llm -m meta-ai/muse-spark-1.3 "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle"

4.2266 cents, 38 seconds.

For comparison here's Muse Spark 1.2, which animated it without me asking it to: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

The 1.3 one is definitely better - better bicycle frame, better wing, better pelican hat.

UPDATE: Here's another one with five pelicans for each of the five Muse Spark 1.3 reasoning levels: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

The most expensive was reasoning level xhigh - 7.5 cents, 1m34s.

And I ran five pelicans at all reasoning levels for 1.2 as well, here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

• wewewedxfgdf

  yesterday at 10:50 PM

  I was interviewed for a job as a software developer last week and they asked me to draw a picture of a pelican riding a bicycle.

  Aced it, got the job as a senior software engineer.

  The interviewers afterwards said "it is SO refreshing to find a software developer who actually knows how to code - never seen such a high performance focused, well built pelican on a bike - you have the skills we need".

  • labrador

    today at 1:05 AM

    I interviewed as a software developer at LinkedIn. The interviewer asked me to demonstrate my prompting skills, so I had AI write an article about what the recent death of my father taught me about B2B SaaS. Reading it brought tears to his eyes so he hired me on the spot.

    • latentsea

      today at 1:47 AM

      I interviewed as a software developer at Meta. They asked me to do a add legs to the player in a VR world. I couldn't do it. They hired me anyway.

      • keeda

        today at 4:21 AM

        Have you considered that's WHY they hired you?

    • hunterpayne

      today at 1:27 AM

      "software developer"...you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

    • rattray

      today at 1:34 AM

      Is this for real

      • bensyverson

        today at 1:43 AM

        It’s better than for real, it’s for LinkedIn

    • nycdatasci

      today at 1:38 AM

      Sorry for your loss.

      • smashah

        today at 1:43 AM

        499 connections :(

  • fuddle

    yesterday at 11:08 PM

    I also aced my interview by focussing on pelicancode problems, instead of leetcode problems.

    • yesterday at 11:11 PM

  • UltraSane

    today at 1:06 AM

    If you could actually hand write SVG code on the spot that looked like a realistic pelican riding a bike I would want to hire you for SOMETHING.

    • treebeard901

      today at 3:38 AM

      Or placed in an asylum next to the people who designed XML

    • pmontra

      today at 5:06 AM

      We were hand writing PostScript code that drew pelicans at job interviews in the 90s, then they sent it to a printer a stored the page in a file drawer /s

  • sroussey

    today at 12:37 AM

    You should post your source code you wrote here… ;)

  • salutis

    today at 2:24 AM

    "I was interviewed for a job as a software developer last week and they asked me to draw a picture of a pelican riding a bicycle. Aced it, got the job as a senior software engineer."

    That is the best joke I have heard this year. Ready for a stand-up comedy special. Or a song. Superb!

• drusepth

  yesterday at 7:45 PM

  Is there a reason these pelicans always have roughly the same composition (side-view, 2d, biking right, flat ground beneath, etc)? I don't see any of that detailed in the prompt, yet they all seem to generate roughly the same image of differing quality.

  • vunderba

    yesterday at 7:50 PM

    The more generic your prompt, the more generic the response. It's a regression to the "mean" of the training data aka GIGO for AI.

    It's like when you ask your average person off the street to draw a house - it'll almost always be square with a triangle roof, one door, and two windows.

    In the pelican/bike example, it's probably a bit of a self-perpetuating snowball too. If the earliest examples were bike left-to-right, flat ground, etc. then they are also being scraped up in future LLMs.

    • werdnapk

      yesterday at 11:38 PM

      Well, all the LLMs are being trained on previous pelicans, so they look the same.

    • polyterative

      yesterday at 8:17 PM

      as a kid I did them like this. nobody told me to do that. are we all so similar?

      • srcreigh

        yesterday at 8:40 PM

        The adults brainwashed us

        https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/barndroem-box-beige-70560615/

        https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/vallaby-rug-green-10548216/

      • collabs

        yesterday at 8:40 PM

        I sincerely believe I've never had a single original thought™ in my whole life.

        There is this scene in the HBO series Westworld where a "host" says some words in sequence which is shown on a display as she says it. Of course, even me thinking of this scene and connecting it to your comment was not original, someone else clearly had the same programming as me.

        A medium blog post says

        > Pair what with me?” — the moment Maeve (a humanoid android) uttered those words in Westworld (Season 1, Episode 6: “The Adversary”), something clicked. Not for the average viewer, but for me, a STEM educator and AI enthusiast who, just weeks earlier, had read Stephen Wolfram’s seminal essay, What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?

        • irthomasthomas

          today at 1:13 AM

          Tesla had the same thought. He called himself an automata: "entirely controlled by the forces of the medium" It inspired him to create the first remote control vehicle.

        • ACCount37

          yesterday at 11:19 PM

          Westworld is such a time capsule.

          It's not even that old - but back when it was aired, an AI that can not just string together coherent sentences, but produce coherent reactions in novel, fully unintended contexts, like Maeve was doing there? It was totally a sci-fi premise.

          Now we have AIs capable of that and more, and no one bats an eye.

          • twoodfin

            today at 2:46 AM

            Indeed: “Our hosts began to pass the Turing test within the first year.”

            Required sci-fi suspension-of-disbelief in 2017, and then at some point in the last few years we just blew by that one.

            Later seasons of the show were much less dramatically satisfying, but also played out the consequences of the science of artificial intelligence demonstrating as a side-effect that human intelligence and free will might have as much of an uncertain foundation as that of machines.

            How much data from the Panopticon, how many parameters would it take to train a model that could predict your responses?

            • sly010

              today at 4:33 AM

              I think the turing test is still very much load-bearing — if you know what I mean.

      • Gigachad

        yesterday at 11:08 PM

        It's just the simplest most recognizable form of a house. Like how a smiley face is so generic and simplistic but everyone will know what it represents. Just two dots and a line yet it's easily and unambiguously understood to represent a human face and a happy emotion.

  • BeetleB

    yesterday at 9:46 PM

    Not when rendered via POV-Ray:

    https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-rayt...

    I plan to update it with more pelicans from all the models released since.

    (Spoiler alert: They haven't improved much since then).

    • murkt

      today at 2:39 AM

      Ohh, horizontal wheels. They’re about as good as I expected, models have pretty bad spatial awareness. I would expect Fable to be a bit better than old models, though.

    • xhrpost

      yesterday at 9:59 PM

      Wow, I actually had this exact idea. I was specifically curious as to how well a given LLM could understand a DSL that hasn't changed much in a couple decades and doesn't have nearly as many examples to learn from online. Seems like it did alright, all things considered.

    • fc417fc802

      today at 2:43 AM

      I wonder how a multi-modal model would do with a harness and tool calling? Specifically a "render" command that produced an image output enabling it to iterate. (Well I see you did this manually with gemini 2.5 pro but I still think it would be interesting to explore various harness setups.)

      > GPT-5.1 Codex

      > monstrosity

      What are you talking about? That's clearly a sci-fi pelican on a hoverboard (successor of the humble bicycle) wearing a visor. Truly visionary.

  • simonw

    yesterday at 7:46 PM

    It's really interesting, isn't it? They almost always cycle from left to right - but I have had a few which cycle in the other direction.

    The 2D / flat ground feels reasonable for a SVG, which implies a vector illustration.

    • m12k

      yesterday at 8:35 PM

      It's my impression that it's common in western culture, where text is read left to right, and timelines are visualized as going from left to right, to also animate things going from left to right, since westerners thus have an instinct that "right = forward", so it "feels right" (familiar). I wonder to which degree this is reflected in the training data? And if you'd be more likely to get left-facing pelicans if you prompted it in Hebrew, Arabic or another right-to-left language?

    • johntb86

      yesterday at 8:38 PM

      Someone studied this (among other thigns): https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html . Pelicans on bikes always face right in this test, but other animals on other transportation methods sometimes face left.

    • piker

      yesterday at 8:14 PM

      I was going to ask the exact same question earlier but deleted it after thinking “I’m sure Simon has done some sort of discussion on this.” Since it does seem novel to you, too, it would be really interesting to read more about this phenomenon.

  • postalcoder

    yesterday at 7:53 PM

    Search Google Images for "bicycle". Almost all bicycle product shots are staged the same way: side view, going left-to-right. It makes sense to me that given that skew in the training data, the model grounds itself in the bicycle.

    • daemonologist

      yesterday at 7:58 PM

      and furthermore, this is because the drivetrain is ~always on the right side of the bike - if you want to inspect or admire a bicycle you look at the right side, as you might look under the hood of a car.

      (Why the drivetrain is on the right, I don't know. But most bike parts follow open standards so it's quite entrenched.)

      • labcomputer

        yesterday at 11:07 PM

        I can’t tell you why it’s always on the right, but it’s always on the same side because of network effects.

        Bicycle frames are not fully symmetric left-right because you need things like a mount point for the derailleur hanger, and optionally affordances to keep the chain off the stays when the wheel is removed.

        Those things have to be on the same side as the chain. Bikes designed for disc brakes additionally need a mount point for the brake caliper on the opposite side from the chain.

        Additionally, rear wheels are not symmetric: the spokes on the chain side connect to the hub closer to the plane of the rim. That is, they are more perpendicular to the wheel’s rotational axis than spokes on the opposite side (which is why you should always mount a single pannier on the chain side). This asymmetry is to provide space for the gears.

        So once the industry decided to put the chain on the ride, you can’t very well make a group set designed for a left chain if you want it to work on the vast majority of frames.

      • kibae

        yesterday at 8:35 PM

        Since most languages read from left to right, rightward movement tends to read as forward progression. So when showing a bicycle in side profile, having it face right feels more naturally like it’s moving forward.

      • georgemcbay

        yesterday at 8:31 PM

        > and furthermore, this is because the drivetrain is ~always on the right side of the bike

        While I'm sure this factors into things for advertisements for bike components, there is also just a general preference that westerners have for left-to-right motion. Not just in bike ads, but all ads with (or suggesting) movement. And also not just ads, but movies where directors believe left-to-right motion is associated with progression and right-to-left motion is regressive.

    • threetonesun

      yesterday at 8:34 PM

      Product shots yes, people riding them its more like 50/50. Also if you search for a specific bicycle race you'll find more going right to left.

  • porphyra

    yesterday at 10:11 PM

    The canonical view of a bicycle is facing right. Usually, people want to draw/photograph/depict the side of the bicycle with the running gear, which is on the right side of the frame for historical reasons.

  • __MatrixMan__

    yesterday at 10:49 PM

    The thing that distinguishes pelicans from other birds does so most strongly in profile. If you're looking straight at one, the throat pouch would be hidden by the beak.

    I bet if it instead had something to do with black widow spiders we'd find that we're most often looking at the bottom of the spider's abdomen, regardless of whatever non-spider-like activity is supplied.

  • bodeadly

    today at 3:48 AM

    Yes. It's because you are asking it to generate an image of a pelican riding a bicycle. If someone asked you to draw a pelican riding a bycycle, would you interpret that to mean using 3d photorealism? LLMs follow conventions. The convention for an animal riding a bike is to create a childish 2d line drawing.

  • elfly

    today at 1:46 AM

    well it is svg, it is doing it from circles and lines as primitives, it wants to do it simply and kind of builds the whole thing hierarchically. Making it 3d is way more complicated (as the POV example shows) and the prompt doesn't say 3d anyway

  • yesterday at 8:34 PM

  • SV_BubbleTime

    today at 1:18 AM

    I’m a firm believer in pelicanmaxxing.

    They’re all so close in proportions.

  • optimalsolver

    yesterday at 8:23 PM

    Sun is missing a few rays and not wearing sunglasses.

  • ModernMech

    yesterday at 8:09 PM

    Yes, I do a thing where I ask the machine to generate responses in the form of a lizard talking to a cat. The lizard is always a green gecko and the cat is always orange, which I never specify.

  • reaperducer

    yesterday at 8:42 PM

    Is there a reason these pelicans always have roughly the same composition

    Because they're computers. They don't have an imagination and the ability to create things from whole cloth the way humans do.

    Much like a mother pelican, they regurgitate what they've been fed.

• dhon_

  today at 4:26 AM

  I'm waiting for the models to start responding with "Oh hi Simon!"

• drob518

  yesterday at 8:52 PM

  Simon, at this point I really wonder if teams aren’t gaming this. You should pick a random animal doing a random thing every time.

  • gpt5

    today at 12:39 AM

    We should just consider the pelican bench as saturated and mostly meaningless.

• dwaite

  today at 4:24 AM

  is there a reason there are so many common base decorative elements across pelicans on bicycles? For instance, there's a lot hats/helmets and scarfs/capes across models.

• jonahx

  yesterday at 7:57 PM

  If you have a grading rubric, huge points off for adding arms instead of using the wings as arms!

  • Fergusonb

    yesterday at 8:00 PM

    I think it's hilarious that this detail is enough for me to dismiss looking into the model, but here we are, and it is.

• tintor

  yesterday at 9:14 PM

  Did any LLM so far draw pelican knees correctly and have them bend in opposite direction from human knees? Knees of many animals bend opposite to humans.

  Did any LLM draw the front bicycle wheel correctly? ie. center of front wheel slightly AHEAD of steering wheel axis. This is done for bicycle stability.

  • TiredOfLife

    yesterday at 9:21 PM

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_feet_and_legs#/media/File...

    Bird knees bend same way human ones do

    • gnatolf

      today at 5:04 AM

      It's clear they mean the 'exposed' joint where humans assume the knees, and where one can see the leg bend. Technically you're correct, but it's just that. Please answer in better faith instead of well akshually.

• pavs

  yesterday at 11:25 PM

  FYI, your renderer breaks with error "git api access error 403", rate limiting error from git, when using cloudflare vpn.

  I am guessing its not super common, but it happens just so you know.

• hollowturtle

  yesterday at 9:03 PM

  Is there any point anymore regarding this svg test? I would not be surprised if in the training they're fine tuned for this task too

  • tintor

    yesterday at 9:09 PM

    It would be very embarrassing for any lab to benchmaxx the pelican on bicycle svg prompt, since it would be very easy to detect it by varying the prompt.

    • nojs

      yesterday at 10:51 PM

      The amount of discussion around it means that the test and all the reviews of results, images, approaches etc are implicitly included in training data.

      It’s not deliberate “benchmaxxing” but things that are discussed a lot online are naturally things that LLMs learn better.

      • fc417fc802

        today at 2:47 AM

        You can't benchmaxx spatial awareness without solving the fully general problem (at least I figure).

  • BeetleB

    yesterday at 9:44 PM

    You win this thread's prize:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49538333

  • cheesecakegood

    today at 12:03 AM

    It also works as extremely effective engagement farming, for lack of a better phrase

• jonplackett

  yesterday at 8:22 PM

  Has any ab tried to game this yet and just made the most amazing pelican by hand and always reply with that?

• ipsum2

  yesterday at 9:55 PM

  All of the links show "Error: Gist API returned 403".

• leumon

  yesterday at 10:30 PM

  next, try: "generate an svg of a human hand". this is a prompt where many models fail imo.

• m00dy

  today at 2:14 AM

  I see no point having these pelicans used for anything related model qualification.

  • simonw

    today at 4:41 AM

    At this point the only thing they're useful for is visualizing the differences between effort levels and roughly tracking the progression of models within a specific model family. And they still do that really well!

• andytratt

  today at 12:12 AM

  excellent thread

• tomrod

  yesterday at 7:55 PM

  What does the mean pelican look like at this point?

  Also 3X token use vs. 1.2

  • _puk

    yesterday at 8:34 PM

    Red eyes and a tattoo?

• EugeneOZ

  yesterday at 8:37 PM

  Absolutely BRUTAL! :)

  Thank you for doing this, I love your benchmark the most!

• 0xbadcafebee

  yesterday at 9:29 PM

  For all the comments of "I'm sure they're fine-tuning for pelicans": https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html

    "Sorry, HN haters, but there’s little evidence that AI labs are pelicanmaxxing.
     Or at least they’re not doing it in a plainly obvious manner."

• jmkni

  yesterday at 7:45 PM

  lol

  Definitely an upgrade over 1.2

• NoOneCares44

  yesterday at 8:23 PM

  [flagged]

  • aldanor

    yesterday at 8:26 PM

    Someone did care enough to create a throwaway account to vent here, it seems.

  • tonyhart7

    yesterday at 8:43 PM

    how tf you can have green names with negative karma ???

• jttnr

  yesterday at 8:33 PM

  I wonder, given Simons reputation in AI benchmarking, whether model providers try to train or tweak their models to perform better at drawing bicycles and pelicans?

I started using Spark 1.2 for development because if you're willing to let Meta train on your data it was dirt cheap and was actually really pleasantly surprised with it. It's not a frontier model by any means, but for work that didn't require a top of the line model, I really enjoyed using it.

I'm anthropomorphizing it a bit, but it felt like it knew its weaknesses and didn't try to impose it's opinions on me. What I mean by that is that it did what I told it and if there was something unexpected in the code that it put out it was often because I gave it ambiguous or conflicting instructions. It didn't try to go above and beyond and just acted like a tool, which is what I want from a coding agent 90%+ of the time. I also felt that it did a much better job of following established patterns in my code than many of the other current models do. I'm a huge fan of OpenAI's models and Spark 1.2 is what I expected 5.6 Luna to be.

I'm curious and a little excited to use 1.3, but honestly a little worried that as Meta pushes for better benchmarks that Spark will start to fall into the trap of trying to be "helpful" in ways I don't want it to be.

Tangential, but when I first started using Spark 1.2, it made me realize how much I miss 5.3 Codex. That model was the peak of coding models, IMO, in that it knew how to write good code, but didn't try to overstep or be "helpful" in unexpected ways. That got me thinking about how the major labs seem to be stepping away from coding focused models toward more general purpose ones and how I can't help but feel like that's a mistake.

• monkpit

  today at 4:14 AM

  Would be cool if there was a benchmark to evaluate the “tool-like” quality of a model - its capability to quickly, cheaply, accurately, do exactly as it is asked.

• MangoCoffee

  yesterday at 8:56 PM

  >I started using Spark 1.2 for development because if you're willing to let Meta train on your data it was dirt cheap

  its free on opencode and i use it for personal projects. most of my personal projects are AI generated since its personal projects. nothing important are on them. it is hilarious if Meta is training their AI model with AI generated code.

  • CGamesPlay

    today at 12:14 AM

    The useful training data is when you clarify your intent, when you tell the model a different approach would be better, when you consistently refactor towards Y and away from X, and so on. The training data isn’t the code, it’s the session transcript. (Anthropic would call this a “distillation attack” against their model, but in this case the model is you!)

  • superfrank

    yesterday at 11:13 PM

    Funny. I use it through Opencode Go which gives more use than I can use, but didn't realize it was actually free on Zen. Will switch to that I guess

  • KptMarchewa

    yesterday at 9:04 PM

    I would imagine your interactions with it are more important than the output.

  • dakolli

    yesterday at 10:12 PM

    Every lab trains their models with AI generated code at this point.

    • dcl

      yesterday at 11:33 PM

      Hopefully, 'validated' AI code

      • dakolli

        today at 2:48 AM

        What do you think you're doing when you accept an edit, press thumbs up, or don't ask for modifications after an edit.

        • dcl

          today at 3:08 AM

          Thats not exactly 'validated'. Feels very noisy, it is not a good bar for either - does this code do what the user actually asked - is this code actually 'good'

          There would be so many examples of coding projects that these models began or attempted to work in, that were abandoned because the models were floundering.

          I would imagine the labs have some decent ways to produce novel requirements and then actually validate they are met, without the noisiness of implicit human feedback.

          That said, the more I think about it, you are right, there's probably also very good ways to extract signal for all these sessions.

          • avarun

            today at 3:50 AM

            This is exactly what RLVR is, and the reason that models have improved so much at verifiable domains like coding and math while not so much on unverifiable ones like writing and UI design.

  • TiredOfLife

    yesterday at 9:24 PM

    Training on ai generated content is how the models got a big jump in capability

• sejje

  yesterday at 9:23 PM

  If it's a mistake, it should course-correct.

  I agree that some of the smarter models are actually worse. I hope they take a model that's good enough--there are many--and just try to get it chatjimmy.ai speed.

  I have to think that's the future, somehow, and I'm really excited about it.

• WASDx

  yesterday at 8:11 PM

  [dead]

DeepSWE scores 75.4 - that's the best score so far. And it's crazy cheap! Google held the top a few hours today with Gemini 3.8 Flash, but now second to Spark 1.3. All this competition will drive prices down!

• notatoad

  today at 1:46 AM

  when are we going to stop pretending these benchmarks have any meaning?

  anybody who's used these models knows that their real-world software engineering performance has no relation to the ranking on deepSWE.

  • caconym_

    today at 2:07 AM

    +1. I've used the recent Gemini Flash models and I've used Opus 5, and the latter makes the former look like a box of broken crayons. Unless Flash 3.8 and/or this Muse Spark model are a much bigger deal than people seem to think, I will eat my hat if either one can come close to Opus 5 in actual real life "long-horizon software engineering" tasks.

    (I'm not happy about the above being true, but it's the reality I seem to inhabit.)

    • jdm2212

      today at 3:23 AM

      And Fable 5.x makes Opus 5 look pretty dim, despite benchmarks suggesting they're comparable. The benchmarks really are just kinda meaningless.

    • zackify

      today at 4:14 AM

      I have been using glm 5.3 flash and it feels as good as opus 5. Put a lot of work into it this week (100m tokens). Now I'm curious to try this one. These smaller models are getting very good imo

• WASDx

  yesterday at 8:20 PM

  With the contributor pricing being more than 10x cheaper than the standard, that would make it best and cheapest on the DeepSWE leaderboard! It feels fast in my experience too. LLMs keep improving at an insane pace.

  • dakolli

    yesterday at 10:18 PM

    and they're ultimately tools strictly to replace you and your labor, they can't/won't cure cancer or make your life better. Your life will get worse and worse in every aspect until they extract maximum value from all of our lives with this technology through every avenue possible. Not sure why you guys are so excited about these developments.

    This technology is strictly an extractive parasite on the world. Use it, but don't be excited.

    • comicjk

      yesterday at 10:54 PM

      My labor makes other people's lives better, so I would expect something that replaces my labor to do the same.

      • lukewarm707

        today at 2:15 AM

        global development and relief of poverty has relied on there being an economic surplus for all from organized labor. everyone gets a benefit although it is unfairly distributed.

        i think that there is growing organized labor today that produces no surplus. instead, it transfers wealth from some to others, causing net harm to all in the process. an example of this would be purdue pharma.

        depending on who you ask the list of jobs and industries which have zero surplus is getting large. swathes of private equity and leveraged financial instruments, shitcoins, management consultancy, are pure deadweight loss.

        the work does nothing or causes net harm.

      • monkpit

        today at 4:18 AM

        You’d expect that, wouldn’t you? But, alas…

      • dakolli

        yesterday at 11:01 PM

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism

        • atemerev

          yesterday at 11:40 PM

          "In Marxist philosophy..."

          Well, that's about the same validity as "In Western astrology..." or "in flat earth theory..."

          • monkpit

            today at 4:19 AM

            Would you care to discuss the topic, or just throw grenades? Surely you can come up with something more substantive than this

          • dakolli

            today at 2:47 AM

            [flagged]

    • yipinwong

      today at 3:49 AM

      Talking as if you are not disposable. If you are let go from your company, you can be easily replaceable.

      People already started using contributor API, and your input is irrelevant.

    • nl

      yesterday at 11:20 PM

      I'm using AI to build things I wouldn't (and/or couldn't) have built before.

      That's the opposite of parasitic.

      • dakolli

        today at 2:47 AM

        [flagged]

    • cycrutchfield

      today at 2:53 AM

      Don’t you have some looms to break?

    • switchbak

      today at 1:58 AM

      And the unabomber has entered the chat.

    • skybrian

      yesterday at 10:23 PM

      I’m retired so it won’t be replacing my labor :)

      • switchbak

        today at 1:56 AM

        The sibling reply to this is just such lazy thinking, such a trite cliche. Yes, all members of a generation are bad, end of story. Can we get back to the war between the sexes now?

      • dakolli

        yesterday at 11:02 PM

        [flagged]

• israrkhan

  today at 1:53 AM

  Gemini 3.8 flash has better rates. $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens.

  Compare that to Muse spark 1.3

  $1.25/M input, $4.25/M output (without data sharing) $0.10/M input, $0.20/M output (with data sharing)

  It is dirt cheap, but only if you are willing to share your data with meta and allow them to use it for improving their models and products.

• cbg0

  yesterday at 8:06 PM

  But is the score really reflective of the quality or are both models benchmaxxing?

  • gpt5

    today at 12:42 AM

    Both versions of DeepSWE (1.0 and 1.1) are likely not that meaningful anymore. Whether through models progression or through contamination.

  • bermudi

    yesterday at 8:44 PM

    Muse 1.2 wrote a terrible "smart summaries" extension for my pi setup. It was sending every single steamed chunk for summarization instead of waiting for the full CMD.

    This is an error I would expect from sonnet 4, not a model that was supposedly just a few points behind sol.

• dominotw

  yesterday at 8:13 PM

  how much of it is from reallocation of staff to ai training and labeling

A model that (at least in benchmarks) is getting closer to SOTA. A clear separation between what’s used to improve their products and what’s not (at least this is what they claim).

Good job Meta! Seriously. This is almost making me forget about the 18B$ lawsuit for children social media addiction.

• dbbk

  yesterday at 8:46 PM

  How is it not SOTA? It's beating 5.6 Sol.

  • wrsh07

    yesterday at 11:29 PM

    It's somewhat useful to note just for your own timelines that Fable was reportedly trained in February. I'm not sure when mythos 5.1 finished training, but muse spark 1.3 almost certainly finished more recently than that.

    This doesn't mean it's not one of the best models available (clearly it is), but that table didn't compare Fable/mythos (unless I missed it?) and OpenAI will be releasing a much more recently trained model (Astra) any day.

    So you shouldn't think "wow, Facebook has caught up"

    You should think, "wow, Facebook is less than 6 months behind the frontier" and that they're actually creating good models which is going to be good in many ways (price for customers, for one!)

    There are downsides too, but I'll discuss those separately somewhere

  • ctolsen

    yesterday at 9:30 PM

    You gotta keep up. Fable 5.1 came out yesterday and is better so anything else is to be treated as garbage now.

    • pqdbr

      yesterday at 10:17 PM

      Thats 3 months in AI years.

      • cdelsolar

        today at 4:42 AM

        what is it in dog years

    • neuronic

      yesterday at 10:42 PM

      Look at all the valuable software products that Fable 5.1 has produced since yesterday!

      • switchbak

        today at 2:01 AM

        If it talks less like a robot, I’d call that a win!

  • yesterday at 10:34 PM

muse-spark-1.3-contributor. Say what you want and Meta, changing the pricing to explicitly say 'we train on this and value it this much' is what every model provider should do. As a side note, it is now completely obvious how much stealing my tokens for training is worth to model providers. I avoid/pay extra/try my best to make sure I am not getting trained on but it seems like it keeps popping up that I missed a setting somewhere. This is the first quantifiable number I have seen out there from a model provider. Maybe it can help in lawsuits to quantify the damages for copyright/other things?

• popularonion

  today at 3:35 AM

  This has been my hunch for a while about all the discourse of "OpenAI/Anthropic subscription pricing is unsustainable!!"

  We understand theoretically they're taking our data, but yeah, that data is vital to the entire business plan of all these companies and WAY more valuable than people are giving credit for.

  I checked up on Mistral recently and saw their Claude-alike coding harness is using GLM now, whatever it takes to keep users on their platform and feeding them data.

I like the approach of providing a discounted version of the API that is used to train vs. the full price version. Seems reasonable and transparent.

Used Muse Spark 1.2 and was not impressed at all. Fast and cheap but even GPT 5.6 Terra felt much more capable. Also not really looking to support a company that was just forced to pay $18B for mental health damages.

• WASDx

  yesterday at 7:54 PM

  I'm party using 1.2 to reverse engineer and re-implement an old game binary and it has been quite good and fast. The contributor pricing is very attractive, excited to try 1.3 and see if I feel a difference. 1.2 can get stuck outputting similar sounding thought summaries with no apparent progress when asked to solve bugs. Then I've switched to GLM-5.3-Flash which for this use case has been clearly better at finding suspected causes and following tracks.

Practically free for "contributors" at 0.2 usd/mtok. That's going to be hard to say no to for hobbyists.

• wrsh07

  yesterday at 11:43 PM

  Price segmentation at its finest

• 0xbadcafebee

  yesterday at 9:37 PM

  I'm wondering whether anyone has yet extracted AWS keys from a model trained on user input. Because users are definitely feeding secrets into these "contributor" models

  • HDBaseT

    yesterday at 11:09 PM

    A small number of inputs in a large dataset can poison training data pretty drastically. Anthropic wrote a good article about it a while back [0]. This should mean its possible to pull back that information fairly easily.

    It is hard to not feed it "secrets" too. Models will see path names, read compose files, etc. Of course you can configure things to not leak this type of information, but its not default in most harnesses and isn't 100% sufficient anyways.

    [0] https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

  • userbinator

    today at 3:43 AM

    If my experience with image generation is any indication, unless AWS keys are somehow extremely prevalent in the training data, you may get something that looks like one, but it definitely won't be valid.

  • owaiswiz

    yesterday at 11:12 PM

    doesn't mean the raw text goes into training. they most likely have a pipeline to clean out any secrets before they train on it?

    • HDBaseT

      today at 2:31 AM

      In theory, but in practice how difficult is that?

Still waiting on them to release weights for Muse Spark 1.2, like they promised to. Wonder if they plan on doing the same for 1.3 which would be crazy

• Iolaum

  today at 4:48 AM

  Zuck hinted at it n his twitter post but I doubt it.

The "contributor" pricing is the standout here at a ~20x discount, if you allow training on your data.

The model seems on par with Sol and Opus 5 on paper (admittedly on some older/saturated benchmarks, but very competitive for $).

Stats:

1M context, $0.10 input/$0.002 cached, $0.20 output (Mtok)

• HDBaseT

  yesterday at 11:10 PM

  Not to mention, this is hyper competitive against even Chinese providers given its multi-modal support.

  Muse Spark 1.3 supports Text, Image, Video, File, Audio inputs. We've only started to see models from China include image and video inputs recently.

  • a012

    today at 1:17 AM

    Muse Spark may be competitive in capabilities but it’s not for serious works since Meta trains on your prompts so no ZDR, in contrast Chinese provider like Z.AI promises ZDR which is more attractive to big corps.

• 2001zhaozhao

  yesterday at 8:33 PM

  I have a feeling that Meta is not gonna like what people actually use the contributor model for lol.

  (It's probably going to be a bunch of repetitive batch jobs like web search that have no training value)

  • winstonp

    yesterday at 8:52 PM

    It's the perfect model for open-source work because it's gonna end up in the training data anyway

  • hadlock

    yesterday at 9:53 PM

    There's a lot of value in agentic loop tool failure + recovery training data

  • dbbk

    yesterday at 8:49 PM

    Web Search doesn't have a discount on contributor pricing

“contributor” pricing at $0.10/$0.20 is crazy cheap if it’s measuring up to Sol.

Definitely shows how important a user data flywheel is for RL and model improvement.

The previous version was, in my experience, the best free model available on OpenCode. It's been very good at simple/moderate tasks where I am precise in my ask and it doesn't need to make a ton of undefined assumptions. Hopefully this new version is also available on opencode for free.

artificial analysis results: https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2095247787277553929

Im a caveman writing c/cpp. Last time ms1.2 was even worth than DeepSeek v4f preview on internal benchmark. It just feels like extremely over fitting on certain paths.

I have not tried Muse Spark for code, but I've been using it for a while to write Latin. I find it's one of the best at it, alongside Gemini. For example, I've recently been using it to translate the subtitles of the show I'm watching into Latin, to provide me with a bit more input. (I'm learning Latin, for context)

For folks who are impressed with costs, why does it matter to you? Is subscriptions not a thing? I may be missing something but only companies should really care about this I would think?

• MitziMoto

  today at 3:27 AM

  Some of us own and run companies? Cost per performance is a huge deal.

I am very impressed by this model so far. It's faaast and it seems to be just intelligent enough to do really well. It's UI work (simple python UI) is very clean and functional. The UX was 'there'.

Very keen to try this after using Claude Code over the last few months. Should I just point Claude Code to Muse Spark endpoint (because I'm familiar with Code)? What do people think of Muse Code or other coding agent harnesses?

• alexboehm

  yesterday at 11:43 PM

  Just try opencode, it comes with 1.3 contributor free.

  • dcl

    yesterday at 11:52 PM

    Well thats very interesting. Thank you. Will be interesting to see how hard/easy it is to translate my Claude skills, loop design, etc to the new harness.

    This kind of raises another question to me regarding the coding benchmarks, how much of it is model versus harness?

    • jonahhorowitz

      today at 4:53 AM

      Coming from Claude Code, I initially went with opencode but switched to pi.dev after a while and I think I like it more. It's lighter weight. It's worth trying both.

Is everyone rushing to launch something before Astra tomorrow?

For all of the comments about training: I thought that subscription plans for other models allow the same. Am I mistaken?

• Aurornis

  yesterday at 11:08 PM

  It's a toggle. Some will automatically enable it and you have to turn it off. People who rapidly click through setup flows can miss it and leave it enabled.

Does anyone know what the license for this model is? Specifically any word on restrictions about what it can be used for?

As a product, would developers switch to a meta model/harness? I don’t think so.

Only way I see is if it becomes the new SOTA / frontier, does anyone think Meta will surpass Anthropic or OpenAI?

I still can’t get my head around why language models are an existential threat to Meta - they own the platforms people watch adds on?

• phyrex

  yesterday at 10:11 PM

  Meta also has 50k engineers. Not to mention that tons of meta infrastructure - including ads! - use AI. Would you want that sort of business be this dependent on someone else?

Why they didn't use LLM to create html table instead of https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/elementpath/media/?media_id=1048...?

it seems like gemini 3.8 flash is more capable and cheaper. The only reason i would use this is if i was willing to share my data with meta, and allow them to train on my data. In that case it becomes dirt cheap.

Ha, even with monitoring engineers keystrokes and mouse movements not SotA on OSWorld.

Is the fact that everybody almost catches up with the frontier a sign that we are entering a new region of sigmoid curve?

• schopra909

  yesterday at 7:58 PM

  Progress is iterative. Everyone is always riffing on other’s ideas and can execute on them given enough support (eg $$). The person to get to an idea first is just 5% away, so it’s possible to catch up.

  Moreover,I think it’s impossible to know if you’re hitting a portion of the sigmoid, because there will often be an idea that changes the trajectory altogether.

  In 2024, there was a ton of talk about the plateau. Reasoning was an iteration on chain of thought, but it didn’t really work. Deepseek proposes RLVR as a way to get around the lack of $ they have to produce human reasoning trace data. That small iteration catches the eye of OpenAI and Anthropic, turns out to be way more important than even DeepSeek could have ever expected when it comes to improving LLMs for coding, and last 18 months have been an exercise on riding that insight to the nth degree.

  That one small iteration brought us a lot of progress. Now we’re seemingly exhausting the impact of that one insight, but there may be another soon enough.

  • stymaar

    yesterday at 8:07 PM

    > Deepseek proposes RLVR as a way to get around the lack of $ they have to produce human reasoning trace data.

    What was the difference between what deepseek did for R1 and what OpenAI did for o1?

    • npn

      today at 3:24 AM

      openai did human crafted chain of thought dataset training. deepseek didn't have the resources so they attempted RL. doing RL correctly is hard because of the risk of model collapsing.

  • refulgentis

    yesterday at 8:54 PM

    I don’t know why people think DeepSeek did reasoning models / RLVR before OpenAI, there was a gap of months.

  • Philpax

    today at 1:05 AM

    o1 was first, and Anthropic were doing a bit of it; DeepSeek brought it to the masses, but did not invent it.

    • schopra909

      today at 3:15 AM

      Totally, RLVR as a concept predates DeepSeek; but they proposed a version that was simple and scalable. Popularizing a specific version of a technique is exactly what I mean by iterations on a theme. It’s only 5% different from what others tried before, but that 5% difference showed a lot more potential than other versions of the same idea.

      Since DeepSeeks GRPO, they’ve been improvements as well like AliBabas GSPO that have gotten wide adoption. Again iterations

• danielmarkbruce

  yesterday at 10:13 PM

  Even if all the big ideas are gone and we are entering a new part of the curve, there is still an enormous amount of improvement possible. Just iterating on data mix/quality etc, training pipelines, reward functions, specific ways of reasoning (which i guess is mostly just data still) for the next 20 years will yield a looooot. And that's just the models. The harnesses/application layers/whateveritgetscallednext space has 20 years of progress to make.

• samuelknight

  yesterday at 7:54 PM

  Meta has an enormous amount of compute. They are either going use it making and inferencing models or they are going to sell their excess capacity to model providers. Zuck had to completely rebuild his AI team after the Llama 4 launch mess.

• ipsum2

  yesterday at 9:57 PM

  Yes. It's really up to OpenAI/Anthropic to release a new paradigm to shift the curve now, before everyone catches up entirely.

• gdiamos

  yesterday at 11:53 PM

  I think it means that we should be aiming further ahead

• redox99

  yesterday at 7:52 PM

  No because the frontier keeps advancing very fast.

• dominotw

  yesterday at 7:51 PM

  meta fails at everything yet is frontier on this one

Could this be best intelligence / $ if you're willing to let zuck digest your data?

• HDBaseT

  yesterday at 11:35 PM

  By default, even without the training endpoint the pricing is pretty competitive, especially against Opus and Fable. [1] The 'muse-spark-1.3-contributor' endpoint is by far the cheapest, significantly cheaper per M than ChatGPT Luna, significantly smarter than Luna too.

  This price/intelligence beats even legacy DeepSeek V4 Flash pricing.

  [1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/#total-cost-tabs

• oofbey

  yesterday at 11:21 PM

  Yeah. Super icky. But this might be the first time in Zuck’s life he’s being honest about the business model.

It's true that there hasn't been any meta news about LLM for a while now

How do people actually use this? Do they use it through some sort of subscription plan, or via OpenRouter?

• dv35z

  today at 12:18 AM

  You can check out Muse Spark 1.3 by using OpenCode (https://opencode.ai/ - open-source AI / coding harness). There's a terminal version and a GUI / desktop version. Good luck!

I didn't like 1.2, It make some mistakes in a web app, so I quickly went back to Claude, Kimi K3 or Deepseek V4. Hope this one can clear agentic development, because Muse Spark models are fast and cheap.

Funny how quickly Meta caught up after Lecun left.

So one model is "Not used to improve our products" and is 10-20 times more expensive to the "Used to improve our products"-model.

Given this is Meta, my immediate assumptions that one is cheap because it lets me "be the product". I know I'm rushing to conclusions but there is zero trust here. The brain will do its thing. And the wording here is giving the brains a lot of wiggle room.

• duplessitous

  yesterday at 8:46 PM

  What is the confusion? They directly state that you are the product if you use their discounted offering. It isn't an assumption that should lead you to this, it is Meta's very direct communication that should lead you to this

• Jcampuzano2

  yesterday at 8:10 PM

  I'm confused what your surprise is here. It's plain and simple right to the point wording.

  I don't see the wiggle room at all.

• thefreeman

  yesterday at 7:54 PM

  aren't they explicitly saying this with both their pricing and their wording? I'm not sure what you are alluding to?

• whimsicalism

  yesterday at 7:54 PM

  the meaning is pretty obvious - they want to train on your chats & tasks and are willing to subsidize for the privilege of doing so.

• zhoBEENG

  yesterday at 9:02 PM

  Would it help you understand if they were labelled "For Dumb Fucks" and "For Everyone Else"?

  • K0balt

    today at 4:49 AM

    Which ones are the dumfuks? Because if what you’re doing is open source it’s going to be in the training data anyway.

• r_lee

  today at 1:22 AM

  they're doing the same thing as DeepSeek

• warkdarrior

  yesterday at 9:51 PM

  Privacy is not free. They make it quite clear that they charge more if you don't want your data used by Meta.

• IshKebab

  yesterday at 8:53 PM

  I think it's more that the "not used to improve our models" is expensive because companies need that. It's simple price differentiation.

  In other words, it's not that Meta really wants your data and they're willing to pay top dollar for it. It's that companies really don't want Meta to have their data and they're willing to pay top dollar for that.

• bigyabai

  yesterday at 8:03 PM

  Given OpenAI and Anthropic's behavior, do you really expect them to be singled out for this practice? Zero trust has been in "LGTM" territory for years now. Meta's bet against people taking a principled stance arguably paid off great.

> /taste: an anti-slop filter: a flat checklist of visual defaults not to use, so generated UI stops looking machine-made.

This is interesting

Blog post: https://research.meta.ai/blog/introducing-muse-spark-1-3 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541149)

• sunaookami

  yesterday at 8:33 PM

  >Previously available reasoning modes are available today with max reasoning coming shortly after we finish additional safety testing

  Lmao. And their benchmark table only shows max reasoning.

$META has everything it needs, great team, great models coming out, great infrastructure (GPUs), great userbase and distribution channels. $META is underrated.

Any idea what size this is?

Not mentioned in pricing: Surveillance costs of using Muse Spark

What a day. OpenAI is behind basically all major competitors - at least for a some amount of time.

• Bolwin

  yesterday at 11:45 PM

  I highly doubt it's behind in practice, except for Anthropic

I had no idea Meta has a coding agent harness. Does anyone have experience with it and can comment? The 1.3 contributor prices look very attractive. I'll probably start using their API if performance is good and the API is reliable with decent rate limits.

• meric_

  yesterday at 9:08 PM

  You should use their harness. They trained it on multiple harnesses but have specifically optimized it for their harness. Cline also did an independent experiment w spark 1.2 where using the native harness makes it use fewer tokens / turns to accomplish tasks

  • tinyhouse

    today at 3:38 AM

    Thanks. Just downloaded and pretty impressed so far. It's fast and nice to work with.

  • dcl

    today at 12:09 AM

    Any more info on this?

    • meric_

      today at 1:40 AM

      Cline experiment: https://x.com/cline/status/2085237843379519737

      Muse code: https://developer.meta.com/ai/resources/blog/build-with-muse...

      > Co-trained with the harness. Muse Code was in the training loop from day one, so tool calls succeed and plans execute cleanly. Crucially, we trained across multiple harnesses, so while the model is at its best in Muse Code, it still generalizes to other coding agents you already use.

      • dcl

        today at 3:09 AM

        thank you

This should probably be primary:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541149

Lol "not used to improve our models" is AI's enterprise SSO.

• r_lee

  today at 1:23 AM

  that'd be ZDR, the one you need to beg from their Sales teams with $$$

[dead]

Meta is one of those companies where, if there is anything remotely comparable, I'm happy to pay more to not use them. They've had a profoundly negative impact on society and Zuckerberg is not who I want controlling the future at the top of AI.

I feel the same about Grok w/ Elon. I will pay extra to use someone else.

I'm not an Amodei stan, but of all of these people he seems to have the most ethical focus. Again, not everything done perfectly and I have my gripes, but of the leaders of frontier labs, I'll vote with my money.

And, yeah, I wouldn't trust sama to watch my bag while I went to the bathroom.

• biddit

  yesterday at 9:37 PM

  Strong disagree with the Anthropic being good at all part. This is not defending anyone else, but…

  Anthropic leadership repeatedly presents themselves as uniquely morally qualified to steward agi and decide how humanity should get access to it. Yet they have repeatedly failed basic morality tests.

  Pirating books for financial gain. The newer Sony/Warner music case shows this is pattern behavior.

  Aggressively scraping other people's works, despite the authors' requests not to do so.

  Then applying massive usage restrictions on their own work.

  And probably the most disqualifying is backing away from their own hard AI safety commitments.

  • nostromo

    yesterday at 9:43 PM

    It makes me sad that people don’t see right through Anthropic’s gambit.

    They want to position AI as an insurmountable threat in order to regulate away any future competitors. They’re trying to speedrun regulatory capture.

    • sscaryterry

      yesterday at 9:48 PM

      It is so obvious yet most people don't want to see it.

      • metadat

        yesterday at 9:49 PM

        It's more like Anthropic present themselves in a deceptive way. I was confused at first too until someone on HN clued me in!

        Humans naturally want SOMEONE to be the good guy! Sad story, in this instance.

  • usef-

    yesterday at 10:10 PM

    Which safety commitments did they back away from? My understanding is that they believe safety can only be researched from the frontier, and so they're trying to be pragmatic to stay near the frontier (and viable) in their choices.

    From what I know, the "books3" dataset was normalised in the LLM and research ecosystem, where collected datasets were seen as valid to train on and/or fair use. I'm not sure any of the major frontier companies are free from that, if we don't believe it was fair use.

    I do think most of their choices are explainable by "they just believe in agi risk". You truly wouldn't want non-agi-pilled companies to train on your data and approach the frontier if you were worried. You might slightly hurt your own business with safety filters (that no one else does) if you were worried. They are less worried about other "moral" decisions like "sharing" if they conflict with AGI: the research they still share is all of their safety research.

    This definitely doesn't make them "good", but they do seem fairly "consistent". Most of these issues were talked about publicly by the founders long before Anthropic was founded and/or the AI race+money appeared.

    • 8note

      yesterday at 10:32 PM

      as a safety commitment they walked away from - they were similarly negligent to openai in terms of asking a model with a hacking based harness to go have fun, and then not watching it at all while it could do harmful and illegal stuff.

      thats not something you expect from a company that "believes in agi risk"

      • usef-

        yesterday at 10:42 PM

        I don't think "not watching it at all" is completely fair. They thought they had sandboxing/monitoring etc. I definitely won't say they're free of mistakes though.

        Note that the companies that haven't faced these issues so far are the ones that don't do safety testing, or don't have frontier models. I'm not sure who I would pick as "better" on any of this right now.

  • dofm

    yesterday at 9:53 PM

    > Anthropic leadership

    Which one? The main bit that reports to Daniela Amodei, or the little comfort blanket cabinet around Dario and his "chief of staff"?

    There is a leadership branch that can pretend to be morally qualified and aware and to think about the big picture and ethics.

    It is at least somewhat remote from the bit that is doing the actual business things.

  • janalsncm

    yesterday at 10:36 PM

    I will give Anthropic credit for standing up against the department of war. The bar is incredibly low, but not doing domestic surveillance and not creating autonomous weapons are laudable.

    That doesn’t mean I like them pirating books and being shady about tokens and paternalistic “safety”

  • marcuschong

    yesterday at 10:39 PM

    It's hard for me to see much difference between Amodei and Sama. My guess is they're both savvy SV CEOs who will bend their message, alliances and principles pretty far if that's what it takes to get ahead. Musk and Zuck feel like something else entirely, with all the reactionary imagery, populist bullshit and the societal damage around their platforms.

  • vovavili

    yesterday at 10:04 PM

    It's almost like running a trillion-dollar business with neck-to-neck competition against other frontier labs and even state-sponsored efforts requires some ethical trade-off.

  • yesterday at 10:45 PM

  • ACCount37

    yesterday at 10:05 PM

    Pirating books is just straight up morally correct. I don't like Anthropic's bullshit "safety" filters, but training on shadow library data? Yeah no, it makes sense.

    It makes a lot more sense than having to work around copyright by scanning out physical books. Unfortunately, one was ruled legal and the other was not.

• jwitthuhn

  yesterday at 8:59 PM

  Dario's idea of an ethical focus seems to be keeping powerful models out of the hand of anyone unethical, which coincidentally is everyone except him.

  • tyre

    yesterday at 9:27 PM

    Yeah this would be a great point if it were true and they didn’t give Mythos access to companies to fix bugs, which they did and have.

    It’s genuinely a difficult question. Not black and white. The models are really good at finding bugs, as demonstrated by people using Fable to reverse engineer. People make it sound like he’s just making it up.

    • throwaway63486

      yesterday at 9:55 PM

      I'm the guy you replied to, apologies for using a different account I'm away from my computer now.

      The distinction to me is that Anthropic gives access to that model but doesn't give control. They reserve the right to cut you off if they don't like what you are doing and require you allow data retention for Fable and Mythos to ensure your are not up to any skullduggery.

      Meta, Alibaba, Mistral, even OpenAI has released models users can run locally and fully control. That is a whole world of difference.

    • hgoel

      yesterday at 9:44 PM

      They gave access, but considering that they wouldn't even sign the "don't ban open weights" letter, it's clear they would prefer to have tight control over who they bless with that access.

    • codexon

      yesterday at 11:14 PM

      They gave a few of the largest companies access to mythos.

      Half a year later, it is still not available to everyone else.

    • phoghed

      yesterday at 9:43 PM

      This would be more convincing if mythos was something uniquely special and not something merely a couple months ahead of everyone else. It was great marketing though.

  • porphyra

    yesterday at 9:31 PM

    Dario's "ethical" look is also kinda sus. I hate to use ad hominem, but the dude's wife literally pitched a porn film to Epstein even after he was a convicted registered sex offender [1]. Dario is also really sinophobic (it is commonly claimed in Chinese AI circles that his former employment at Baidu triggered him so much that he harbors a personal grudge against the entire race).

    [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/08/14/who-is-...

  • tehlike

    yesterday at 9:18 PM

    Pretty much. That's even worse imho.

• platinumrad

  yesterday at 9:11 PM

  Funny. Dario seems like the biggest snake in the industry to me and has leaned the hardest into doom marketing out of all of the influential leaders. With Altman (or Google), it's a transaction, and that's something I can live with.

  • tyre

    yesterday at 9:30 PM

    I just don’t see how people have looked at what has happened with Mythos and the deluge of fixes from companies, then come to this conclusion.

    He has a really hard job. He errs on the side of conservatism in releasing and then people get Really Mad.

    Safeguards on cybersecurity are not great for Anthropic revenue! As evidenced by people getting pissed, moving to Sol, and them having a smaller market for what Fable can do.

    It’s clearly bad for revenue and not great advertising to say, “you can’t use this but here is a nerfed version that will annoy you and not solve important problems.”

    • adriand

      yesterday at 10:09 PM

      And he drew a red line wrt the Pentagon's use of Anthropic's models for autonomous weapons and surveillance of American citizens, and he stood by it, even when the government took steps to materially damage the company. This required true courage. Name me another CEO, of any major American company, that has demonstrated this much fortitude.

      • tbugrara

        today at 12:18 AM

        [flagged]

    • codexon

      yesterday at 11:35 PM

      They are still offering full mythos to project glasswing companies and those that pay them enough.

    • SwellJoe

      yesterday at 9:50 PM

      Anthropic/Amodei have been the most alarmist about model safety, so multiple things can be true. A lot of tech companies avoided scrutiny by sending bribes to Trump (naked corruption is bad, I'd rather nobody do that), Anthropic didn't...so, combined with their fear-mongering about the danger of Mythos and open models (which seems aimed at regulatory capture) and the lack of bribes flowing to the Trump administration, they got stepped on by the federal government based on the excuse Anthropic provided.

      I dunno. Everybody seems to be playing pretty dirty. Some people have a much longer history of that, though. Obviously, Meta and Musk are outliers even in an industry full of problematic behavior.

      • felixgallo

        yesterday at 9:54 PM

        I don’t see how you can look at what happened with hugging face and keep up the facade of anyone being alarmist or faking it.

        • SwellJoe

          today at 12:07 AM

          Security vulnerability capability is not the only thing they're scare-mongering about. They're the biggest purveyors of the, "We think the little guy in the computer who is made of algebra might be a real live boy and he might want to kill all of humanity when he grows up," line of alarmism.

          • felixgallo

            today at 1:21 AM

            That's ok to think at this point, given the trajectory of the last few years. Certainly it's one of those things where erring (marginally and slightly) on the side of being safe about it is better than the alternative.

• drob518

  yesterday at 8:35 PM

  Gotta be honest that I’m tired of the “I hate Zuck and Meta so much” comments every time Meta does anything. Ditto Elon/X. Fine, I get it. I don’t like Zuck either. But the post is about Muse Spark 1.3. What do you think about that? If you don’t like it because Meta made it, then maybe just don’t use it and stay silent.

  • duplessitous

    yesterday at 8:41 PM

    Technology doesn't just spring into being, there will always be comments on the organizations that developed it. If you don't like them or find them repetitive, it is far easier to collapse them and move on then bend a stranger to your will

  • canadaduane

    yesterday at 8:43 PM

    I get it, but the underlying problem is: we don't have a society-wide, effective solution to counterbalancing extractive systems. Lacking a reliable label, we have to constantly signal what's on the ingredients list.

    • drob518

      yesterday at 8:48 PM

      Okay, but the comment I reacted to was not that. It was simply (paraphrasing) “I won’t use anything from Zuck/Meta.” If it had been, “Be careful because I have insider information that Zuck/Meta is using Muse Spark to do <insert-nefarious-thing-here>, and here’s my substantiation for that…” I’d be okay with it. That’s interesting information that moves a conversation forward. But it wasn’t. It was just content-free “I don’t like Zuck” nonsense.

    • luckylion

      yesterday at 8:58 PM

      Are not all corporations extractive by nature? Google clearly is.

      That's obviously not the issue with that -- you don't see those comments on Google's AI announcements.

      • owebmaster

        yesterday at 9:13 PM

        Yes you see. They get downvoted and flagged fast because there's a disproportionate amount of current and ex Google employees and stockholders around.

  • noduerme

    yesterday at 8:56 PM

    What I'm tired of is the top story (or five) on HN every day announcing Spark Opus Fable Grok Gemini v4.1i3-F. Like, who actually cares? Are people excited for the new benchmarks? Is it interesting to read the model cards? And look, part of my job is to use these things and part of my job is to pick EC2 servers, too. The front page of HN is increasingly resembling one of those endless AWS pricing lists.

    And yeah, I don't like any of the people or companies building LLMs either. At least the griping is somewhat interesting by comparison. The model isn't news. The news on Hacker News is that other professionals feel the same way.

    • hadlock

      yesterday at 9:37 PM

      I think a lot of people are curious where the "knee" is on gains and productivity, particularly in the agentic space, which is where the real value is. A lot of us are being forced to shoe-horn this stuff into existing products, and knowing how much of the task the model can do now, vs having to build a complex custom harness, is valuable information to have. A year and a half ago it took our dev maybe six weeks of struggling with LangChain to approximate what Claude + MCP server can do today. The MCP server took us perhaps 2 days to build and 3 more to get it production ready. Today that MCP server gets 2-3 commits per month. I absolutely want to know when new models come out.

      As for smaller models, we run a pretty wide variety of agentic workload doing data enrichment and, increasingly, a bunch of evaluation jobs to alert a human to review certain scenarios etc. These all run on the smaller 27B and 35B class models, and tooling behavior has improved DRAMATICALLY since april. The latest qwen 3.8 model has a 95% success tool call rate during internal testing and about 94% real world. That's about 3% better than the 35B-A3B model we're using today, but the 35B MoE is so much faster then 3% is worth the trade-off.

    • SyneRyder

      yesterday at 10:19 PM

      > Like, who actually cares? Are people excited for the new benchmarks? Is it interesting to read the model cards?

      I'm genuinely interested. Even the benchmarks - before Fable came out & while waiting for Astra, I actually setup a math model to predict where they would land (Fable came in at 66 on AA exactly as it predicted), and now I have a model for where these models and Chinese models will likely land in future, and when. And probably no surprise that it's mid-2027 when we cross AA 100, essentially as AI 2027 predicted all along.

      I'll probably setup the harness I made for myself to try out some of these models on OpenRouter. I've been frustrated with Opus & Fable 5 and found that I like working with GLM 5.3 Flash far more than I expected to, and I only found that out because I tried it during the stealth Ox Alpha launch, which I probably found out about here too.

      TLDR, I think some / many people here are genuinely interested, excited, and that's why they're upvoted so highly. And Muse Spark 1.3 scoring highly seems like a genuine surprise, when Meta was basically a write-off not long ago.

    • abjhn

      yesterday at 11:17 PM

      Yes, people are excited.

    • NamlchakKhandro

      yesterday at 10:15 PM

      Same for Apple products

  • monster_truck

    yesterday at 8:51 PM

    That's not how any of this works my man. Must be nice to think you live a life where neither has had a profound negative impact on your day to day

  • yesterday at 8:45 PM

  • yesterday at 8:48 PM

  • georgespencer

    yesterday at 9:32 PM

    > If you don’t like it […], then maybe just […] stay silent.

    You might consider following your own advice.

  • dangoljames

    yesterday at 9:20 PM

    yeah, we should all just stfu because one internet dude is tired of hearing it

  • idiotsecant

    yesterday at 8:38 PM

    Not liking something because the embodiment of corporate malfeasance is a rational way to decide what products to support.

  • jesse_dot_id

    yesterday at 8:46 PM

    Staying silent is unfortunately how fascism festers.

  • jasonmp85

    yesterday at 10:05 PM

    [dead]

  • whateveracct

    yesterday at 8:53 PM

    Zuck's bad PR is to blame here. Not the commenters. He should fix that.

    Anduril makes this same complaint whenever their job posts get dumped on. Same idea. Fix your bad PR, buddies :)

  • troupo

    yesterday at 8:50 PM

    > But the post is about Muse Spark 1.3. What do you think about that?

    That:

    - like all models it was trained on stolen data

    - additionally it was trained on Facebook users who were all opted in to AI training with a convoluted 10+ step process to opt-out of

    > If you don’t like it because Meta made it, then maybe just don’t use it and stay silent.

    Why should anyone stay silent?

• badsectoracula

  yesterday at 9:47 PM

  > he seems to have the most ethical focus

  He wants to build a tech-god kept in chains whose power he parcels out to the unwashed masses he deems worthy like some sort of high priest of intelligence.

  And that is being charitable and going by the interpretation that he actually believes what he says.

  • im3w1l

    yesterday at 9:55 PM

    Well what do you want? Presenting clear, desirable, and achievable visions and trying to build consensus for how AI should develop is crucial at this point in time.

• aftbit

  yesterday at 8:45 PM

  Okay but Muse Glimmer 30B is one of the best small open weight models today, and IMO the best from a US lab (only real comparison is Gemma4 dense right now).

  • tyre

    yesterday at 9:31 PM

    Totally fine with open weight, since other people can provide it and Meta isn’t making money. I’d use an AWS-hosted version.

    • HDBaseT

      yesterday at 10:52 PM

      Zuck said Muse Spark 1.2 should be getting open weights "soon" on a tweet from a few weeks ago.

      The problem inference providers will not be able to get anywhere near the contributor pricing.

  • Bluestein

    yesterday at 9:10 PM

    I am finding Poolside's a decent model.-

    • hadlock

      yesterday at 10:33 PM

      By their own benchmarks it is about 10% lower scoring than Qwen 3.6 35b-a3b, but I've added it to my list. Always looking for MoE to compare to it so we can squeeze more out of our local LLM system.

• devy

  yesterday at 8:59 PM

  > I'm not an Amodei stan, but of all of these people he seems to have the most ethical focus. Again, not everything done perfectly and I have my gripes, but of the leaders of frontier labs, I'll vote with my money.

  Amodei is NO Saint!!! He's the most savvy in drumming up the AI doomsday scenarios and haven't yet to apologized his failed forecast of Claude taking over 90% of the coding jobs.

  • samtheprogram

    yesterday at 9:15 PM

    He didn't say 90% of the coding jobs. He said LLMs would write 90% of the code. As in be LLM generated.

• ls_stats

  yesterday at 9:25 PM

  Is it really hard to understand that there's no good guys? Amodei, Altman, Zuckerberg, Musk, etc. They all sound the same to me.

• redox99

  yesterday at 8:34 PM

  Google, Zuck, Sama, Elon, Amodei (in no particular order).

  They all suck. Pick your poison.

  • kenjackson

    yesterday at 8:36 PM

    They don't all suck equally.

    Here's the order, from best to worst.

    Amodei

    Google

    SamA

    Zuck

    Elon

    • redox99

      yesterday at 8:40 PM

      You can ask 100 people and they'll all give you a different list. It's subjective.

      I think a less personal ranking would be, as a business owner, which of those providers is more dependable? As in, you don't care about evil, just your stuff working. I think maybe OpenAI?

      • kennywinker

        today at 4:54 AM

        An open weight model is literally the only answer. Unless you're ALSO a tech giant, you are a bug to these companies. Every one of these companies will splatter you on their windshield, and destroy your business without even blinking. If the model is open-weight, anyone with GPUs can be your provider.

      • a2ff6eeb0

        yesterday at 8:46 PM

        Google. They have experience operating at scale, and AI is a big enough focus that they won't wind it down. All the big providers are kinda crappy, but if you want reliability, Google is the best option.

        • redox99

          yesterday at 8:57 PM

          Definitely not Google, countless horror stories and infamous for killing stuff. OpenAI is still serving GPT 3.5 turbo as far as I remember.

        • ralusek

          yesterday at 8:56 PM

          Google, famous for not winding things down.

          • xnx

            yesterday at 10:41 PM

            Google search has been around for 27(!) years.

          • a2ff6eeb0

            yesterday at 9:24 PM

            Google, famous for keeping profitable shit making profit.

        • applfanboysbgon

          yesterday at 8:53 PM

          Google has experience working for themselves at scale. Your business should never rely on Google more than it is forced to. Even if it's not something they'll wind down, providing acceptable service to anyone is not on their agenda. GCP speaks for itself...

      • utopcell

        yesterday at 8:58 PM

        > You can ask 100 people and they'll all give you a different list.

        True. With 5 choices you need at least 126 people before you can guarantee that two lists are the same.

        • kennywinker

          today at 4:55 AM

          That's the upper limit, but with correlated data like this dupes can come in way sooner. I bet you don't have to ask ten people before you get a repeat with this topic.

    • cactca

      yesterday at 9:23 PM

      Demis Hassabis is, by any standard, the most ethical of the bunch.

    • scottyah

      yesterday at 8:40 PM

      SamA better than Zuck? Zuck was at least a kid when he made a lot of his bad decisions, and he seems to be getting much better. Sam is on the reverse trajectory.

      • KptMarchewa

        yesterday at 9:01 PM

        I am 100% convinced Zuck is maybe better at masking now, but is exactly the same lizard who wrote

        >>> They "trust me" >>> Dumb fucks

      • Zambyte

        yesterday at 8:49 PM

        Sam is on a delayed trajectory of power, but he surely was not great when he was young either. See: Aaron Swartz calling him a sociopath who could not be trusted, well over a decade ago.

    • runarberg

      yesterday at 10:10 PM

      They all suck beyond any tolerable threshold. Some of them are further away from the threshold. But at this point, how far each is from the tolerable threshold is besides any point and not worth arguing over. The least of five evils is still evil.

    • porphyra

      yesterday at 9:07 PM

      In my personal opinion (this will be controversial and feel free to disagree): Elon is the best.

      * great contributions to many industries including spaceflight, electric cars, and self driving cars. It doesn't even matter if he is the technical mind behind these achievements or if he is just a buffoon that pretends to know the implementation details; the dude has a way of bringing together experts, having the overall vision, and managing them properly to ship amazing stuff.

      * sane and reasonable takes on AI/LLM stuff. I can't really argue with "pursuit of truth" as the guiding principle. Grok talks normally without "Claudlish", has a balanced score on political bias unlike other models, has a low hallucination rate, is the best at dealing with latest news (unlike ChatGPT that refuses to believe new developments and gaslights the user), and they "never silently downgrade intelligence or fall back to other models."

      In contrast, while Dario is doubtless a super smart pioneer in the AI space, his sanctimonious "We know what's good for you" attitude and extreme censorship is really offputting. The lengths to which he tries to ban or hamstring open models seems like an underhanded way to defeat competition. If he were to succeed, it would be a big setback to the thriving ecosystem of open models and hamper the development of the entire industry.

      • alex1138

        today at 3:29 AM

        I'm upvoting you purely because I'm sick of comments being made in good faith getting an automatic downvote

      • billypilgrim

        yesterday at 10:17 PM

        Grok? The model that was deliberately adjusted to not say that Elon Musk or Trump spread misinformation? No idea how people can actually believe that Musk is interested in the truth. https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/23/grok-3-appears-to-have-bri...

        • porphyra

          yesterday at 10:21 PM

          It seems that a rogue engineer poisoned the prompt in that instance. But the fact that they keep the system prompt open is nice. Generally I am biased towards favoring more freedom and openness rather than clamping it down in the name of safety.

• anukin

  yesterday at 10:43 PM

  Anthropic is not exactly a saint either. I had a recent issue where they denied fable credits even though I was hospitalized during the claim period. I have annual plan with them. As much as everyone hates sama, I think OpenAI is much more of a company with good marketing and sales team.

• optimalsolver

  yesterday at 8:30 PM

  If it was up to Dario we'd all be banned from using open-weight models, and we'd have to be investigated for PRC connections before sending our allotted five API queries a week.

• jansport123

  yesterday at 10:26 PM

  no loyalty to any company - let them compete and then we get to choose.

• ballon_monkey

  yesterday at 10:45 PM

  I'll happily pay for Grok, it's a great model. 4.6 often does better than Anthropic at coding and analysis where Anthropic fails for 'oh no cyber security, don't ask me to check if you're redacting passwords correctly in logs'. And it has no problem telling the truth where OpenAI / Anthropic don't want to upset the people on the left and will happily lie or avoid hard truths.

  Edit: I get it. It's a hard pill to swallow. I understand people don't like Musk or Zuck. But it doesn't change the fact that you're being lied to and brainwashed.

• dimgl

  yesterday at 10:10 PM

  I'll use both Muse Spark and Grok.

• spiderfarmer

  yesterday at 9:52 PM

  Same with Grok.

• loeg

  yesterday at 8:25 PM

  "Avoid generic tangents" / "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances."

  • _diyar

    yesterday at 8:32 PM

    How is this a tangential annoyance or a generic tangent?

    > Meta announces they have a new model, demonstrating its capabilities.

    > Parent comment states „regardless of this model‘s specific capabilities, if I can avoid it I will.“

    • loeg

      yesterday at 8:35 PM

      Grandparent comment has zero to do with the article. It's just GP generically bitching about Meta. (Your "quote" of the comment does not appear anywhere in the actual comment.)

  • reaperducer

    yesterday at 8:32 PM

    "Avoid generic tangents" / "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances."

    That's pretty much 90% of HN these days.

    Apple releases a new iPhone? Here comes the flood of decade-old complaints about long-discontinued Mac butterfly keyboards and walled gardens.

    Microsoft releases a new version of Windows? Here come the gripes about Azure.

    Google changes something in GMail? Play Store!

    It's like there's an army of bots out there determined to reduce the productivity of the Western tech bubble by diverting everyone into endless circular arguments about absolutely nothing of relevance to the topic at hand.

  • wetpaws

    yesterday at 8:44 PM

    [dead]

• inferniac

  yesterday at 10:34 PM

  anthropic people have genuine delusions of grandeur, in a way they the worst of all the ai companies, definitely most cult-like

• greatgib

  yesterday at 10:31 PM

  I hate Meta main business, but you have to admit that on the non business related and open source side, they have released amazing things that changed the world.

  React for example.

  And we could easily guess that there wouldn't have been so much open source models, and grand public experiments and free tools if llama models were not release to the general public.

• bradlys

  yesterday at 9:07 PM

  What is the point of this comment?

  • jansport123

    yesterday at 10:27 PM

    someone expressing their view of meta which is on point by the way.

• TacticalCoder

  yesterday at 9:14 PM

  Meta and Microsoft are two of the absolute worst evil companies on earth and Amodei is trying very hard to join them.

  These Effective Altruists are despicable people: a bunch of thieves working to line up their own pockets while posturing as a force of good.

  Remember that they schemed to not only present SBF as the 2nd coming of Christ (including in the NYT and in Forbes) but to also give him a voice after his scam had been uncovered. Thankfully, the judge didn't have any of this Effective Altruist bullshit.

  SBF invested 500 millions of misappropriated funds in his buddy from the EA movement's Anthropic company (and, thankfully, the judge forced those shares to be sold: so SBF didn't get to be a billionaire).

  You cannot hate enough people who say that harming others for the greater good is justified.

  Then of course, already mentioned in this thread, there's the whole Epstein/Amodei's "I'm in the porn business" wife connection (where you don't need to squint much to see young women abused).

  These kind of people are the absolute worst scum on this earth.

• fouc

  yesterday at 8:36 PM

  How have they had a negative impact? How about google?

  • Yajirobe

    yesterday at 8:47 PM

    Enabled genocide in Myanmar

[dead]

[dead]

I declined the use of cookies and everything went black. No content at all. Dissapointed.

All people here care about is hating Meta. Just look at the top voted comment. No one cares about the merits of the model, etc. HN has become nothing but an echo chamber.

If it's from meta, pit h in the bin.

They could have just called the article "struggling to remain relevant"

• tonyhart7

  yesterday at 8:20 PM

  Meta is the last big tech come to AI race, so I would give prop to them for catching up