California: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for lower U.S. barriers for open-source AI models to better compete with Chinese rivals as the social media giant released a new open-weight model on Monday and said it plans to launch more such models soon.
The new model, Muse Glimmer, is much smaller than leading AI models from rivals and is instead designed for agentic tasks and can run on a Mac or PC with a single graphics card, aiming to tap demand for AI systems that run directly on people's devices.
"In the coming weeks, we are also going to open the weights for MuseSpark 1.2, our latest foundation model and one of the leading models in the world. And we've got even bigger models that are coming soon too," Zuckerberg said in a video post accompanying his 14-page essay titled "The Future is for Everyone" in which he championed spreading AI rather than leaving it in the hands of a few.
Zuckerberg's statement marks the latest show of support for open-weight AI, which is gaining traction as businesses grow wary of ballooning AI bills and worry about recent cybersecurity incidents involving models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta.
Open-weight models are typically cheaper than leading models from so-called frontier labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic. They also come with publicly accessible core components for easy customization, unlike closed models that companies keep fully under their control.
Meta's launch comes as the social media giant seeks to strengthen its position after forming a costly, new superintelligence team last year to propel itself back into the high-stakes AI race.