Meta released a new version of its Muse Spark LLM on Thursday. As its name indicates, the big news about Muse Spark Open is that it’s an open-weight model. Rather than being offered solely as a cloud service, it’s publicly available for anyone to run on their own hardware. With 816 billion total parameters and a 1-million-token context window, it’s the U.S.’s most capable open-weight model, according to Meta.

As I wrote in a recent feature, Meta’s AI story dates all the way back to the founding of its original AI lab in 2013. One of this long journey’s high points happened in 2023-2024, when its open-weight Llama model was embraced by companies that wanted to control their own AI rather than rent it from a company such as OpenAI or Anthropic. But that momentum evaporated last year when Llama 4 was widely regarded to be a dud.

That set off a chain of events inside Meta. Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang joined the company to head a new research organization, Meta Superintelligence Labs. Llama gave way to a new family of models, starting with Muse Spark. But they were closed cloud services, not open-weight.

With Muse Spark Open’s arrival, Meta has a shot at rekindling the excitement over Llama. By running open-weight models on their own infrastructure, companies can avoid uploading confidential data—from medical records to unreleased movie footage—to third-party services. They can tweak the model for specific purposes. And since they own the hardware, they can gorge on tokens without racking up any fees.

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