Meta's smart glasses are getting a major AI boost, but it doesn't address its biggest problem

• Meta just debuted a new AI: Muse Spark
• This improved LLM more closely matches ChatGPT and Gemini
• It's launching on Meta's smart glasses and social platforms soon

Meta’s VR scaleback came with the promise of renewed effort in its glasses and AI divisions, and today we’re seeing the first glimpse of what this focus means, as Meta debuts Muse Spark.

A new Meta LLM, Muse Spark is described as offering “competitive performance” across a range of metrics including reasoning, health, and agentic tasks. Meta shared performance scores for Muse Spark that shows its performance in these areas is solidly amongst the pack — either matching, surpassing or being just behind its Gemini and ChatGPT competitors in each of those fields.

Meta’s announcement report gets quite into the weeds about the testing, scaling, and training Muse Spark received with the promise that we should look forward to “increasingly capable models” on the horizon.

The report also highlights the safety of Muse Spark, such as its refusal to be used to discuss chemical and biological weapons, which might bring this new AI into the government-usage conversation dominated by OpenAI and Anthropic.

Regardless, the interesting aspect of this new AI is that it’ll soon be rolling out to Meta glasses and software users — at least in the US where Meta usually introduces new software features first.

Meta promises that Muse Spark will debut on Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart specs “in the coming weeks” which should bring some serious performance boosts.

Exactly what this boost will look like is yet to be seen in practice on Meta’s glasses, but we have experienced the Muse Spark update on other platforms — and we expect the AI glasses roll-out might see improvements to conversational performance, image and video editing (perhaps with improved generative elements), and improved health data assistance.

Though this comes on the back of the growing backlash to Meta’s AI and glasses, it doesn’t seem to address some of the biggest concerns folks have (primarily data privacy, especially for images and videos). Perhaps the major improvements and utility of the new Meta AI will win people over, however, as Meta’s lacking ability compared to its rivals was a growing frustration — that does at least seem to have been addressed.

We’ll have to wait and see how Muse Spark unfolds, but some of my Meta interest is returning. Let’s see if it can live up to, and maintain, the hype.

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