Meta’s Long-Awaited AI Model is Finally Here. But Can It Make Money?

Almost 10 months after Meta spent billions of dollars to bring in Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang as the centerpiece of Mark Zuckerberg’s AI overhaul, the company finally revealed Muse Spark on Wednesday, its first new model since the transition. One big question is — will users pay for it?

While rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have spearheaded the artificial intelligence boom with powerful models and popular chatbots as well as other services, Meta has been a hefty spender on AI but has yet to show any new revenue streams from it.

In June, Meta shelled out more than $14 billion to hire Wang and some of his top engineers and researchers, soon creating Meta Superintelligence Labs as a new elite unit. And in January, the company told Wall Street it plans to pour between $115 billion and $135 billion this year into capital expenditures, nearly double its 2025 capex figure.

“It’s been a year of basically no releases and a lot of hiring, and then the capex worries for this year are pronounced,” said Morningstar analyst Malik Ahmed Khan, in an interview. “I think Meta had to show investors and operators they have been working on something of substance. That’s the first step.”

Meta’s second step, Khan said, is making the model work and figuring out how to monetize it.

Muse Spark, Meta’s newly released model, is proprietary, a sharp change from its predecessor family of models called Llama, which consisted of open-source offerings, though the company said it does plan to eventually release some open-source versions. Zuckerberg shook up his company’s strategy after the April release of Llama 4, which failed to captivate developers.

Arun Chandrasekaran, an analyst at Gartner, described the move as a “major shift” and said it “signals an intention to move away” from the Llama brand.

Taking a cue from other frontier AI labs, Meta aims to eventually offer third parties paid API access to Muse Spark after an initial “private API preview” with “select parties.”

But Meta is very late to the game. OpenAI and Anthropic are collectively valued at well over $1 trillion, thanks to the popularity of their models and services, and Google has embedded Gemini across its portfolio of apps and products, while also selling access to the Gemini models via its cloud unit.

Meta’s AI technology, to succeed, has to be good enough to compete with top models while also providing a novel business opportunity.

Andrew Boone, an analyst at Citizens, said Meta’s clear advantage is the more than 3 billion people who use Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp every month. And the business opportunity for Meta has nothing to do with trying to attract developers, who currently swarm to OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and a host of Chinese models, but rather to focus on its core market: advertising.

“That’s the crown jewel, that’s what needs to continue to improve,” said Boone, who recommends buying the stock.

Khan shares that sentiment.

“I believe that would be the killer use case from Meta’s perspective,” Khan said, with the goal being to “make ads more engaging and improve targeting.”

Advertising accounted for 98% of Meta’s $200 billion in revenue last year. The company has made numerous efforts to diversify its business, most notably spending tens of billions of dollars to try to make the metaverse happen. But Meta’s ad model is the one thing that’s consistently worked, and the company’s investments in AI have served to improve its targeting capabilities and provide better tools for marketers.

Khan said that as advertisers see returns on investment from their Meta spending, they reinvest that money back into more ads on the platform. So it makes sense that they’d be willing to pay for AI services if they can get even better results.

Meta declined to comment about its API plans beyond its initial announcement.