Meta shakes up the frontiers, open and closed

Meta's Muse Spark Open narrows the US-China open-model gap by roughly half, but restrictive licensing and valuation mismatches with Anthropic remain open questions.

• Muse Spark Open leads: Meta's new open-weight model (816B total/42B active params, 1M context) scores 39 on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, now the strongest American open model, though still 10th globally behind Chinese models like GLM 5.3, Kimi K3, MiMo V2.6 Pro.
• Gap narrows, doesn't close: Lambert estimates the US-China open-weight gap has shrunk roughly in half, from largely irrelevant to behind but relevant, thanks to Muse Spark Open and Reflection's Beam.

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