April 8 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms on Wednesday unveiled Muse Spark, the first artificial intelligence model from a costly team it assembled last year to catch up with rivals in the AI race.
Shares of the company extended gains to trade up nearly 7%.
U.S. tech giants are under pressure to prove their massive AI outlays will pay off. The stakes are especially high for Meta after it hired Scale AI CEO Alex Wang last year under a $14.3 billion deal and offered some engineers pay packages of hundreds of millions of dollars to staff a new superintelligence team.
Superintelligence refers to AI machines that could outthink humans. Muse Spark is the first in a new series of models from that team, and is part of a family of models known internally as Avocado.
The model will initially be available only on the lightly used Meta AI app and website, and in the coming weeks, replace the existing Llama models powering chatbots on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Meta's collection of smart glasses.
"This initial model is small and fast by design, yet capable enough to reason through complex questions in science, math, and health. It is a powerful foundation, and the next generation is already in development," the company said in a blog post.
It did not disclose the model's size, a key measure typically used to compare an AI system's computing power with rivals.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had tempered expectations for performance, telling investors in January that he thought the team's first models "will be good but, more importantly, will show the rapid trajectory that we're on."
"I expect us to steadily push the frontier over the course of the year as we continue to release new models," he had said.
FOCUS ON EVERYDAY TASKS
Muse Spark can help users with tasks such as estimating the calories in a meal from a photo or superimposing an image of a mug on a shelf to see how it looks.
Meta also released Contemplating mode, which runs multiple agents at one time to boost reasoning power. For instance, while planning a family vacation for a user, one agent can draft a travel itinerary and the other can look up kid-friendly activities.
The company is betting that applying AI to everyday personal tasks will help boost engagement with the more than 3.5 billion users across its social media platforms, potentially giving it an edge over rivals with a smaller reach.
(Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru and Katie Paul in New York; Editing by Leroy Leo)
