Meta launches AI model as Zuckerberg champions open-weight push

Menlo Park (California): Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for lower US barriers for open-source AI to better compete with Chinese rivals as the social media giant released a new open-weight model on Monday and said more would follow soon. The new model, Muse Glimmer, is smaller than leading AI models from rivals and is instead designed to run agentic tasks on a Mac or PC with a single graphics card, aiming to tap demand for AI systems that run directly on people’s devices. “We’ve got even bigger models that are coming soon,” Zuckerberg said in a video post accompanying his 14-page essay titled The Future is for Everyone in which he championed spreading AI rather than leaving it in the hands of a few. “The notion AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic.” Zuckerberg’s statement marks the latest show of support for open-weight AI, which is gaining traction as businesses grow wary of ballooning AI bills and worry about recent cybersecurity incidents involving models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta. Open-weight models are typically cheaper than leading models from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. Th­­­­ey also come with publicly accessible core components for easy customisation, unlike closed models that companies keep fully under their control. Those controls are in the spotlight after Hugging Face, the AI coding collaboration hacked by a rogue OpenAI model, was forced to use a Chinese open-weight model to defend against the attack because closed-source models have curbs on cybersecurity use. Chinese startups are leading the race for open-weight models, with Moonshot’s Kimi K3, Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max and DeepSeek’s V4-Flash rivaling the performance of top US systems. By contrast, the leading models from US developers OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google are closed-weight. Shares of Meta, which have fallen about 10pc so far this year, were up nearly 3pc in premarket trading on Monday. Polic