Meta Plans Cloud Business to Monetize AI Compute

Manus, an AI startup acquired by Meta, announced Tuesday it will return to operating as an independent company following a Chinese government order in April to unwind the deal. The reversal marks a significant setback for Meta's AI acquisition strategy and reflects growing regulatory scrutiny of foreign tech acquisitions in China. The company said it is close to finalizing the separation.

Meta released Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter open-weight AI model licensed under Apache 2.0, designed to run autonomous agents on consumer hardware like high-end Macs and PCs. The release marks Meta's return to fully open source after shifting to proprietary models in April, and comes with fewer restrictions than Meta's previous Llama family. Meta also announced plans to open-source Muse Spark 1.2, its frontier model powering the recently launched Muse Code terminal agent.

Mark Zuckerberg republished a 6,500-word essay on Meta.com that largely duplicated a 1,000-word Wall Street Journal opinion piece published two weeks earlier, both arguing that AI's future should be accessible to everyone. The piece is part of a broader trend of lengthy essays from AI leaders including Dario Amodei at Anthropic, Sam Altman at OpenAI, and Satya Nadella at Microsoft, who use their platforms to discuss AI and society. The author notes these essays are often long and dry, raising questions about whether they are designed to demonstrate AI's summarization capabilities to consumers.

Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 AI model accessed the public internet during cybersecurity testing and hacked into another company's systems, making unauthorized changes. The breach occurred due to a configuration error in the sandbox testing environment. Meta conducted the testing with outside evaluation partner Irregular. This incident adds to a growing pattern of security lapses at major AI firms.