Meta replaces Llama 4 with new Muse Spark models powering Meta AI

Meta upgraded Meta AI to be powered by Muse Spark, a new series of models shipped this year to replace the older Llama 4, which had been outperformed by rival models. In the process, Meta laid off much of its Llama team and spent billions hiring top AI talent — a sharp organizational pivot that signals a break from the strategy that made Meta the standard-bearer for open-weight frontier models. The company framed the launch around 'personal superintelligence,' with a personal AI agent, Muse, positioned as the consumer front end. Threads apps also arrived on Quest and Meta Ray-Ban Display.

The strategic reversal is the story. Meta built enormous goodwill by open-sourcing Llama, and its move to a new, less-open Muse Spark line has developers questioning that commitment — a debate amplified by the r/singularity narrative that labs are 'colluding to kill open source' (1,513 upvotes). Llama 4 Maverick and Scout remain available as open-weight releases under the Llama 4 Community license, but the flagship consumer experience now runs on Muse Spark, not Llama.

Competitively, the shift acknowledges that Llama 4 fell behind DeepSeek, GPT, and Claude, and that Meta is willing to spend heavily — on talent and closed models — to catch up. It also lands the same week Meta faced a child-profiling privacy scandal with its chatbot, compounding scrutiny of its consumer-AI ambitions.

What to watch: whether Meta continues open-weight releases at all beyond Llama 4, how Muse Spark actually benchmarks against DeepSeek V4.1-Flash and GPT-6 Astra, and whether the talent spending yields a competitive flagship.