Tech giant Meta debuted its new Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full Premium AI models on Monday, continuing a push toward what CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently called the “AI frontier,” where the heavy hitters have dominated the artificial intelligence space.
The models build on the Muse Spark AI model launched earlier this year. Meta calls the new paid tiers its “most capable models yet,” reporting that the models can perform personal and professional agent tasks, ranging from handling insurance claims to helping tenants understand a lease agreement to building fully functioning apps.
Stop playing
Meta says its new models, the fruits of billions of dollars invested in the past year, leapfrog the competition. But it’s playing with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google in the AI race.
“Meta is making up for lost time with a lot of new AI tools,” Katelyn Chedraoui, CNET’s expert reporter on artificial intelligence, told me. “But this new frontier model comes amid serious security concerns in the AI industry. Security measures will be essential for any new launch.”
Many researchers and experts advocate for external evaluation and regulation of the technology, with some AI executives, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, making high-profile calls to slow down AI development. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg has been vocal in his belief that labs can and should self-police to avoid the worst effects of AI.
“I’m much closer to the belief that AI is a technology that can be constructed with normal safeguards and built responsibly than the anthropomorphic vision of AI, which is that it will just do its own thing,” Zuckerberg told the Financial Times in an interview this week.
Muse Wonder and Wonder Full
Muse Wonder is the “state-of-the-art” premium-tier AI model from Meta. It is first available to coders who pay for access to the Meta Model API, via the Power Plan at $20 per month or the Maximum Plan at $100 per month. However, Meta’s announcement says it will “soon experience and muse” with more flexible per-million-token pricing.
Meta says Muse Wonder builds on the core capabilities of its Muse Spark AI model with more advanced features, greater processing power and improved capability in law, finance and healthcare applications. Meta gives the example of Muse analyzing a lease agreement or handling an insurance claim. (To be clear, don’t rely on AI for healthcare or mental health.) Muse Wonder’s new “boundary coding performance” also allows the agent to help build games and apps.
Muse Wonder introduces two new features: Active Memory and Active Focus.
The first, Active Memory, allows the model to remember and carry information about conversations. Storing potentially sensitive data immediately puts my privacy-conscious Spidey sense on edge. That said, Meta says it trained its Muse Wonder model to share private information without permission and hardened it against cyber attacks. The company even says that “developers and security teams can use models like Muse Wonder to find flaws in their own code and strengthen their systems,” which – I have to be honest – sounds like peak tech hubris to me.
The second new feature, Active Focus, keeps the AI agent working when it runs into technical dead ends. With Active Focus, Muse Wonder is said to be able to take alternative approaches, recover from mistakes and ask the user for clarification. That should allow the model to handle more complex tasks like Spark and encounter fewer roadblocks that we first saw in our test.
But boasting that your AI model can more effectively bypass what blocks are in place (perhaps for some reason) sounds incredibly familiar. Recently, Anthropic withdrew access to its AI models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, after the US government imposed major restrictions on who could use them.
Muse Wonder Full is said to be an even more powerful version of the Premium Wonder model with all the same new features, but with a shift in focus towards businesses and power users. Basically, Wonder Full unlocks more flexible reasoning, a tweaked base model and access to more behind-the-scenes processing power, making it a better fit for unfamiliar tasks, engineering and professional workflows.
With no public API, Muse Wonder Full is available exclusively to developers who sign up for the paid Muse Code AI Agent and is bundled into a monthly subscription priced from $50 to $200.
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