Meta Muse Wonderful? Or Just Benchmark Hype.

Brian Maucere (0:00)

Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to The Daily AI Show. Today is October 13th, 2026 And this is The Daily AI Show. We're live every weekday, Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. Eastern. With me today to start it off is Andy and I'm Brian. I think we'll maybe have Anne and we'll see what else pops in the door as well. Hey, Jeff, who's already in the comments, appreciate you being there. And while they were as well, if you guys want to join us in the comments live that is in YouTube, that's the best way to do it is go to YouTube and just join the live stream from there.

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Yeah, let's get into it. I know there's been some news from Meta and otherwise. So who would like to kick things off today?

Andy Halliday (1:04)

Well, speaking of Meta, let's just take a look at this, which is the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. And you see this hatched blue bar here next to Sonnet 5.5 Max and Opus 5.5 Max is Muse Wonder. And it's ahead of Fable, it's ahead of GPT-6 Astra, and Gemini 4i by a solid three points, matches Sonnet 5.5 Max. And so I think there's no doubt that we have to accept that Meta has become one of the Frontier Labs.

I mean, that investment that Zuckerberg made has paid off.

Brian Maucere (1:52)

Possibly. Yeah. I mean, so for all of this, you know, I'm just going to quote what one of the newsletters that we, I think a few of us read are Ben's Bites. And he went ahead and downloaded it.

And he said, so I signed up for yet another AI subscription to test it out. I tried Wonder, Medium, and Wonder Full, High. Medium was more verbose than Full. And they both felt slow as well as churning out awful UI. I didn't test them on proper coding tests. I probably won't reach for these models again unless I'm just testing. So for all the, that's just one person's opinion. But I do trust Ben because, you know, like a lot of us, he's out there testing and poking around.

Andy Halliday (2:36)

It highlights that, you know, performing really high on these reasoning intelligence benchmarks does not capture the full quality set of what a model can do. So, you know, I think what's becoming really obvious is that Claude has stayed at the top of the charts in both measures, right? It's really appreciated in terms of its capabilities and its harness, its architecture as for users, whether deep development users or sort of more surface level users like myself.

All of that just continues to be why I find a low probability that I'll go through the switching costs, the barrier cost to go and, you know, like, should I go try Muse Wonder? And I just don't have time. I'm sorry. Until something really blows everything else away, I'm not going to bother.

Brian Maucere (3:34)

Well, I was just going to say it's what I feel like for Muse, right? It's basically they're saying this would be the, I don't know which one, Wonder or Wonderful, which will be the default model behind Muse. To me, that's the actual value here.

Karl Yeh (3:50)

That's the question, yeah.

Brian Maucere (3:51)

Yeah, great if people are using it for other reasons. More importantly, they've got such a home run so far with Muse as a personal agent that any model that improves that and just makes people feel like they're getting better answers or whatever. To me, that's where I would want to be if I was an investor in Meta, is making sure that Muse continues to inch towards being profitable. Right now, they're spending a lot of money on it, but I think that's where, once they figure out what that model is, I don't think it'll be ads, I think it'll be through taking small percentages of people's charges and fees and stuff like that. So anyway, sorry, Beth, you're going to say.

Beth Lyons (4:33)

So what I'm seeing and as Jeff is also saying as well, it's wonderful, it's the full version that people are really saying like, hey, this is really good. Full is of course, the more expensive one. I am not sure that they're going to use that for Muse as a long-term strategy, perhaps another bump in like, oh my God, this is amazing.