Meta enters the crowded AI coding battle with Muse Spark 1.1 | TechCrunch

Meta publicly launched a new version of Muse Spark on Thursday, a multimodal AI model designed for agentic coding that aims to compete with similar products offered by OpenAI and Anthropic.Spark 1.1, the first version of which was announced in April, can engage in multistep reasoning and handle complex processes, manage digital workflows, and deploy new features in enterprise systems, the company says.Meta is a bit behind its competitors here; Anthropic and OpenAI have offered similar models for quite some time. But that doesn’t mean Meta’s entry into the market isn’t a threat.An ongoing source of competitiveness within the AI industry remains the cost of usage, and Meta appears to be offering a competitive rate. Reuters reports that the company will charge $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens. That puts it in line with (albeit slightly above) Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna.Meta’s pitch to users is Spark’s ability to handle large agentic workloads, fix bugs, and help with large code migrations — the kind of automation that enterprises are increasingly turning to AI companies to provide. “Muse Spark 1.1 delivers exceptional performance in personal agentic tasks that require planning and orchestration across a range of external apps and services,” the company wrote in a blog post.Meta has released a handful of foundation AI models over the past few years. The Muse Spark release was apparently important enough to compel CEO Mark Zuckerberg to post on X for the first time in three years. Zuckerberg’s last post was in July 2023, around the time the platform rebranded from Twitter to X.In his post, Zuckerberg called Spark “a strong agentic and coding model at a very low price,” noting that the model was “strongest at agentic performance, tool use, and computer use.” Zuckerberg also noted that there was “more to come soon” — implying that the company plans to release additional models.It’s been a big week for AI announcements — particularly for Meta, which also unveiled a new AI image-generation model on Tuesday, dubbed Muse Image. Other releases this week have included a new version of Grok from SpaceXAI and a new family of models from OpenAI, GPT-5.6, that also dropped Thursday. Suffice it to say that the competition within the AI industry is as healthy as ever, and companies that wish to stand out from their peers have their work cut out for them.TopicsWhen you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Senior Writer, TechCrunch

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