Why Muse Wonder Is Dividing AI Users

Nathaniel Whittemore (0:00)

It appears we officially have a new player in the Frontier AI race. Earlier this week, Meta has just announced a new series of models that it calls Wonder. And unlike the Spark models it released over the last several months, Wonder is meant to compete head-on with, as Meta Chief AI Officer Alexander Wang put it, the big boys. But can it hang? Today we're going to look at Wonder and its bigger sibling, Wonder Full, and ask what it means that Meta is now firmly back in the Frontier AI race. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

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We kick off today with the latest company to put some emphasis on speed. This is something we've seen increasingly throughout the last couple of months. Obviously, it's something that Google has emphasized with their Flash models, but more recently, OpenAI has also been pushing their Ultra Fast mode, and Anthropic has now figured out how to serve Opus 5.5 at a blistering pace with a new addition to Fast mode. They seem to have stepped up the pace for this one, now serving Opus at a verified 285 tokens per second at max. OpenAI hasn't published a speed test for GPT-61 Sol on their Fast mode, but their docs suggest a theoretical maximum of 280 tokens per second. What's more, OpenAI is charging 50% more for the premium speed, and while people debate which is better, realistically, both are very expensive versions of the product with fairly niche applications. For Anthropic's version, usage isn't included in regular subscriptions, as some found out the hard way this weekend. Still, for those looking to burn through a ton of tokens quickly on a budget, Chubby noted that Anthropic can serve 50% more tokens per dollar.

I think that right now these fast and ultra-fast modes are a little bit of a novelty to most people, but as they become more common and de rigueur, big shifts in the latency of models will change how we interact with them in ways that I don't think they will quite know until we get there. How important this ultimately is as a vector of AI competition we will see, but it's certainly something that all the labs are exploring at the moment. Now, speaking of Anthropic, new Anthropic models have been spotted in testing.

Users have reported queries being routed to a new model instead of Opus 5.5 with very impressive results.

People were showing off code-based animations that were introduced with Opus 5.5, but then seemingly pushed to this new model. Others reported seeing Fable prompts routed to a new model as well, opening the possibility of a double-headed release. Chubby on X wrote, A release should be near. Since Anthropic's IPO is also pretty close, they want their new model to be released a few weeks ahead, so the market can really count that into the valuation. Long story short, Fable 5.5 should arrive soon, and it looks to be a much bigger leap than we even expected. In addition to the competitive dynamics, this release could also be a big test of what the major labs are comfortable releasing moving forward. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have restricted testing of their most advanced internal models and could commit to pacing the frontier by focusing on mid-size model releases like Opus and Sol, or we could see another round of acceleration as new larger frontier models are unleashed.

As to what AI insiders expect from this, Google's Patrick Toomey wrote, I was at an AI dinner last night in New York City. Some interesting topics discussed. One of those topics was, as he put it, consensus was Fable 5.5 will be stunning, but OpenAI will beat it in December with Bell. If you thought, in other words, about slowing down for the holidays, think again, my friends.

Speaking of OpenAI, the company is reportedly exploring a Sora revival as part of a partnership. Oh, so long ago, the TikTok style video generation app enjoyed a brief moment in the sun. In late 2025, Sora grabbed the number one spot on the App Store chart, displacing ChatGPT. For about five minutes, Sora memes became the hot trend. However, by the beginning of this year, when faced with difficult choices around where to deploy compute, enterprise use cases like coding went out and Sora was mothballed. The shutdown in April was OpenAI's best example of its mandate to end what it called side quests. Now, however, a comeback could be in the works. The information reports that OpenAI is in talks with an unnamed startup to license the Sora model and relaunch services around it. The stealth startup was reportedly founded in recent months by Bill Peebles, the former OpenAI researcher who led the Sora project, and co-founders include former Disney chairman and Hollywood legend Jeffrey Katzenberg, as well as former Dropbox CFO Sujay Jaswa. Sources said the deal is still coming together and it's unclear whether the startup would get full access to Sora's weights, but they would have enough access to heavily customize the model. So for those who miss those crazy cat memes, you might be back in business soon.