Last Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg posted on X for the first time in three years. That alone should tell you something. The occasion was the launch of Muse Spark 1.1, the second model out of Meta Superintelligence Labs and the first Meta model ever to ship with a price tag. It arrived with a public API, aggressive pricing at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and closed weights. Read that last part again. The company that spent three years evangelizing open weights as the moral and strategic high ground of AI just shipped a proprietary frontier model behind a paid API, and the CEO came back from a three-year social media exile to announce it. Spark 1.1 did not arrive alone. Two days earlier Meta shipped Muse Image, its first image generation model from the new lab. A week before that, reports surfaced that Meta is building a cloud business, internally called Meta Compute, to sell surplus AI infrastructure to outside...
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