Meta’s closed AI model has missed repeated developer launches, raising awkward questions about its costly superintelligence circus.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta Platforms has delayed the release of its newest AI model to developers several times. As of Tuesday, the company still had no planned release date, nearly two months after its AI chief told developers it was coming “soon”.
The delay raises questions about how fast Meta can turn its monster AI spending into cash rather than another Zuckerberg shrine to compute. Meta has been building an application programming interface, or API, so other apps can use its AI technology.
A Meta spokesman told WSJ that the company was testing the API with partners and planned to release it this month.
“We know people want the API and we’re excited to get it into their hands,” the spokesman said.
For closed AI models, which are not publicly available for download, developers usually need an API to get anywhere near them. OpenAI and Anthropic make money partly by selling API access to customers that want AI inside their own tools without building models themselves.
Meta Platforms chief AI officer Alexandr Wang had expected the API to arrive around the April launch of Muse Spark, some people said.
“The muse spark API will be coming soon! we have been thrilled with the amount of excitement amongst developers who want to try muse spark inside their agentic harnesses,” he wrote. “Stay tuned!”
The first delay, from April to May, was blamed on bugs discovered during testing and the need for more infrastructure. It was then delayed again to June, one of the people said, leaving Meta’s developer pitch looking a bit wobbly.
Meta plans as much as $145bn in capital expenditure this year, mostly to build out its AI infrastructure dreams. The company wants personal and business agents for its 3.5 billion daily active users.
In April, the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street baulked at Meta’s bigger spending plans and sent the stock down more than five per cent after hours. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has started spelling out how the company might claw some money back from its AI bill.
Zuckerberg said a cloud computing business was “definitely on the table” as a way to monetise any spare capacity Meta builds. The company has announced new subscriptions for Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, and said it would test subscriptions for its Meta AI chatbot.
Zuckerberg said companies ask Meta every week about creating an API service, but gave no launch date for the Muse Spark API. Meta delayed an AI model last year after engineers struggled to improve its capabilities, and that Behemoth model was never released.
After that mess, Meta went on a hiring spree, overhauled its AI teams and put Wang in charge of Meta Superintelligence Labs.A secretive MSL unit called TBD Lab built the model that became Muse Spark.
Earlier Meta AI models were open source, but Muse Spark is the first released without the blueprint and software files behind it. Meta’s internal benchmarks claim the model is competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, and beats xAI’s Grok on most tests.
Developers have mostly been unable to test that for themselves, beyond a few third-party evaluation firms given early access before launch.
