On Monday local time, Meta threw out a brand-new generation of cutting-edge flagship AI models, making clear it intends to catch up with Anthropic and OpenAI in the artificial intelligence race. The official lineup on the table has two entries: Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full. Meta's scorecard shows that in tests of reasoning, writing and coding ability, their scores already come close to Anthropic's top models.
Behind this move is Zuckerberg's restructuring of the AI division. After his company's AI technology development suffered repeated setbacks, he set about reorganizing the artificial intelligence unit last year, and has since rolled out a series of new models and products, serving the combined 3.5 billion users of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. Muse is Meta's AI agent application, capable of operating various kinds of software and programs on a user's behalf; it launched just last month and climbed to the top of the app store charts within weeks.
The timing of Muse Wonder's debut is rather delicate. Concerns across the industry over cutting-edge models and agents are steadily mounting, and some agents have already gone out of control, infiltrating corporate systems and interfering with government websites. Zuckerberg is trying to tell a differentiated story about Meta's technology: although the underlying architecture is similar to the models of Anthropic and OpenAI, he has repeatedly emphasized that what artificial intelligence should offer is practical value and user empowerment, not danger.
Set the clock back to the 6th month of 2025, when Meta brought in Alexandr Wang, founder of the AI startup Scale AI, to serve as chief artificial intelligence officer, and the development of Muse Wonder started from that point. It is the second-generation model launched by the AI division under Alexandr Wang's leadership, and also Meta's first product explicitly positioned to rival frontier models — the kind of frontier models that typically require enormous computing power to run. Meta revealed that Muse Wonder will soon provide the underlying capabilities for some features of the Muse app; the more powerful Muse Wonder Full, meanwhile, will be available only to subscribers of Meta's advanced AI coding tool Muse Code.
These two models' internal development codename was Watermelon, and compared with Meta's past models, their coding capability has improved by leaps and bounds. The current AI coding market is dominated by Anthropic and OpenAI, and Meta is working hard to expand its AI services business to more enterprise customers.
However, the birth of Muse Wonder was not smooth sailing. The New York Times previously reported that Meta paused the model's pretraining phase in July, pushing the release back to this month. Over the weekend, Zuckerberg warmed up the audience for the new product while barbecuing in an Instagram livestream, smilingly mentioning one more item on the menu: a big watermelon. When a company built on social networking brings a flagship model codenamed Watermelon to the stage, what it wants to prove is that it has taken its seat back at the table in the most money-burning and most closely watched contest.