I Used to Hate Meta: Muse Wonder Changed My Mind

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

I don't know how he did it, but Mark Zuckerberg and Meta might have just pulled off the biggest comeback in AI ever. They just released their new model called Muse Wander. It's basically the largest AI model that they've ever released, and it competes directly with Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra, and Fable 5.1 from Anthropic. Basically the most powerful AI models that exist today. And this is crazy because 18 months ago, Meta's models would come in last place pretty much every single time for video generation, image generation, general LLM context. It just sucked overall. They also torched billions of dollars on fire, spent $25 billion to hire one 29-year-old individual to head up their new Meta Super Intelligence Labs. And it just seemed like Zuck had kind of lost the plot. But with this new model, code-named Watermelon, now officially called Wanda, they have a real competitor to compete against Anthropic and OpenAI. You see the AI race up until yesterday was pretty much a two-horse one, and now there's a third major player in the works. And the last thing I'll say is Meta's entire AI strategy seems to be very different from that of Anthropic and OpenAI. They seem to be focusing just on personal agents, and I think that's a much larger advantage than I actually gave it credit for. And this is coming from a former hater of Meta products now, actually someone who enjoys using them. So I'm going to get into all of this and more, the brand new models on today's episode of In the Loop, brought to you by Qualcomm.

Okay, so let's start with the model itself. Meta actually released two models, but it's both called Muse Wanda. But there's two varying degrees of effort across both of these models. So the standard one is called Muse Wanda. And this is basically their Claude Opus 5.5 competitor. And it actually comes in at exactly the same price. It's $4 per million tokens input in $10 per million tokens output. So it's very clear that they're trying to compete with the Opus 5.5. And it's actually quite good. But before you get into the benchmarks, the second model is their max model, their Fable 5.1 model, their bigger competitor, which is actually kind of behind closed doors right now. But you can access it if you get a $50 subscription. But the idea here is can Meta's second model compete directly with Fable 5.1? Well, the answer is a bit of a mixed bag. If you look at this tweet from Aaron Levy, he kind of shows the progression of Meta models over the last year and a half or so. When they started, Meta's models weren't very performative. We're looking at the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, which is basically the best way to assess the general intelligence of a model. Think of it as like the ultimate human exam. But for AI models, they're tested through a mixture of maths, reasoning, coding, literature, creative writing, basically the stuff that humans are tested on when kids growing up through high school, college, blah, blah, blah, but for AI models. Now, back in the day, they used to score pretty low scores. You're seeing on the right hand side of the screen around 31 to 34 Now, the massive leap over a year and a half, leapfrogging, often some very prominent names and models, have now put them in second place, just within striking distance of the flagship model from Anthropic, Claude Opus 5.5. When we look at the benchmarks, at least from the numbers that Meta's showing us, this model seems to be quite good. It's really good on personal superintelligence index, pretty good at long-term coding, especially for agents, because this is a model designed for AI agents specifically. It's really good at automation, general work, but it's also really good at legal stuff. I was looking at this Harvey Lab AA, which basically tests the model's capability to replacing or automating a bunch of lawyering work. And it scored more than double the second place, which is Claude Fable 5.1 Max. It scored 13.1. And I'm mentioning this because Zuck specifically said that the models that Meta is putting out, MuseWonder, MuseWonder Full, which is their max version. The entire focus around these models is that they actually are useful to you. And I mean that specifically, just you. It's not meant to be this kind of generally widely available LLM that is weirdly applicable to anyone and everyone. It's trying to optimize for the types of work that the majority of the people face. Now, that's not to say that anyone and everyone in this particular example is a lawyer, but anyone and everyone typically gets involved with some kind of lawyer or contracting or review thing, whether you're signing a new employee contract to join a new company, or if you're dealing with a contract with an insurance company or whatever that might be. And this is just one snippet of what's going on inside Zuck's mind and Meta's entire AI strategy. Something that's also net new for them is DeepSui 1.1 and coding in general. This model is a major leap up from its predecessor. Now, is it as good at coding as Claude Code, Fable 5.1, as GPT-6 Astra Codecs? Would you or should you drop your subscriptions there and start using Meta?