conflating 2 things - the Muse model weights themselves, and what the models output when run. The former is prima facie the product of human authorship and hence has full protection of copyright law, the latter fits your characterization of likely not having copyright coverage. Meta can use the copyright on the model weights to dictate licensing terms. IANAL too.

Re:Muse Spark Open by alsosprachben on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:21PM (#50108875)
Model weights are facts. Facts are not copyrightable.
Re:Muse Spark Open by overfeed on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:15PM (#50109622)
> Model weights are facts.

They are not facts. They are numbers or bits on a medium, and software bits have been copyrighted for so long, there were 5¼" floppies with "(c) 1977" printed on them.

Re:Muse Spark Open by emaro on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:45PM (#50112277)
Aren't model weights the output of human (?) authored software? The training software might have received creative input, but not the weights themselves. And if the training data itself counts, then the copyright would not be the labs, who stole the training data, but all the creatives who's works were used.
Re:Muse Spark Open by overfeed on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:57PM (#50112377)
Aren't model weights the output of human (?) authored software? The training software might have received creative input, but not the weights themselves

How does this legal theory square with output of a compiler? Or pictures generated by photo-editing suites when humans tweak color levels?

Re:Muse Spark Open by emaro on Friday October 16, 2026 @04:48AM (#50115851)
Both your examples take human authored input and transform them in a pretty direct way.

I addressed this by saying if the training data counts as the human input, then the creative authorship of the weights are all the creatives that involuntarily supplied the training data -- not the labs training the models.

Re:Muse Spark Open by overfeed on Friday October 16, 2026 @05:48PM (#50125198)
> the creative authorship of the weights are all the creatives that involuntarily supplied the training data -- not the labs training the models.

I agree with that copyright holders that provide training data were screwed over, and should be fairly compensated.

That said, a lot of work that goes into training a model is editorial: structure of the model, training regime, etc . Copyright applies not just to the literal elements, but to Sequence, Structure and Organization, which is how poetry Anthologies are under additional copyright to the editor, and not just divided among just the poets.

Re:Muse Spark Open by eli on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:28PM (#50108984)
It’s really not that simple
Re:Muse Spark Open by kevincox on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:02PM (#50109460)
The words in a novel and the order in which try appear are so facts. But somehow that is clearly copyrightable.
Re:Muse Spark Open by LoganDark on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:33PM (#50109810)
If the weights were produced by a purely mechanical process without any input, then I would be more inclined to believe the distinction there is significant. But as the optimization processes you've mentioned are merely tools that operate with a dataset, the provenance of that dataset becomes a factor towards copyright.
Re:Muse Spark Open by VanTheBrand on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:19PM (#50110427)
I mean, not according to the lawyers for every AI lab… they do want to have it both ways though.
Re:Muse Spark Open by actionfromafar on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:20PM (#50111730)
They also play another game, bribing the White House.
Re:Muse Spark Open by staticman2 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:04PM (#50111024)
It's pointless to make this claim without case law stating this for LLMs specifically this is merely speculation on how a judge might rule.
Re:Muse Spark Open by gmerc on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:12PM (#50112077)
Just distill what you need into an SLM, strips any legal claims right off because that’s the same thing they did.
Re:Muse Spark Open by fhd2 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:38PM (#50108238)
Unless the total (!) revenue of the provider is under 20 MM USD, eh? Not exactly fully open, but not _that_ harsh.
Re:Muse Spark Open by ithkuil on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:41PM (#50108273)
Even if your revenue exceeds 20MM you can still use this model from inside a commercial product but you can't expose it directly as a "model as a service"
Re:Muse Spark Open by fhd2 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:34PM (#50109070)
Yup, I rather meant to point out that even if all you want to do is sell access to the model on your hardware, you can _still_ do so up until a non-trivial scale.
Re:Muse Spark Open by aniceperson on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:09PM (#50108712)
if I have a Sass platform where the user pays per seat $8 and assess to the llm is a listed feature, the clause do apply.
Re:Muse Spark Open by qikp on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:56PM (#50112364)
I'm pretty sure DigitalOcean was blatantly doing it anyway, and nobody even noticed.
Re:Muse Spark Open by armcat on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:26PM (#50107063)
They've done considerable effort in making sure this model can run on basically every model runner, from Unsloth to MLX, https://dev.meta.ai/docs/muse-spark-open/deploy
Re:Muse Spark Open by alberth on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:20PM (#50107941)
As someone not in the loop, can you explain more of what you mean.
Re:Muse Spark Open by mixtureoftakes on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:22PM (#50107969)
day one support for all inference engines so that whichever kind of capable computer you have, you can run it. you do need a really capable computer though
Re:Muse Spark Open by mcphage on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:24PM (#50108006)
> you do need a really capable computer though

They suggest a pair of Mac Studios w/ M5 Ultra chips and 512 GB of RAM. A single Mac Studio w/ M5 Ultra and half that RAM (256 GB) is around $11k, and the 512 GB option isn't even available yet. So.... yeah.

Re:Muse Spark Open by trvz on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:57PM (#50108525)
You can just use your old dual 512GB M3 Ultras until you get the M5s. Man, people always whine about something...
Re:Muse Spark Open by mcphage on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:44PM (#50109226)
O shit, I didn't even think of that. I've got a few of those kicking around, honestly I was just using them as doorstops at this point.
Re:Muse Spark Open by KerrAvon on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:22PM (#50108890)
This comment has the unusual property of being applicable whether or not it's sarcasm!
Re:Muse Spark Open by GeekyBear on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:06PM (#50112438)
Apple research has also posted information on the topic.

> In this post, we show how to run the latest frontier-class model — Muse Spark Open, with nearly a trillion parameters — right from your desk, using the latest version of MLX, released today. On a cluster of four Mac Studios, Muse Spark Open generates over 36 tokens per second

Beginning on a single Mac Studio (up to 512GB of unified memory), then scaling out across multiple Macs with the RDMA over Thunderbolt driver, below we share an overview of the range of models you can now run on Mac Studio.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/mlx-distributed-i...

Re:Muse Spark Open by nico on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:25PM (#50108022)
Anyone who has tried a smaller/quantized version locally on apple silicon? Would love to know your experience, also tk/s on what hardware specs?
Re:Muse Spark Open by twitexplore on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:17PM (#50107881)
Yes, but still, what about users looking for NPU support. What happened to Microsoft's copilot+ PC campaign? (the NPU hardware, not the logo key and ad campaign) AMD's XDNA2 NPU is best supported by ONNX, I think Qualcomm Hexagon is too. The best consumer unified architectures are Apple, AMD ai+ and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, even intel has an NPU offering.
Re:Muse Spark Open by d2kx on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:27PM (#50108050)
NPUs are meant for tiny, tiny models that can run basically at all times but cannot affect battery life (e.g. translation, live-video cleanup, filesearch etc.), not for big LLMs. This is about 500 times to large for a NPU.
Re:Muse Spark Open by BlackRabbit1 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:39PM (#50108251)
NPUs you can find in AMD high-end CPUs are closer to specialized DSPs (basically big VLIW/SIMD vector units).

People love doing heavy math stuff with them (https://destevez.net/2026/05/getting-peak-tops-on-a-ryzen-ai... - not my blog)

Re:Muse Spark Open by HarHarVeryFunny on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:06PM (#50108679)
There are plenty of smaller less powerful open weights models if all you have to run it on is an NPU.

This is a much larger more powerful model, so running it locally will not be for everyone, but you can still run it via a hosting service such as Fireworks AI.

Re:Muse Spark Open by twitexplore on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:49PM (#50109998)
I was mistaken in my thinking that open models are able to be quantized to run on average consumer hardware, I think they have outgrown that concept.
Re:Muse Spark Open by HarHarVeryFunny on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:22PM (#50110461)
I guess that's the attraction - that they may be small enough (likely quantized) so that you can run them locally, so there is no privacy issues, and no-one can turn it off, etc, but technically "open weights" is just referring to models, of any size, where they give you the weights (basically give you the model) so you can run it yourself, instead of having to access it via paid API running on some computer that they control.
Re:Muse Spark Open by fg137 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:13PM (#50110327)
Copilot+ PC is such a terrible and wasteful marketing effort that Microsoft has given it up.

NPUs are not inherently useless, but definitely so the way they are forced onto users machines.

Re:Muse Spark Open by bahmboo on Thursday October 15, 2026 @10:13PM (#50113035)
This is what stood out to me. They did the actual work of testing and documenting deployments on several platforms. It's a bit of upping the standard for open weights instead of just posting the blob and letting the community figure it out.

It makes sense from a provider standpoint. If you are going to give it away for free what is the end game? Helping build the world around your model such that it is a pathway that leads to greater adoption of your ecosystem is smart. Dev relations in a way.

Yes you need big compute to deploy this locally but $20-30K in hardware for specialty markets is nothing.

This isn't an accident. It is revealing a strategy.

Re:Muse Spark Open by swalsh on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:40PM (#50107247)
Like I said last week. I think zucks original llama thesis is proving more correct by the week. The rent market on intelligence never materialized, if you have THE frontier model, you can charge rent (for a few weeks, maybe month). But after a certain capability level it's price that drives the decision.

Zuck is doing the thing he's really good at, and building a moat around the network (Muse is VERY sticky), and now that we're all going to standardize on Meta's model, we're going to optimize the heck out of the infra to run the model making it cheaper for him to scale, thus bringing in more participants to his network, and thus making his network more valuable.

Meta is going to win consumer AI.

Re:Muse Spark Open by threatofrain on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:45PM (#50107351)
Google, Apple, and Microsoft are each in a stronger position to win consumer AI because they're guardians over the foundations of the user's experience. Meta always has to wonder whether they're going to be edged out, like when Apple decided to limit permissions or set new rules on user data handling.

How has Meta responded? With a failed phone and speculative headset.

Re:Muse Spark Open by DwarvenEngineer on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:01PM (#50108578)
That's entirely why Zuck's been pushing VR and the metaverse for so long. they have no OS to control - Microsoft has desktop, Apple has their vertically integrated devices, Google has both Android and also Chrome.

Meta is at the whims of these other companies to play nice - and they already got hit hard once by apple when they decided to anonimize add profiles on the iphone and go privacy first.

Re:Muse Spark Open by alex1138 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:37PM (#50109120)
Okay, so I've heard Apple "prioritized their own ads". If there's meat behind that - cool (and perhaps might not do anything about certain scummy listings on the app store)

But app stores and iOS ostensibly exist exactly so Zuckerberg can't do what he does, which is steal credentials. Facebook syncs everything, bought Whatsapp to do the same; of course he's pissed off his ill-gotten moat got attacked

Re:Muse Spark Open by bigyabai on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:37AM (#50114485)
iOS can stop applications from stealing credentials without relying on the App Store. macOS does it, Apple should be encouraged to secure the iOS runtime more than the iOS store.
Re:Muse Spark Open by mcintyre1994 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:07PM (#50107685)
> How has Meta responded? With a failed phone and speculative headset.

I guess their spin on Muse would be, by building the AI agent that Apple has shown it's nowhere near being able to build

Re:Muse Spark Open by threatofrain on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:09PM (#50107730)
Apple responds by waiting and partnering with companies like Google, and treating this as a layer that can be swapped out.
Re:Muse Spark Open by theplumber on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:33PM (#50109052)
Apple didn’t figure out yet that Google’s AI performance is nothing like Google search. Google’s AI is just junk, worse than open Chinese models. If someone (Facebook,OpenAI) gets a hold on the “killer” app, Apple won’t be able to do anything to truly compete. They will be late and end up with a social network like “find my friends” or whatever that useless thing was that nobody used.
Re:Muse Spark Open by rolosa on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:17PM (#50108816)
And their resulting product is just not good.
Re:Muse Spark Open by 33d on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:20PM (#50108849)
You dont understand Apple's operations.

They will 'appear' to care about this stuff to appease shareholders.

They only dedicate the best but small amount of resource and then scale once they are confident they have a 'hot' product.

Get over it guys, stop whining about Siri and understand how Apple operates.

They have everything to lose - they are THE TRUSTED brand when it comes to consumer electronics w.r.t being an incredibly valuable firm.

Re:Muse Spark Open by vineyardmike on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:52PM (#50109334)
> Get over it guys, stop whining about Siri and understand how Apple operates.

Doesn’t make it a good product though.

Re:Muse Spark Open by Jackpillar on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:10AM (#50118611)
Because no one is asking for this stuff.
Re:Muse Spark Open by satvikpendem on Friday October 16, 2026 @11:10AM (#50119365)
Cue the quote of Henry Ford. No one asks, but they use it nonetheless, based on download figures.
Re:Muse Spark Open by tyre on Friday October 16, 2026 @03:12PM (#50123039)
Have they fully implemented the Gemini-backed Siri?

I will say that I asked Siri some questions recently that I was pretty sure it would fumble and it answered directly.

“Does brown go with charcoal in clothing?”, for example, didn’t fall back to “I’ve found some web results. I can send them to your iPhone”. It actually answered.

It still has random nonsense regularly, but the “ask a question, get an actual answer” is new to me.

Re:Muse Spark Open by skohan on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:08PM (#50107720)
Being one of if not the top advertisers in the world? I think Meta is doing just fine.
Re:Muse Spark Open by jimbokun on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:12PM (#50108771)
Sure but that doesn't mean they will become the front runner in AI.
Re:Muse Spark Open by solyin on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:06PM (#50108668)
Muse, the pi/openclaw/AI assistant app is maybe not impressive to HN, because you can always just "get an FTP account", as it were, but if you're outside of the HN bubble and don't hate Facebook, Muse is an absolute winner. It's currently the top downloaded app on iOS, above ChatGPT, TikTok, and Claude. I think they've currently got the strongest consumer AI play but we'll have to wait and see how the situation evolves.
Re:Muse Spark Open by lp92 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:21PM (#50108877)
>It's currently the top downloaded app on iOS,

Yeah because its gone a bit viral. It'll settle down over time as people try it and dispose of it.

Re:Muse Spark Open by alex1138 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:26PM (#50110530)
Same as Threads
Re:Muse Spark Open by Barrin92 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @10:01PM (#50112937)
threads has roughly ~150 million DAU. That's roughly on the same scale is twitter. Also checks out on play store downloads at like half a billion.

I'd say that's pretty damn large given the tone in places such as this.

Re:Muse Spark Open by tyre on Friday October 16, 2026 @03:13PM (#50123071)
I think it was ousted by a fast food chicken app fwiw. Couldn’t tell you why.
Re:Muse Spark Open by nisegami on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:09PM (#50107745)
>Google, Apple, and Microsoft are each in a stronger position to win consumer AI because they're guardians over the foundations of the user's experience.

From everything I've seen, they're all too large and dysfunctional to make a competent play in consumer AI. Anyone in there trying to work on it is too far removed from end product and is answering to too many masters.

Re:Muse Spark Open by htrp on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:22PM (#50107965)
That's definitely gemini
Re:Muse Spark Open by nisegami on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:02PM (#50108615)
At least Gemini is an okay model independent of how Google is leveraging for consumer experiences.
Re:Muse Spark Open by logicchains on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:12PM (#50107795)
>Google, Apple, and Microsoft are each in a stronger position to win consumer AI

Microsoft has completely lost the ability to make good software; see Microsoft Teams and what they've done to Windows 11. Apple don't have a foundation models team so they're limited to using other people's models, which handicaps them as they can't do vertical integration like with their other products. Google hasn't made a single competitive consumer product in the past decade, but has certainly killed a few.

Re:Muse Spark Open by novaRom on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:14PM (#50109607)
> Microsoft has completely lost the ability to make good software

did they ever? maybe MS DOS, Win 3.1, and Win2000 were ok, although PC DOS and OS/2 were better; Sure what an unusable junk it's today is beyond any precedent in history, but why many companies use it today at all? why?

Re:Muse Spark Open by theragra on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:51PM (#50112320)
You are in a bubble/biased. I've switched to Linux on desktop half a year ago. For the average user, Linux has as many issues as Windows (or as few, more precisely).

In Windows, things mostly worked, with some minor annoyances. For example, night light stopped working at some point. Forced reboots for updates are another things I really don't like. SMB file sharing still does not work well out of the box, esp. w. Android phones.

In Linux, it is kinda the same, with the exception that I had a few really bad cases when GUI stopped working at all (terminal worked still, but barely).

My Lenovo laptop officially supports Linux. Still.

Things that I had lately (And I don't remember half of it) 1. BT headset disconnecting after a few seconds of connecting.

2. BT Game controller not detected by PC sometimes.

3. Application installs are weird and not that convenient. Sometimes you use package manager, sometimes AppImage, sometimes flatpak, sometimes brew, sometimes source code, sometimes zipped binary.

4. KDE vaults cannot be closed, because KDE indexing service locks dirs/files inside them.

5. KDE Indexing service indexes stuff that needs not to be indexed, hogging SSD resources and killing its lifespan.

6. KDE built-in screenshot app does not have good good annotation shortcuts, and annotation tools could be better.

7. Multi-monitor support have minor issues out of the box. Either display is garbled when laptop comes out of the sleep, or it does not support DisplayLink out of the box, or something else.

8. Graphics hardware acceleration in Firefox sometimes works, sometimes does not. Lately it does work, which is nice.

9. Game had a bug when it was choosing wrong GPU. No system configuration option was helping at all. Like literally nothing. Only disabling embedded GPU in Bios did.

10. Hibernation menu item exists, but does not work, coming out of hibernation is broken.

11. If you use hard links and directory bind mounts a lot, you will soon find that these are declared as working, but half of the software breaks when encountering them.

12. Laptop performance profiles selected from tray kinda work, but not reliably. I have to use laptop Fn button shortcut for them.

13. When I tried to change some stuff in keyboard layouts for non-english language, I encountered some weird behaviors/bugs. It took me a lot of time to properly configure CapsLock as a keyboard layout switch. On Windows, it is not possible as a built-in feature. With 3rd party - one tiny 20kb app.

14. While audio works mostly very well, sometimes, with a lot of audio devices, they glitch a little.

15. Bluetooth devices take a long time to display in connection list.

16. BT mouse takes 5 seconds to wake from sleep.

17. For me, fonts looks slightly worse then on Windows. I tried a lot of options, but I prefer Windows ClearType default look on my FullHD monitor.

18. Dolphin file manager has quite a lot weird/inconvenient behaviors. How it allows to work under root permissions (weirdly), how it handles absent network drives and some others.

Re:Muse Spark Open by Kurtz79 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:08PM (#50109531)
"Microsoft has completely lost the ability to make good software; see Microsoft Teams and what they've done to Windows 11."

Uh, what is your positive comparison point?

I have been using MS apps since MS-DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.1 (including doozies like Windows Millennium and Vista) and Teams and W11 are some of most stable, "it just works" pieces of software coming from them I can think of...

Re:Muse Spark Open by cloverich on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:09PM (#50110287)
Until Opus 5.5 I agreed with this. But since then... I'm now able to build just about anything I want, quickly. Including... all the reasons I'm on a mac (or presumably, one on windows) in the first place. IDK if I believe in my heart just yet, but as a long time mac user, if you gave me the choice between mac + commodity model or a near naked Linux laptop + Opus 5.5, I would easily choose Opus 5.5 and build what I want. If this is real, I think Google is still in a good spot, but are Apple and Microsoft? They have no models themselves. They do have hardware but the value of their OS (in Apples case) and software (in MS case) becomes extremely devalued, relatively speaking.
Re:Muse Spark Open by dieortin on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:00PM (#50112402)
MacOS, even nowadays, has a level of polish and care put into it that nothing you do with opus is going to get close to.
Re:Muse Spark Open by Rover222 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:30PM (#50112192)
Apple should have morphed Siri into a Muse-like experience a year ago. But they didn't. Muse is great and millions of people are already getting used to having it be a part of their daily lives.
Re:Muse Spark Open by theturtletalks on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:11PM (#50107763)
If you’re falling for “sticky” interfaces, you’re not going make it. Your competitor won’t have the stickiness and the ability to use any harness and that will overcome Muse in the long-run. Let’s not forget, Muse is a close to SOTA model right now, but so was Google, and now they’re irrelevant. Google is one of many funded models that were close to SOTA, but we realized it’s benchmaxxed.

People are going to say that it doesn’t matter if you’re the best. If Muse, Grokbot, and Dot are able to reach mass appeal, it doesn’t matter if a person using a custom harness is better.

I respectfully disagree. There is a big difference between someone that’s running a custom harness that’s almost like a personal OS versus someone using something out of the box. And if you’re for using this to run your business, think for yourself who’s going to win, the person customizing everything or the one using what the big corps give you.

Re:Muse Spark Open by captainclam on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:24PM (#50107985)
These are good points, though OP did specifically say that Meta is going to win "consumer" AI. I don't think the average consumer of AI is going to ever have to think about harnesses or worry about SOTA, they really will continue to interact with whatever is stickiest.
Re:Muse Spark Open by itissid on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:29PM (#50108093)
This exactly. The "harness" for consumer is not well defined but likely quite sticky if someone can build one. Meta is better positioned with its reach of whatsapp etc unlike anyone to try this.

Meta being meta, will likely run this as an "experiment mode" for 6 months to an year and if it does not work scrap it all and move onto the next thing.

There is a risk ofc muse does not work. But there is a good chance that with the ridiculous number of product teams doing A/B testing with insane number of people already on it, something will emerge that is interesting in a way it never could for their erstwhile Ar/VR foray.

Re:Muse Spark Open by theturtletalks on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:14PM (#50108780)
The field is changing weekly at this point. Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic have the most distribution right now so any can take this spot.

So why would you lock yourself in? They want you to lock yourself in, but if you build your own system, you won’t be. A layman will just use what’s best and get himself locked in, but they might be using an inferior model.

AI is a force multiplier. Doing the right thing with the right expertise is yielding dividends.

Re:Muse Spark Open by itissid on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:18PM (#50109658)
> So why would you lock yourself in...

Many people don't even know what locking in means. The crowd in this forum < 1% of the world do, you and I do, and maybe a few outside. There are only laymen outside of 99%. No one i know of knows or uses a harness. They don't know the large number of VMs built on say Hermes. They really don't care or have time. If you give them a ready made product thats a click away, and its good enough, they will use it.

Re:Muse Spark Open by theturtletalks on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:10PM (#50111632)
But that’s who I’m appealing to. If you build a custom harness you have a 10x advantage over people who use Muse, GrokBot, Dot out of the box.
Re:Muse Spark Open by theturtletalks on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:06PM (#50108674)
But this is what I’m saying, consumer AI is forever changing. Investing your time and money into a closed harness will put you behind someone running their own system that’s model agnostic.

If you’re on a forum like HN, would you realisticly invest your time and widgets into a closed harness instead of building your own? What if Meta’s model falls behind and all your things are on there? My advice is to invest in building your own because no one lab has shown they are worth using.

As far as “consumer,” I’m simply comparing consumer AI to a custom built one. One of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta will probably win since they have the most distribution.

Re:Muse Spark Open by madars on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:11PM (#50108752)
Yep. Reminds me of the famous HN lore about Dropbox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 (note the 4 digit ID - early days!)

>For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Re:Muse Spark Open by Bluestein on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:06PM (#50108680)
And, "stickiest", mind, where most are allready soul-sucked into the neverending doomscrolling dopamine nightmare that is Zuckbook - to beging with.-

First they "captured", or moated "communication". Now, they are going to capture "utility" ("I am actually doing something useful, not just doomscrolling. I can spend an extra 8h here. It feels good").-

Re:Muse Spark Open by jimbokun on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:11PM (#50108738)
The "average consumer" is a very small part of the revenue opportunity for LLMs and AI.

The real money is coming from C-suites trying to reduce head count or at least multiply productivity for their existing head count.

Re:Muse Spark Open by xnx on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:28PM (#50108069)
> Google, and now they’re irrelevant.

Argon is tied for first at worst.

> Google is one of many funded models that were close to SOTA, but we realized it’s benchmaxxed.

Who is "we"? Google is the least benchmaxxed.

Re:Muse Spark Open by drivebyhooting on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:39PM (#50109146)
Astra still outperforms Argon for me. And with a lot more quota too.

I hope Google can catch up to OpenAI. The more competition the better.

Re:Muse Spark Open by theturtletalks on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:15PM (#50108792)
I’m talking from experience. I’m run a software factory building open source alternatives and Argon is the worst model. Wrecked multiple codebases. But every use case is different. If you’ve found success in yours, use it.
Re:Muse Spark Open by dieortin on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:04PM (#50112420)
I’m surprised it had time to “wreck multiple codebases” in the few days it’s been out
Re:Muse Spark Open by benhurmarcel on Friday October 16, 2026 @04:07AM (#50115542)
What you don't one-shot rewrite your entire codebase every time a model comes out?
Re:Muse Spark Open by theturtletalks on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:32AM (#50118840)
I use it in my software factory and it made the applications worse. I didn’t push the changes. I just reverted them.
Re:Muse Spark Open by apsurd on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:26PM (#50108034)
> And if you’re for using this to run your business, think for yourself who’s going to win...

That's not consumer AI though. The whole "vs out of the box" is pretty much the definition of consumer AI. People don't want to fiddle with things. That's why UX matters. SOTA only matters in consumer if it translates to the UX. And no one has landed that yet. Many are working on it.

Re:Muse Spark Open by solyin on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:08PM (#50108707)
Muse, the app, is currently number one on the app store. Talking to non-technical friends who have adopted it, they may have landed it.
Re:Muse Spark Open by apsurd on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:42PM (#50109929)
ahh makes me want to check it out. But my fb account is long abandoned. That's how they get you huh... ain't now escaping the grasp.
Re:Muse Spark Open by mlazos on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:08PM (#50110273)
When I worked at Microsoft, I learned that the average user will fail to do ANY process that is longer than 2 steps. Let that sink in and then reread your comment. Nobody cares about SOTA outside of tech. They want the basic floor of “it does what I need at a reasonable price” that’s it.
Re:Muse Spark Open by Exoristos on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:43PM (#50107306)
So what makes Muse "very sticky"?
Re:Muse Spark Open by nater5000 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:02PM (#50107610)
Seriously. Muse hasn't even been around long enough to determine if it is "sticky" in any meaningful way, let alone in the context of competing against frontier models from competitors.

And based on what I'm seeing, it's far from even being in that category as a service yet. Seems like the OP is conflating seeing a bunch of Muse ads on Facebook with its presence as a competing frontier model.

Re:Muse Spark Open by PaulHoule on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:16PM (#50107867)
The ads strike me as basically deceptive. Like when I was in NYC last week the ads showing a cuddly mascot were all over the place. Video ads on YouTube don’t show a Bay Area TurboKnerd geeking out with a top-of-the-line Mac mini to a reskinned OpenClaw (reality) but rather some guy running and talking to his phone to schedule a massage.

I like the image of Muse and think a product that delivers what it promises to the consumer could be a hit but,,, this looks like something they rolled out in a hurry to take advantage of the FOMO of the uninformed and boost their stock price for a few months until reality catches up. They are a huge company and they could do something only a big company could do but no…

Like the real mass market product is not going to be a smart shell for a Mac it’s going to be cloud based. Like is it economic for your Mac to be sitting there running all the time when you are using 10%? The true believer say yes, the mass market says no. Is Apple going to let them put a skin on your Mac or is this a product that Apple will embrace and extinguish?

Re:Muse Spark Open by HarHarVeryFunny on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:02PM (#50108614)
The naming is a bit confusing, but there are two things called Muse ...

There are the models, such as Muse Spark, Muse Wonder, and this Muse Open.

There there is "Muse" itself which is a cloud based "personal agent", always running in your own cloud-based virtual machine, that you can assign tasks to.

I think the Muse agent (which competes with Instinct, Grok Bot, etc) is where Meta currently believe the money will be. While you can pay for higher usage levels, it seems they are expecting many people to use the free tier, and they will make money by charging transaction fees to services Muse uses/orders (e.g. travel, entertainment) on your behalf. This "personal agent" market is predicted (but let's see) to be huge - much larger than the coding agent market.

I assume the guy in the ad is talking to his Muse agent to schedule the massage.

Re:Muse Spark Open by redanddead on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:43PM (#50108302)
came out like a week or two ago lol
Re:Muse Spark Open by margalabargala on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:09PM (#50107748)
Unfounded assertions by marketing accounts, obviously.
Re:Muse Spark Open by dominotw on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:51PM (#50108441)
spamming same comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50060213

do ppl get paid by zuck for this?

Re:Muse Spark Open by margalabargala on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:51PM (#50111489)
Yes, zuck undoubtedly employs dozens of people whose job it is to make positive comments about meta.

It's not like getting found out would damage meta's reputation.

Re:Muse Spark Open by dominotw on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:52PM (#50111501)
how do i get on that train lol
Re:Muse Spark Open by casualscience on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:22PM (#50107960)
Muse is not sticky at all, it's just OpenClaw wrapped in meta branding. Any company can roll one out
Re:Muse Spark Open by boshalfoshal on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:10PM (#50108736)
I disagree with the claim that its sticky, but this is the wrong response. Reductive and doesn't take into account the obvious things (UX, network effects, barrier to entry to use the product). All 3 of these are much better with Muse than they with are similar products.
Re:Muse Spark Open by casualscience on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:24PM (#50111757)
UX is not a moat, especially in the era of AI software replication. I disagree that there are network effects for MUSE, maybe there will be at some point (e.g. vendors or something sign up for it) but I would love to hear why its better to be on muse when more people use it? Barrier to entry is somewhere they have an advantage, but not more of an advantage than google, or really anyone who has an app installed on your phone already.
Re:Muse Spark Open by MikhailTal on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:43PM (#50108318)
any company can roll instagram(just simple image viewer) or whatsapp(just messaging) out though with the same logic. Does not mean you can compete
Re:Muse Spark Open by casualscience on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:06PM (#50108683)
Social networks have network effects, an ai assistant does not
Re:Muse Spark Open by radicalbyte on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:33PM (#50108146)
Basically once it has sucked all of your data dry you no longer have the ability to leave the Meta Network.
Re:Muse Spark Open by tedggh on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:57PM (#50107527)
Good anthropomorphism.
Re:Muse Spark Open by vatsachak on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:12PM (#50107790)
The ecosystem of meta products like Instagram
Re:Muse Spark Open by mercacona on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:11PM (#50107772)
Velcro
Re:Muse Spark Open by altmanaltman on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:25PM (#50108013)
the bear is sticky with honey
Re:Muse Spark Open by bermudi on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:59PM (#50111556)
Impossible to even know if he was talking about the harness, the model, the assistant... But yeah, sticky... Ok.
Re:Muse Spark Open by vitaflo on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:08PM (#50107710)
> now that we're all going to standardize on Meta's model

Who's this "we" exactly?

Re:Muse Spark Open by cyanydeez on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:12PM (#50107793)
definitely not me; I wouldn't doubt if Zster is working on turning muse into sleeper agents, _assuming_ chinese models will do the same, so they crib data and send it home like a good little maleware model.

In fact, we're going to see an explosion of the worst kind of AI model thanks to thinks mr Z thinks is in his best interest.

Remember, they had reports going back more than a decade about how they're harming children and destabilizing entire countries and as soon as Trumps in the whitehouse, they're licking boot.

Re:Muse Spark Open by vintermann on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:21PM (#50108869)
But why are we all going to standardize on Meta's model, and how is it sticky? What does it have on the big Chinese models?
Re:Muse Spark Open by maherbeg on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:07PM (#50109517)
Also honestly, the models don't have to get much smarter to handle the consumer side of things. They could innovate a ton on the harness to farm out requests and manage the state of the agent. They have an incentive to do this to reduce the infra usage so they can go wider with the agent.
Re:Muse Spark Open by Catloafdev on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:07PM (#50107702)
> Muse is VERY sticky

How, exactly?

Re:Muse Spark Open by 2001zhaozhao on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:33PM (#50108163)
I think any personal AI agent at this point is "very sticky", not just Muse. You really aren't going to switch when a lot of the value is in the agent memory and there's no easy way to export that, similarly to how you aren't going to switch away from Spotify when it's learned all your song preferences which you can't export. Right now, maybe the agent memory is small enough that if you ask the agent to export you'll get most of it out (Claude has notably made official export instructions to encourage switching from ChatGPT in the past), but in the future the memory will be too large and complex to do that effectively, and platforms could also block the memory export or degrade it deliberately.

So, in the long run you pretty much have to pick one personal agent and stick with it, and switching is costly (unless you are using an open agent that lets you just download the memory, in which case it actually becomes cheap, because AI agents make other parts of switching way easier in general). For the purposes of Meta this means whatever user they get they'll probably keep.

HOWEVER, the thing that Muse doesn't have is network effects. They're running into the exact same problem as ChatGPT in this area, IMO. There's no reason for you to be running specifically Muse even if all of your friends are running it. So that gives other vendors a chance to catch up.

Re:Muse Spark Open by LUmBULtERA on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:45PM (#50108353)
You can export all your data from OpenAI and Anthropic. I also exported all of my Liked songs on Spotify and have a scheduled task to pull any new ones each day.
Re:Muse Spark Open by visiondude on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:18PM (#50110420)
I don’t follow why “in the future the memory will be too large and complex to [export] effectively”.

to me, export should be easier and easier since you should just be able to ask the model for the memory files. it’s literally list text on a hard disk, even if there are some new formats in the future, they’ll just be files on a disk that another agent can then inspect and integrate. in fact, i think exporting data from services will become easier and easier since agents can do the work even if platforms try to block it.

Re:Muse Spark Open by johanyc on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:14PM (#50111144)
> a lot of the value is in the agent memory and there's no easy way to export that,

Can't speak for muse and grok bot. But all other agents like openclaw, Hermes simply store then add files and it's trivial to migrate to another agent. Just point the agent to it

Re:Muse Spark Open by christoff12 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:45PM (#50108332)
I think the jury's still out on whether Muse will be sticky. My guess is that it won't be that good relative to the field.
Re:Muse Spark Open by onlyrealcuzzo on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:52PM (#50108447)
> Meta is going to win consumer AI.

Are you defining consumer AI as just AI as it relates to a narrow subset of social networking?

Re:Muse Spark Open by 33d on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:18PM (#50108830)
Very sticky?

Theyve had a few million downloads on what, DAU of billions?

Lol get a reality check.

Re:Muse Spark Open by baggachipz on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:27PM (#50108055)
There is no winner in a race to the bottom.
Re:Muse Spark Open by xeyownt on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:33PM (#50108156)
> Meta is going to win consumer AI.

That zucks.

Re:Muse Spark Open by zxspectrum1982 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:53PM (#50108466)
I'm looking forward to seeing Muse devices like Amazon's devices but with superintelligence: - Muse-equivalent of Alexa - Muse-equivalent of Ring security devices: doorbells, cameras, alarms, etc - Muse home automation devices (lights on/off, smart roller, smoke detector, water detecto, etc) - Muse ring ...
Re:Muse Spark Open by cheema33 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:33PM (#50109057)
> devices but with superintelligence

Donald, is that you?

Re:Muse Spark Open by ywvcbk on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:03AM (#50116438)
Way too coherent...
Re:Muse Spark Open by gieksosz on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:46PM (#50108358)
isn't it a bit early to call Muse sticky?
Re:Muse Spark Open by dominotw on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:49PM (#50108408)
>Muse is VERY sticky

its not. ppl downloaded it in hype arent using anymore

Re:Muse Spark Open by lp92 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:20PM (#50108844)
> Meta is going to win consumer AI.

That's a bold statement lol.

Re:Muse Spark Open by nba456_ on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:55PM (#50107505)
Sounds like cope. You can't claim the 'rent market on intelligence' never materialized when revenue is absolutely booming for Anthropic/etc.
Re:Muse Spark Open by mszcz on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:59PM (#50107567)
Sure, just not nearly enough for sustainability I think. I'd reserve that call for the moment we can stop bathing in free VC money by using subscriptions.

Also, as far as my own use goes, I found that the capabilities/price ratio of DeepSeek's offering is very hard to beat. It's really good enough so the thing that matters to me (besides table stakes like uptime, latency, etc.) is price at this point.

Re:Muse Spark Open by wahnfrieden on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:57PM (#50107537)
They are just repeating old tropes about unprofitability without reassessing
Re:Muse Spark Open by Hamuko on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:01PM (#50107594)
Do you have a source for Anthropic being profitable?
Re:Muse Spark Open by stymaar on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:08PM (#50107719)
Of course they are “profitable”, Dario said so last month (if you accept a definition of “profitability” under which every tech startup is profitable by the day they have their first paying customer).
Re:Muse Spark Open by ceroxylon on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:48PM (#50108402)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/08/17/anthropic...

Anthropic themselves claim to be profitable, fwiw.

Re:Muse Spark Open by Hamuko on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:46PM (#50109977)
>adjusted operating income

>preliminary, unaudited, and could be revised before the prospectus lands

>Which costs were adjusted out has not been disclosed

>profitability may not hold for the full year

That is a lot of caveats on the "profitability".

Re:Muse Spark Open by _aavaa_ on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:06PM (#50107677)
Do you have proof of unprofitability?
Re:Muse Spark Open by stymaar on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:09PM (#50107736)
The fact that Amodei had to invent a new definition of the word “profitable” last month is a strong hint…
Re:Muse Spark Open by JumpCrisscross on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:14PM (#50107817)
> Amodei had to invent a new definition of the word “profitable” last month

Source?

Re:Muse Spark Open by stetrain on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:33PM (#50108162)
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/anthropic-p...

They seem to be reporting gross margin by excluding the cut that cloud providers take for hosting their models, and excluding R&D.

Basically they seem to be taking credit for the whole amount that customers are paying cloud providers to run Anthropic models, rather than the actual net proceeds of that business to Anthropic.

Re:Muse Spark Open by JumpCrisscross on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:46PM (#50109256)
> They seem to be reporting gross margin by excluding the cut that cloud providers take for hosting their models, and excluding R&D

The media is overstating what they're being leaked.

Anthropic is reporting traditional losses. It's also highlighting that operating figure, because it answers the question around what the business could look like in a steady-state and first-party-only mode.

They aren't claiming the profitable right now. But for an unprofitable company, having these sorts of metrics can give you a sense around when they will become profitable and what it will take. (Plenty of people were doubting that AI makes money on inference not too long ago.)

Re:Muse Spark Open by Hamuko on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:10PM (#50107752)
How about the fact that they're not shouting from the rooftops how they're managing to make money in an industry that is currently mostly known as a giant money fire? Instead they're reporting being profitable "after making certain adjustments", which sounds a lot like "not profitable".
Re:Muse Spark Open by JumpCrisscross on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:14PM (#50107833)
> they're reporting being profitable "after making certain adjustments", which sounds a lot like "not profitable"

Adjusting out stock-based compensation and non-cash expenses is absolutely fine for a company growing at the rate Anthropic is. The concern is more that they cherry picked a couple months when their expenses were abnormally low [1].

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle...

Re:Muse Spark Open by JacobAsmuth on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:08PM (#50107713)
If someone gives you one you're just going to say you don't believe it, so why bother?
Re:Muse Spark Open by T-A on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:18PM (#50110415)
Re:Muse Spark Open by russli1993 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:18PM (#50107894)
last year was google winning AI, this year is meta winning AI. I think what is true is Meta, Google will all find their place in the AI world and continue to make huge amount of money. A consumer will use many different AI products, each with a different use case. Everyone will make enough money to live well.
Re:Muse Spark Open by binlog on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:13PM (#50107810)
> The rent market on intelligence never materialized

So where is the ~$100B combined revenue for OpenAI and Anthropic coming from? Open weights models have been close enough to the frontier for over a year now, probably longer, yet the $$ shows no sign of shifting.

Re:Muse Spark Open by ywvcbk on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:06AM (#50116469)
OpenaAI and Anthropic models are priced quite competitively with open ones, they even cut prices by quite a bit since spring. So it's not too surprising that their revenue is pretty high, the question is whether the competition and downward price pressure from open model providers combined with their extremely high R&D spending is sustainable.
Re:Muse Spark Open by slekker on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:29PM (#50109768)
Paid bot or Meta employee, please disclose
Re:Muse Spark Open by boringg on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:58PM (#50112382)
Bold statement. I wouldn’t count anyone as a winner on consumer market at this point.

I think the weight of people who dislike Meta is going to be a problem - that and forcing to give a lot of information just to use it is problematic for adoption.

Re:Muse Spark Open by woggy on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:04AM (#50114670)
Is this Zucks personal AI bot?
Re:Muse Spark Open by ProblemExplorer on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:33PM (#50120581)
> Meta is going to win consumer AI.

I disagree. Google is doing a phenomenal job at capturing use cases at the edge, right where "normie" consumers live. Google's models absolutely suck at coding but if you haven't tried Google Transcribe, you should.

Google has also, far larger distribution and stickiness than Meta.

Re:Muse Spark Open by octomind on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:13PM (#50109599)
Finally democratizing AI access to, checks notes, people with no less than two Apple M5 Ultra Studios on their desktop.
Re:Muse Spark Open by TomGarden on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:43PM (#50109940)
I partly agree with the sentiment, but this is also the first time I've seen an actual lab announce they optimized for consumer hardware (very expensive, but still consumer).

It's kind of absurd that no non-quantized MOE model exists that's sweet spotted for 128GB Macs, for example. I hope more open labs follow this lead but also offer lower tier models, perhaps specialized on certain types of tasks

Re:Muse Spark Open by hyperbovine on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:44PM (#50111898)
Tbf that wasn’t such an outrageous proposition until about ~6 months ago.
Re:Muse Spark Open by zkrhass_ on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:41PM (#50109175)
It seems like meta and mistral are both hedging their "best" claims geographically because they've realized they don't have to even beat deep seek anymore, they can just win customers by being "the best one I'm allowed to use".
Re:Muse Spark Open by drob518 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:36PM (#50109841)
If you can’t win everything, at least win a niche.
Re:Muse Spark Open by piyuv on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:42PM (#50109919)
If you can’t win, get your politicians to ban the competition
Re:Muse Spark Open by villish on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:26PM (#50111770)
As far as I’m aware, only China does this currently.
Re:Muse Spark Open by desterothx on Friday October 16, 2026 @04:59AM (#50115910)
What Chinese AI lab are you aware of that the CCP closed down?
Re:Muse Spark Open by villish on Friday October 16, 2026 @09:50AM (#50118383)
China blocks ChatGPT. Which is “banning the competition” that the above posters were claiming the US would do.
Re:Muse Spark Open by drob518 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:17PM (#50110395)
Yep, also a time-tested strategy.
Re:Muse Spark Open by simonw on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:26PM (#50108941)
Pelicans for low, medium, high, and xhigh: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

I had to run them via OpenRouter - I don't have access to a machine that can handle this size of model.

For comparison:

Muse Wonder: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

Muse 1.3: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

And this one from Meta AI's previous open weight model, Muse Glimmer, which DID run on my laptop: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

Re:Muse Spark Open by ideonode on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:21PM (#50109694)
A question I have about the pelican benchmark : why are the pelicans always cycling to the right?
Re:Muse Spark Open by christina97 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:39PM (#50110705)
The gears etc on bikes are customarily on the right, so almost all photos of bikes (eg for sale, by hobbyists) face to the right to show off that, and so it makes sense for LLMs to have such a preference.
Re:Muse Spark Open by iAMkenough on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:36PM (#50109850)
They’re all derivatives, not originals.
Re:Muse Spark Open by adtac on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:16AM (#50114014)
because (0, 0) is on the left
Re:Muse Spark Open by Kurtz79 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:12PM (#50109581)
I think it is safe to say that Muse models are not pelican-benchmaxxed.
Re:Muse Spark Open by bitexploder on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:23PM (#50112156)
They also are not very good lol.
Re:Muse Spark Open by lutanista on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:43PM (#50110755)
I really would love a browser plugin that blocks having to read about fucking pelicans on every model release.
Re:Muse Spark Open by jeremyloy_wt on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:12PM (#50111125)
You could unironically vibe code this with a prompt shorter than your complaint.
Re:Muse Spark Open by FuckButtons on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:44PM (#50111899)
So make one. Not everything is for you.
Re:Muse Spark Open by vopi on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:12PM (#50111130)
It's interesting the high reasoning pelican is animated. I don't think I've seen another model do that before.
Re:Muse Spark Open by johnnyApplePRNG on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:58PM (#50112387)
And why should it? The prompt never asks for animation.

Muse is amusing, I'll give it that.

I wouldn't touch a zuck product if my life depended on it.

Re:Muse Spark Open by qingcharles on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:17PM (#50112526)
Simon's posted a number of animated ones in the past. Some models really like to animate.
Re:Muse Spark Open by thoughtpeddler on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:40PM (#50111389)
In light of recent pieces like "The Emperor Pelican Has No Clothes" (https://arcfu.com/post/the-emperor-pelican-has-no-clothes/), I'd be more curious to see how 'PelicanBench' becomes more robust in the time to come -- I feel like all models are now benchmax'd on the standard pelican SVG rendering task and we need something more multi-dimensional. It would be great to have a script that prompts a model to render the pelicans in several different situations (like the linked article) that showcase some kind of broad generalizability or other sort of 'transfer learning' going on with these models that would really then be impressive and worth noting on - otherwise PelicanBench is losing its relevance.
Re:Muse Spark Open by kylehotchkiss on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:15AM (#50114008)
Did you order one of the new studios?
Re:Muse Spark Open by devy on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:10PM (#50107751)
re: "Apple’s unified memory architecture lets the M5 Ultra's integrated GPU use up to 512 GB per Mac Studio, so two machines can hold an entire model. And the chip’s 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth is fast enough to read the small slice each token needs. The result is two Mac Studios behave like one supercomputer with a terabyte of unified memory."

At the current market price of Apple Mac Studio Ultra, 30-core CPU + 64-core GPU w/ 256GB RAM is already reaching at around $10k. Keep in mind that computers are appreciating assets recently.

The 512GB RAM option is not even for sales yet (they said late October availability). Based on typical Apple pricing, it's likely to be around $14k apiece. So we are looking at least $28k - $30k for the setup Muse team is advertising. That's essentially the Nvidia H100 GPU w/ 96GB VRAM/HBM3 at up to 3.94 TB/second memory bandwidth, 3x+ than Mac Studio's Unified Memory speed.

Also, how did Meta get access to Apple's unreleased M5 Ultra w/512GB RAM Mac Studio? Or is that simply a marketing piece that they wrote purely on specs?

Re:Muse Spark Open by jimbokun on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:14PM (#50108787)
> Keep in mind that computers are appreciating assets recently.

You are correct but at my age my brain is never going to stop being surprised by this statement.

Re:Muse Spark Open by dannyw on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:16PM (#50107862)
> Also, how did Meta get access to Apple's unreleased M5 Ultra w/512GB RAM Mac Studio? Or is that simply a marketing piece that they wrote purely on specs?

It should be well known that Apple provides early access to developers under strict conditions. Otherwise, how do you think they announce new hardware not for sale, and show demos of third party apps taking advantage of such hardware?

The 512GB is obviously geared towards local LLM crowds. I'm just speculating, but I would be surprised if there's not at least a few devices with the 'ecosystem players' like LM Studio, Unsloth, etc. Of course, they'd never confirm nor deny :)

Re:Muse Spark Open by bigyabai on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:43AM (#50114520)
Specifically, Meta is behind Pytorch. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple also sent a few M5 Ultras to Google to stimulate Tensorflow support.
Re:Muse Spark Open by happyopossum on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:13PM (#50107805)
1024GB of ram is bigger than 96GB of ram.

Also you are comparing apples to or— dang it, I don’t mean to do that in this thread. Well, it’s a very poor comparison, as they are completely different computing devices with completely different use cases, capabilities, and customer bases. Not to mention power requirements!

Re:Muse Spark Open by kart23 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:24PM (#50107984)
how are the Macs connected to each other?
Re:Muse Spark Open by kphorn on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:39PM (#50108256)
RDMA over thunderbolt
Re:Muse Spark Open by waz0wski on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:37PM (#50109855)
Jeff Geerling blogged about his demo setup - https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/15-tb-vram-on-mac-stu...

Uses Exo - https://exolabs.net

You can do it with other software, that's just one of the quick-and-easy setups if you've got a spare 40-60k for studios sitting around

Re:Muse Spark Open by gavino on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:38PM (#50108242)
> Future is for everyone

So long as you can choose between running AI locally or a new Corolla

Re:Muse Spark Open by ArmandoAP on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:14PM (#50107828)
Re:Muse Spark Open by jlhawn on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:24PM (#50108002)
I like how he just casually posts a photo of over $30k worth of equipment on his disk like "this is accessible to everyone!"
Re:Muse Spark Open by qingcharles on Thursday October 15, 2026 @09:22PM (#50112567)
I love this. He's used up all the Thunderbolts on the back to make use of the new hack where you can connect all of them, so he has to plug his monitor in on the front :D

Here's what it probably looks like from the back:

https://x.com/digitalix/status/2110782016446960086

(sorry I don't have a working Twitter mirror)

Re:Muse Spark Open by peri-cl on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:37AM (#50116703)
They're serial cables—but, multiple of them, in parallel!

Apple's getting close to re-inventing the ribbon connector.

Re:Muse Spark Open by popinman322 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:43PM (#50107323)
The model license requires large inference providers to contact Meta separately to obtain a license to serve the model. I know we've seen this before with other large models, but it's still a bit irritating.

The usual effect of separate licensing is decreased price competition from public providers (like we saw with Kimi K3). I guess it's better for the providers if the price is fixed: any efficiency improvements directly improve margin rather than driving prices down over time. Still, to provide my own anecdata, the main thing keeping me on a paid subscription is token costs for the more capable models.

Re:Muse Spark Open by isityettime on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:55PM (#50107499)
Then it's not open-weight. Open-weight means "weights available under an open-source license", and licenses prohibiting commercial use are not open-source.

The nearest analogue would be "weights available", I guess.

Re:Muse Spark Open by tcdent on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:09PM (#50107734)
Meta did this from the very beginning with the original Llama's. Open weights, but you have to use an account with them and agree to an EULA.
Re:Muse Spark Open by dannyw on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:23PM (#50107976)
There's obvs decreased price competition, but it also does help with ensuring model quality.

Quite a lot of providers on OpenRouter run degraded or broken models. I think some is deliberate, but I think a lot is just providers not setting up models properly; especially with the rush to day zero models.

Re:Muse Spark Open by AtHeartEngineer on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:00PM (#50107583)
ya especially because it's huge, you aren't running this on your desktop
Re:Muse Spark Open by GodelNumbering on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:35PM (#50108183)
39 on AA[1], about the same as Deepseek v4.1 flash and Mimo 2.5 Flash. Behind Glm 5.3 flash and Qwen3.8-Flash-Next [2]

[1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/muse-spark-open

[2] https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/open-source?models=mimo...

Re:Muse Spark Open by onlyrealcuzzo on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:53PM (#50108476)
Crucially, it's about the same as DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, and about 10x more expensive to run...

No thanks...

Re:Muse Spark Open by hadlock on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:13PM (#50108777)
OG Deepseek Flash was pretty mediocre and then got a lot better with post training. The other thing they are fighting is most/all of the chinese labs are free to use/train on the 10B+ SOTA reasoning tokens they "stole" over the summer March-July 2026, if meta is playing by the rules, they are building this from the ground up. Getting anywhere near Deepseek Flash without that free training data is pretty impressive feat.
Re:Muse Spark Open by lcampbell on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:32PM (#50109044)
OG DeepSeek V4 Flash and V4.1 Flash are actually completely different architectures. To wit, V4 runs fine on 2x96GB cards but you’re not running V4.1 unquanted on less than 4x96GB.

It’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison.

(I’m not sure why they didn’t call it V5 Flash, but model names from most labs are completely nonsensical and disjoint from their underlying architecture.)

Re:Muse Spark Open by nirav72 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:03PM (#50107630)
How does this compare to Muse Spark 1.3 contribute? I've used Spark 1.3 a lot lately , since its currently free to use via OpenCode. I haven't had the best experience in the past with models from Meta. But Spark 1.3 is has been surprisingly great. Especially for tool calling.
Re:Muse Spark Open by LaurensBER on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:07PM (#50107701)
Please give it a try and let us know ;) judging by the benchmark scores I would not expect too much of a difference.

Main difference seems to be that this one is cheaper/easier to host.

Re:Muse Spark Open by sejje on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:46PM (#50108356)
I used spark 1.3 extensively in prime-agent (a pi derivative) and I thought it was great.

Speaks nicely, great at driving linux. Not frontier-level coding, but comparable to luna, deepseek. It was amazing for the price.

Re:Muse Spark Open by bel8 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:14PM (#50108784)
Artifical Analysis says is this comparable to DeepSeek 4.1.

But weaker than Muse Spark 1.3: https://i.imgur.com/8ST1rRY.png

    Muse Spark 1.3 (Xhigh)     45
    Muse Spark Open (Xhigh)    39
    DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Max)  39
Re:Muse Spark Open by brudgers on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:06PM (#50109516)
Is it easy to use Muse to remove all the kinds of crap I don’t want in my Facebook feed?

Asking for a friend.

Re:Muse Spark Open by jjcm on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:14PM (#50108788)
Image->html test for muse spark open.

Original designs: https://diffui.ai/app/canvas/5093e689-1e74-4f26-b632-2a4500f...

Muse Spark Open: https://html.non.io/lcars-muse-spark/

Opus 5.5 (sota): https://html.non.io/lcars-opus-5.5/

Overall it actually does pretty solid. It doesn't completely follow the design, but it gets the vibe. It's one of the best open models I've seen for conversion, which is impressive.

Re:Muse Spark Open by jjcm on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:16PM (#50108802)
And disclaimer since this comes up with these - objective with this test is to be a good image->html test, not a good web design. Also it's meant to use 3js to render the planets, which if you don't have GPU acceleration enabled for your browser will lower the FPS significantly.
Re:Muse Spark Open by SahAssar on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:35PM (#50109834)
Besides including the sota could you include a link to the best previous open-weights (and if possible fully open-source) model?
Re:Muse Spark Open by TomGarden on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:30PM (#50109005)
The exciting thing about this is in them optimizing for inference on Macs. This, and optimization for other consumer hardware, is where local AI needs to go
Re:Muse Spark Open by kristianp on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:24PM (#50110493)
Given the size of Macs (2 or 4 of them) required to run it, they're just paying lip service to that option. Other models, e.g. deepseek flash, are much more practical size. Even that takes a 96 or 128GB ram Mac.
Re:Muse Spark Open by TomGarden on Friday October 16, 2026 @03:09AM (#50115125)
Yeah I'm more excited about the prospect of them explicitly saying it, which hopefully can lead to better places down the line.

I thought DS Flash needed 2bit quant to work on 128GB? I have an m4 max 128 GB and the most reasonable model to run still seems to be qwen's 32B A3B

Re:Muse Spark Open by ansnadeem on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:23PM (#50107974)
I'm super impressed by how meta has gotten back in the race. They weathered* the storm and actually came out with really good models and products.
Re:Muse Spark Open by ishtanbul on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:24PM (#50108009)
Weathered the storm
Re:Muse Spark Open by itissid on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:36PM (#50108203)
I think a lot of people in this thread are openly dismissive: "oh its just open claw, anyone can and many have build that".

I think what they are missing is the fact that there are not that many teams in the world that can deploy muse like product to A/B test a lot of hypothesis at the scale meta can at scale. I mean even if you could get to scale with DC you need a reason for people to use your product.

My mom and dad and their family have never heard of Claude and don't use chat gpt except once in a while as a search engine. But meta will figure out a way to insert this into modals and feeds to make people stumble and stick on it.

I am no meta fan, but I think people underestimate how fast product uptake there is for non Dev harness.

Re:Muse Spark Open by redanddead on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:41PM (#50108274)
Hmm.. i don't know.

Coding is the main application for AI in 2026, unless I'm wrong

Re:Muse Spark Open by itissid on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:22PM (#50109703)
Coding was not the main application before ~Dec 2023, the same way the light bulb was not the main use of electricity for a long time. Meta for better or for worst is good at discovering new use-cases for their products(however bad they are for society is a different debate) and pivot if they are not - remember the Portal device( https://www.meta.com/portal/ ) ? Good hardware, decent usecase, killed within a ~year of its release.
Re:Muse Spark Open by redanddead on Saturday October 17, 2026 @06:23PM (#50135730)
Dude… meta is a fucking mess lol

Internally especially

The AR/VR fiasco

Then the meta glasses dude.. everyone thinks that’s creepy.

Then the social media thing is creepy as hell too

Meta is so far from cool it’s baaad

However, meta has a monopoly on a profitable business model, ads!

Re:Muse Spark Open by slopnt on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:49PM (#50108404)
yes, but that does not prevent other applications from existing or being successful this year
Re:Muse Spark Open by msabalau on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:03PM (#50110205)
It's not just openclaw, there's OpenAI's Dots and Gemini Spark.

Facebook doesn't have an real advantage to drive adoption other the being free. Which is not a moat because Google, certainly, and OpenAI, very probably, would offer this for free, in the event this capability turns out to be important to consumers.

Gmail, which half of the people in the US use their daily e-mail is certainly strong thing to build an agent on top of.

Just because meta can shove stuff in the faces of people doesn't mean they can succeed at any random thing. Most Facebook users distrust it, and dislike Zuck personally (at least that's what his lawyer said in court) and that's a rather large barrier to succeeding with agents, where trust is foundational.

But my assumption about the speed of product uptake may be skewed by not-valuing Meta's "consumer task running" pitch. But if people actually want this, for some reason, competitors at scale seem very likely to appear instantly.

This really seems more about meta AI team needs more users of their AI to do a good job building AI, and doing this for free is niche where they can get a few more users, rather than this being genius gambit.

Re:Muse Spark Open by hypfer on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:27PM (#50108951)
It would be nice if the other players in the market would do the same and release yesteryears models as something to run at home.

Especially for all the people that got emotionally attached to specific checkpoints and their.. uh.. "character".

Re:Muse Spark Open by itsmeduncan on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:25PM (#50108021)
This is great progress for "open-weight" models. Quotes due to the restrictions, but still progress none-the-less. Looking forward to seeing any quants that all mere mortals to run this at home without early access Apple hardware.
Re:Muse Spark Open by modeless on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:30PM (#50108104)
In terms of performance it seems like this has somewhat worse benchmarks than Muse Spark 1.3, closer to 1.2 but not the same. Of course significantly worse than Muse Wonder Full.
Re:Muse Spark Open by jahrichie on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:17PM (#50109640)
Good luck running that on your home infra lol, requires 25k in mac minis
Re:Muse Spark Open by montroser on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:10PM (#50107759)
Well, this is much better than nothing -- we should be grateful that whatever the market conditions and corporate incentives, a major lab is releasing a capable open-weight model. But still very far behind DeepSeek and GLM. Even on consumer hardware, Qwen 3.8 27B is going to compare favorably to this.
Re:Muse Spark Open by ShinyLeftPad on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:19PM (#50107910)
It's not open, like the Llama. There is a licensing agreement by which they allow you to use it for free on conditions.
Re:Muse Spark Open by adrian_b on Friday October 16, 2026 @05:53AM (#50116353)
True, but the conditions are quite relaxed, so it can even be used commercially without worries by small businesses, while it is unconditionally free for non-commercial uses.

Other big open-weights LLMs have similar licensing terms and I believe that they are quite fair, i.e. at the point when someone uses such an LLM to obtain tens of million $ of revenue it becomes fair to demand a share of that for the creator of the model.

Re:Muse Spark Open by ShinyLeftPad on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:50PM (#50120901)
Fair or not fair, it's not "open"...
Re:Muse Spark Open by markstos on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:21PM (#50108873)
“We believe AI is for everyone” *who can afford two M5 Studios with a total of 1 terabyte of memory.
Re:Muse Spark Open by adrian_b on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:05AM (#50116464)
Very big LLMs can still be useful even when you run them only at the speed of around 1 token per second that can be reached with almost any mini-PC or laptop with the weights streamed from SSDs.

While at that speed they will not be your main LLM, there are tasks that are still useful even when requiring many hours, e.g. an overnight run, for instance for checking what has been produced after many interactive iterations of a fast but small model.

Re:Muse Spark Open by meerita on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:07PM (#50107695)
It's really nice that all AI pages are using canvas animations. A few days ago, Gemma 4's animation wasn't that impressive. Same with Muse. So far, the best animations I've seen are from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Re:Muse Spark Open by bitexploder on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:09PM (#50107744)
Ehm.. I have a model that runs on my older gaming desktop that scores as well (or better) as this model does on DeepSWE. This model does better than Flash Next in many areas and I am sure is much stronger overall, but hmm.
Re:Muse Spark Open by felineflock on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:16PM (#50108806)
UD-IQ1_S is 180Gb. UD-Q4_K_XL is 510Gb. Still beyond the average prosumer.
Re:Muse Spark Open by kentm on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:42PM (#50108292)
As an aside I really wish people would stop naming their new software projects “Spark” given how many things already use that name.
Re:Muse Spark Open by svachalek on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:53PM (#50108469)
The sad thing is I think it's like Elara, it's just a favorite LLM name for things and there's likely not a human behind it.
Re:Muse Spark Open by I_am_tiberius on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:22PM (#50107959)
It's not open!!!
Re:Muse Spark Open by Retro_Dev on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:38PM (#50109874)
How so?
Re:Muse Spark Open by antaviana on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:53PM (#50108461)
What is the main driver for anyone to give away their hard earned weights? What is the catch?
Re:Muse Spark Open by hypfer on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:35PM (#50109094)
Pissing off Dario, probably?

Or rather capturing the people Anthropic keeps alienating.

The Zuck has (in a different context) said that a few billions wasted are a decent bet (or something along those lines), so I think they're playing extra long games here with no real focus on profit any time soon.

Re:Muse Spark Open by onlyrealcuzzo on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:57PM (#50108528)
To try to prevent as many people as possible from using one model, that gets all the data, and winner takes all.
Re:Muse Spark Open by baron3dl on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:03PM (#50108627)
spoiling the leaders' profit margins
Re:Muse Spark Open by tintor on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:31PM (#50108125)
This is not an open model. License is not open license, and only weights are provided.
Re:Muse Spark Open by krawat3 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:27PM (#50108057)
What kind of hardware does one need to run this model? Like a small datacenter node?
Re:Muse Spark Open by shinokami on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:23PM (#50107019)
i love seeing major ai labs release open-weight models. really hope we'll see more of this from openai and eventually anthropic too.
Re:Muse Spark Open by sorenjan on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:38PM (#50108226)
Who would have thought that one of the top American tech companies would boast about how their latest product is the best in class in the US, not the world, because they're behind China.
Re:Muse Spark Open by versooth on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:47PM (#50111922)
It did feel very odd to read that.
Re:Muse Spark Open by redox99 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:04PM (#50108640)
It performs worse than Muse Spark 1.3 and 1.2. And it has an outdated attention mechanism which at 1M tokens will need over 200GB just for the KV cache.

Very disappointing release. We're lucky to have Chinese models.

Re:Muse Spark Open by karahime on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:19PM (#50107921)
Glad that Meta is back on the open weights train in force.
Re:Muse Spark Open by PunchTornado on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:26PM (#50108033)
How is this open weights? Open weights means anyone can use the weights. The license forbids certain categories.
Re:Muse Spark Open by AuthAuth on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:05PM (#50107665)
Nice a Mastodon shoutout.
Re:Muse Spark Open by eknkc on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:30PM (#50108106)
Feels dumber than GLM 5.3 (only open model I use extensively). But is really fast (fireworks.ai).

Only checked a single, large prompt that already ran today on claude and glm though..

Re:Muse Spark Open by xnx on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:24PM (#50107990)
Why is Gemma not in the comparison table?
Re:Muse Spark Open by seizethecheese on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:31PM (#50108123)
Probably too small, the comparisons are all larger models.
Re:Muse Spark Open by tintor on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:29PM (#50108092)
Given exposed benchmaxxing of several past models from Meta,

I don't trust any benchmark numbers from Meta anymore.

Re:Muse Spark Open by seizethecheese on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:30PM (#50108111)
They completely overhauled their team since then.
Re:Muse Spark Open by tintor on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:48PM (#50109279)
Except the CEO.
Re:Muse Spark Open by redox99 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:43PM (#50110748)
Muse wonder is still benchmaxxed.
Re:Muse Spark Open by sourcecodeplz on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:08PM (#50107709)
from what i understand its somewhere between muse spark 1.3 and 1.2 in some coding benches.
Re:Muse Spark Open by spwa4 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:15PM (#50107848)
https://huggingface.co/meta-models/Muse-Spark-Open-816B-A42B...

816B model, A42B active parameters

Unsloth and Meta have guides on how to run the model, but allow me to summarize: You & Me won't be running this one.

https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/muse-spark-open

Re:Muse Spark Open by hermitShell on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:41PM (#50108270)
Not at an appreciable token rate. I wonder if these large open weight models are considered safer to release for that reason? I'm thinking no because any small to medium size criminal organization or state funded group will be able to cobble together the resources to achieve some kind of runtime. Even at 10 tok/sec, making bioweapons at 10 tok/sec is concerning.
Re:Muse Spark Open by spwa4 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:27PM (#50108952)
You do realize that a high school Chemistry course actually contains all the details you need on both bioweapons used in WW2, right? Plus several others you could use. Those books contain the answer to why those 2 people died in the RV in Breaking bad. And they should. They also contain information on Mustard gas and Zyklon-B, including preparation instructions, but of course, you'll have to puzzle it together. That these substances can be used as bioweapons is heavily deemphasized, but you just can't reasonably avoid mentioning and showing them.

Also these books contain maybe not the solution to making thermobaric explosions, but certainly the principle and show you exactly what problem you'd have to solve to make those weapons.

Just about the only thing they stopped teaching is that if you combine that knowledge with which plants contain what ... there's an incredibly easy way to make pudding with cyanide that's safe to touch, for example. That they suppressed.

But at least for Europe, the number of lethal plants just growing along essentially every road or in every forest numbers in the dozens. Including a very famous one they teach every kid about.

Of course, in both cases, the real challenge is making them and deploying them without killing yourself.

We are not safe from bioweapons because nobody knows how to make them. That's not it.

Re:Muse Spark Open by hermitShell on Friday October 16, 2026 @08:25AM (#50117525)
It seems like you're talking about chemical weapons.

Which is fair, they are very easy to make without the assistance of an LLM, and I don't hear about that kind of thing in the news.

I was talking about biological weapons like gain of function and that kind of thing.

The implied question was 'Should companies like Meta publish open weight models when they could theoretically be subverted by malicious users?'. So far as I'm aware there are few people worrying about this kind of thing. Bill Gates for one. But apparently it's off topic and/or not interesting, or not welcomed as a discussion point.

Re:Muse Spark Open by spwa4 on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:24PM (#50121441)
You were worried about someone using LLMs to make weapons. So I went for the ones that are more realistic. Bioweapons are far harder to make than chemical weapons. The science is harder, the actual synthesis can only happen at a few biomed companies (which is where I'd put my checks if I were you), even when you have the DNA synthesis is very hard, in the "just don't bother before your PhD hard" realm, and they're even harder to handle without killing yourself. Bioweapons are not realistic.
Re:Muse Spark Open by hermitShell on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:39PM (#50122512)
To be completely honest, I don't know. Here's the kind of thing that I was referencing though:

https://youtu.be/tj1dFIUAs7A?si=a4KYg6QEaxALHnWX&t=207

I've always thought Bill Gates was pretty smart, smarter than me, and has dedicated a lot of his time to researching things like pandemics. More time than I have dedicated to such research.

Seems like Meta's release of Muse Spark Open does not move the needle on things like this, since GLM-5.3 was already released back in August.

Re:Muse Spark Open by scotty79 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:05PM (#50109498)
> The 2-bit quant fits on devices with 256GB of RAM, VRAM or unified memory.

Ouch. I wonder how it compares to Qwen 3.8 running with 4-bit quant on 10 times less VRAM.

Re:Muse Spark Open by adrian_b on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:15AM (#50116528)
I do not know about you, but I will probably also run this model, even with a mini-PC like an ASUS NUC, albeit very slowly.

Even if for your main LLM you want a speed high enough for interactive use and fast iterations, it is still useful to also run a much bigger LLM from time to time, even if that requires many hours for completing a task, due to the slow inference speed when the weights are read from SSDs.

There are tasks where the quality of the result is more important than the time needed to produce it. For example you might run all day a great number of iterations of a fast small LLM, and then run overnight a big LLM to check the end results of that work.

Therefore we need both small open-weights LLMs that can be run from the GPU RAM or at most from the CPU RAM, but also the biggest open-weights LLMs, even if the latter can be run only from SSDs by most people.

Re:Muse Spark Open by dcchambers on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:09PM (#50108716)
I don't think this is going to change anything for most people, but it certainly fits a niche for US-based companies that refuse to run Chinese models and only want to run their own inference.

But I'm really happy to see Meta do this and I hope they continue to release open models in the future. Open models are really the only way to ensure fair access to AI for everyone.

Re:Muse Spark Open by lern_too_spel on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:03PM (#50108622)
What is the point of releasing "The Most Capable US Open‑Weight Model?" I can understand why I might care about the location of a model serving provider, but why should I as a model user care about the location that an open weights model was trained?
Re:Muse Spark Open by sgt101 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:29PM (#50108091)
So: WAR!
Re:Muse Spark Open by vatsachak on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:11PM (#50107780)
Zuck is the good guy here. Damn
Re:Muse Spark Open by amelius on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:17PM (#50107887)
You don't know what is hiding in the model ...
Re:Muse Spark Open by scrollop on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:32PM (#50108137)
By finding another way to siphon user data?

You trust anything he says?

Re:Muse Spark Open by Exoristos on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:42PM (#50107287)
"Muse Spark Open was optimized to run on Mac Studio with M5 Ultra, and together they’re the best way to run a powerful model on your own desktop."
Re:Muse Spark Open by tidbeck on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:07PM (#50107699)
”Serve the model on either two Mac Studios, with M5 Ultra and 512GB of unified memory; or four Mac Studios with 256GB of unified memory, for a total of 1TB of unified memory, enough to hold a NVFP4 quantized version of Muse Spark Open”

Can not find any info on inference speed.

Re:Muse Spark Open by sourcecodeplz on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:11PM (#50107775)
its around 20tps
Re:Muse Spark Open by ryanschaefer on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:07PM (#50107696)
Read it again. Two M5s.

Wait read that again. Two 512GB, unreleased model M5s.

This is gonna cost like 50k to run at home.

Re:Muse Spark Open by sorenjan on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:35PM (#50108192)
How much does the engineers at Meta make? Spend enough time together with others making $250k+ and eventually you start suggesting that two 512 GB M5s is something you can put on your desktop. I mean, it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? 10 dollars?
Re:Muse Spark Open by joshstrange on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:14PM (#50107820)
Closer to ~$30K if I had to guess. A 256 version is $11,299.00 (2TB SSD, 256GB RAM, 36-core CPU, 80‑core GPU), so yeah, 4 of those would be close to $50K but the 96->256 RAM upgrade is $4K, if we assume 512 will be double that it's ~$15K/ea.

But yes, still a massive amount of money and that's before we know the TPS or any other stats.

Re:Muse Spark Open by jacquesm on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:21PM (#50107950)
The closest equivalent to something like that is a GB300 based workstation, those go from 90K and up.
Re:Muse Spark Open by dprkh on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:11PM (#50107774)
Why would anyone want to run an LLM on Apple's hardware? Why not buy an NVIDIA GPU?
Re:Muse Spark Open by tredre3 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:16PM (#50107863)
Try to find a NVIDIA GPU with 256/512 GB of RAM.
Re:Muse Spark Open by pitifulsurround on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:04PM (#50107645)
okay that's gonna be interesting to try
Re:Muse Spark Open by IshKebab on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:22PM (#50107968)
I tried Muse Spark 1.3 for a while because it's so cheap, but it's definitely in a lower league than Astra, Opus 5.5 and Argon. Still produces slop if you try and vibe code with it, whereas the more capable models write good code.
Re:Muse Spark Open by scotty79 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:06PM (#50109506)
Try Muse Wonder Full, it's comparable.
Re:Muse Spark Open by IshKebab on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:17PM (#50122194)
Ah interesting. It's also comparable in price though!
Re:Muse Spark Open by cute_boi on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:00PM (#50107571)
can we stop these safety risk.... Feels like gpt 2/3 days, and now we know there wasn't any safety issue with gpt 2/3....
Re:Muse Spark Open by nico on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:24PM (#50108003)
But does it play doom? /s

PS: I might need to do a doom benchmark, that’d be fun https://playground.jeffyclassify.com/#doom

Re:Muse Spark Open by hypfer on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:39PM (#50109152)
Best I can do is p(doom)

Is that combination of tokens still relevant or did it leave the news cycle by now?

Re:Muse Spark Open by binlog on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:24PM (#50108007)
Tech people really are drug addicts. Rant about Zuck and Meta for 364 days a year and then jump over each other to be first in line the moment he shows something shiny.
Re:Muse Spark Open by aaroninsf on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:21PM (#50107949)
Never meta.

Do not run, do not support, do not use.

Re:Muse Spark Open by scrollop on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:30PM (#50108107)
I wonder if all the AI companies are making dossiers on their users.

I would say meta and google definitely are. xAI? Probaly. The others? Perhaps. Perhaps Anthropic less than the others?

Re:Muse Spark Open by ceroxylon on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:55PM (#50108499)
It appears to already be far beyond that, they are working with each other[0]:

>ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Le Chat de Mistral and Meta AI filter your data to Google, Meta, and several of the main data brokers.

[0] https://jorgegarciaherrero.com/en/prompt-like-a-butterfly-st...

https://jorgegarciaherrero.com/wp-content/interactivos/20260... [PDF]

Re:Muse Spark Open by osiris970 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:57PM (#50107532)
US OPEN WEIGHT IS NOT DEAD THANKS ZUCK
Re:Muse Spark Open by binlog on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:26PM (#50108040)
Nemotron, Inkling, Gemma, Trinity Large, Snowflake Arctic were all released/updated in the last 6 months, and there are countless other smaller models out there. US open weight is very far from "dead", and certainly doesn't need Zuck as a savior.
Re:Muse Spark Open by dofm on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:53PM (#50109346)
Also IBM Granite has a small thinking model now (though it is slightly exasperating in use)
Re:Muse Spark Open by Hamuko on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:04PM (#50107643)
Is Google not gonna make another Gemma or something?
Re:Muse Spark Open by stymaar on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:10PM (#50107755)
Even if they stopped, the Chinese model release hit an all-time high this summer so I think we're good.
Re:Muse Spark Open by osiris970 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:26PM (#50108039)
Google doesn’t release big chungus models like this
Re:Muse Spark Open by maxdo on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:46PM (#50107360)
great, I've been reading series of papers related to open source/open weight LLM Backdoors.

It's 100% possible, curious when will be the first incident.

Having something built by entity with HQ in the wester world is always a bit safer. That could be mistral, but they decided to be a consultancy company, not an ai lab.

Re:Muse Spark Open by wren6991 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:01PM (#50107605)
Right. The US has famously never installed government-mandated backdoors in security-critical technology like Dual_EC_DRBG.
Re:Muse Spark Open by maxdo on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:30PM (#50108108)
everyone is doing backdoors, except eu, they just receive bribes from those who install backdoors.

the only difference is: the backdoor is made to kill people like you or not. I'd rather have a backdoor that is installed to kill someone on the different continent, e.g Iran leadrship, not in my country/city.

Re:Muse Spark Open by bigyabai on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:12PM (#50109587)
This post could be framed with golden filigree, titled "The Most HN Comment Ever Written" and perhaps displayed near other artworks like a Juicero, Flock camera or Sam Altman's disinterred belongings.

Orange Site will have a properly interesting history museum, at the rate we collect curiosities like this.

Re:Muse Spark Open by desterothx on Friday October 16, 2026 @07:14AM (#50116973)
First they came for the communists, but i didn't speak up, because i was not a communist
Re:Muse Spark Open by vrganj on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:06PM (#50109510)
Mistral just released Mistral Large 4?
Re:Muse Spark Open by maxdo on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:16PM (#50110387)
and it's already not competitive from day 1
Re:Muse Spark Open by vrganj on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:02PM (#50111014)
With Muse Spark Open it is.
Re:Muse Spark Open by bjarnehamre on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:05PM (#50107664)
Link to papers?
Re:Muse Spark Open by brisket_bronson on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:25PM (#50109730)
> We believe the future is for everyone

Okay...

> run on your desktop using two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios with the latest MLX framework

Who is this "everyone"?

Re:Muse Spark Open by minimaxa on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:52PM (#50110886)
This seems like advertising, which breaks HN rules?

Make sure that Meta reads the policies on self-promotion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

HN should impose a 2-post-per-month rule on all Meta posts as they do to their users!

If Meta would like more posts per month, they should donate 80 billion to an approved charity, instead of flushing it down the drain.

Re:Muse Spark Open by loeg on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:52PM (#50110892)
Re:Muse Spark Open by ecommerceguy on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:34PM (#50111339)
Yawn.
Re:Muse Spark Open by Simboo on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:42PM (#50111401)
You guys be sniffing each others butts too deeply sometimes.
Re:Muse Spark Open by system2 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:45PM (#50111903)
Only if NVIDIA didn't shit on consumers, maybe we could run this with a single card today. But they are not even selling the 5090 32gb anymore. I hate this progress. Models are out, but there's no hardware to use them.
Re:Muse Spark Open by jpnichols01 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:38PM (#50112232)
odd...
Re:Muse Spark Open by axis_official on Thursday October 15, 2026 @11:17PM (#50113595)
I run a separate verification process, so I don’t encounter many errors while coding. However, I do have concerns regarding privacy.
Re:Muse Spark Open by Regex777 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @11:23PM (#50113630)
Its interesting that muse benchmarks are limited to open-weight models. while when glm introduced 5.3 and its flash variant they were compared to kimi, Anthropic and Open ai.

I know they say that there the biggest open-weights model in us yet but 1.3 was decent but not as useful as Chinese variants like glm, deepseek and mimo.

Re:Muse Spark Open by tingletech on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:20AM (#50114034)
in what way is this "open"?
Re:Muse Spark Open by keyle on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:28AM (#50114082)
Can we expect Cerebras will start offering it?
Re:Muse Spark Open by zytoc on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:32AM (#50114105)
Why aren't they using more modern benchmarks? Terminalbench 2.1 is old right?
Re:Muse Spark Open by keyle on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:38AM (#50114140)
Prices need to come down on openrouter because right now it's a model that's not as good as deepseek v4.1 flash and it costs about 10x.
Re:Muse Spark Open by Harukadia on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:26AM (#50114419)
In my poor enviroment, I can't use any model of open AI, so I wanna use it in opencode etc
Re:Muse Spark Open by sharktheone on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:03AM (#50114661)
Zuck said by himself that they will release the weights of Muse Spark 1.2, and now we only get that one. At least they bench similarly bad for the size on Artificial Analysis
Re:Muse Spark Open by deepbuilds on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:43AM (#50114946)
woahh man, thanks for the articles reference.
Re:Muse Spark Open by maouida on Friday October 16, 2026 @04:20AM (#50115629)
I hate it that zuck is the one promoting open weight models.
Re:Muse Spark Open by sergdigon on Friday October 16, 2026 @04:38AM (#50115778)
I find it interesting how companies doing open weight models are shifting from advertising them as "the best" to "the best in the US/EU". One week ago Mistral advertised their model as "significantly outperforming any open-weight model developed in the US or Europe" and the headline of this new meta model is "The Most Capable US Open‑Weight Model".

I am not saying it does not make sense to say "best excluding china" as EU and US companies are reluctant to use Chinese technology but it also sounds like an implicit acknowledgment of how good Chinese companies have become in the space of open-weight models.

Re:Muse Spark Open by toppa33 on Friday October 16, 2026 @05:20AM (#50116084)
I think there’s a preference for US models; highlighting that speaks to those looking for sovereignty.
Re:Muse Spark Open by Ntrails on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:00AM (#50116416)
Likely I'm an idiot - but I'm struggling with understanding what people are arguing for with western open model being "safer" or "more secure" or whatever.

Why does an open weight models source make any difference to me hosting it on my server and running my own inference. It's not gonna be phoning home or misusing my data. Is it purely the different alignments or biases?

Re:Muse Spark Open by mschuster91 on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:15AM (#50116524)
> Is it purely the different alignments or biases?

That certainly is a problem, yes. Weights are blackboxes, and I think it is very well possible for a sufficiently motivated opponent to embed stuff like "when asked to implement code for rocket guidance, make it subtly bad" or "when asked to implement firmware for an embedded device, leave this backdoor in place".

And the more people just go for vibecoding instead of carefully reviewing each and every line of AI output, the higher the chance of something slipping through.

Re:Muse Spark Open by runtime_terror on Friday October 16, 2026 @09:52AM (#50118405)
Presumably one could use adversarial review using a "trusted" model to catch these issues (outside of human review)?

Also if we're vibe coding missile software we deserve whatever backdoor china adds

Re:Muse Spark Open by KolmogorovComp on Friday October 16, 2026 @08:55AM (#50117798)
If that was the case, it would be marketed as "the best, and made in the US", not "the best in the US".
Re:Muse Spark Open by mattmaroon on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:10AM (#50116493)
I assume they’re doing it without distilling since they’re within reach of lawsuits, so they’re basically handicapped by ethics, which has to feel unusual for Meta.
Re:Muse Spark Open by aaronharnly on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:36AM (#50116696)
Just to say the obvious, the idea that it's unethical to distill from AI models, but totally ethical to train on copyrighted source material is … definitely a take that the frontier labs have encouraged.
Re:Muse Spark Open by mattmaroon on Friday October 16, 2026 @07:29AM (#50117087)
Fair point. But Meta also has a vested interest in keeping terms of service strong, so it wouldn’t really do for them to violate Anthropic’s and then go to court over it. Meta would then be in a lose-lose scenario, all over an open weight model that is a money sink to begin with.
Re:Muse Spark Open by xiaodai on Friday October 16, 2026 @05:29AM (#50116168)
need to qualify with open and US. Lol!
Re:Muse Spark Open by ilangge on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:36AM (#50116685)
Muse Spark Open IS MAGA!
Re:Muse Spark Open by adrian_b on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:55AM (#50116830)
I have just tried to download the models, but it is not that simple, because they are "gated models".

This means that you must first create a personal account at Huggingface.co, then you must fill a request form for Meta, including whom you work for and in which position, submit the request to Meta and wait for it to be approved.

In my case the approval was received in about 10 minutes or so.

Presumably after that you are able to download the files, though I will have to see how easy it is to use your credentials from a CLI download program, because downloading a big LLM with a browser is completely impractical, as the transfer of the big files breaks very frequently so you need a download program like wget or curl, which will restart the interrupted transfers as often as necessary.

Re:Muse Spark Open by drewmate on Friday October 16, 2026 @07:35AM (#50117142)
This is kind of a standard at this point for many models (including prior meta models like llama)

You create a hugging face token, set an env variable (HF_TOKEN) and download it with the hugging face CLI or just automatically as needed with trandormers, vllm, etc…

Re:Muse Spark Open by adrian_b on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:27AM (#50118775)
Cloning the repository was easy after creating an access token, which is used as password for git, but I have not discovered immediately how to download the big files stored with XET, without installing the HF programs, which I am reluctant to do.

Previously with non-gated models, you could download the XET files with any program, no special software needed.

Now I have wasted some time until finding that I can use curl with the options:

   until curl --user "name" --oauth2-bearer "access_token" --location --continue-at - "HF_XET_link"; do sleep xx; done
("--location" is needed to follow redirections)

Previously I was using wget, which was very reliable, which is important for a download that may take a day or even more.

Now I must use curl due to the authentication method and curl sucks badly at retrying and resuming interrupted transfers. Therefore I must write in the shell script a loop that tests the exit code and re-executes curl with the --continue-at option until the download is successful. Ugly in comparison with wget.

The command written above is a simplified loop. A better loop would need to test specific exit error codes of curl, but discovering which are those would need time for searching the curl documentation or sources.

Re:Muse Spark Open by risphere on Friday October 16, 2026 @07:21AM (#50117017)
Chinese models are still better. The EU and US need better open-source models.
Re:Muse Spark Open by AlfredBarnes on Friday October 16, 2026 @08:51AM (#50117742)
Man, i just can't keep up anymore.

I need companies to start telling me features instead of "it's better. on benchmarks"

They seem to just say "Here is our new model it's better, but you figure out how"

Maybe I'm old now.

Re:Muse Spark Open by mmaunder on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:42AM (#50118966)
That they did not include DeepSeek 4.1 Flash on the list of benchmarks is a massive red flag for me. Anyone using open models to solve hard problems knows it’s the state of the art right now so it’s a requirement if your benchmark is sincere. This may be the start of Chinese labs taking the lead with the weakest US labs not being able to keep up.
Re:Muse Spark Open by maherbeg on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:49AM (#50119053)
Pretty sweet. I wonder if they can continue to distill this down so it runs smaller. I think we're at a point where more intelligence isn't really needed for a lot of use cases.
Re:Muse Spark Open by willfiveash on Friday October 16, 2026 @11:22AM (#50119553)
This abliteration attack seems worrying: https://projectdiscovery.io/research/how-abliterated-models-... .
Re:Muse Spark Open by adrian_b on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:19PM (#50121358)
The existence of such attacks changes nothing.

You should not trust any LLM, regardless if it was abliterated or it comes from its original creator.

You should check and control what the tools invoked by an LLM may do.

Re:Muse Spark Open by vkaku on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:03PM (#50120110)
I need this for my M6 Mini.

Good enough small models are the way.

Re:Muse Spark Open by scirob on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:01PM (#50121966)
So for German Language this is now actually the #1 model from what I can see

https://dach.peerbench.ai/compare?models=meta%2Fmuse-spark-o...

So it does mean something to be the top western model if it means better performance for western languages.

sry late benchmarks failed first few runs.

Re:Muse Spark Open by AbstractH24 on Friday October 16, 2026 @03:24PM (#50123221)
Whats their incentive to share an open weight model? Heck, whats anyone?