Meta's war mode, and its first AI model in a year:
Meta has spent the last year buying its way into the AI agent race, acquiring Manus for over $2 billion and investing $14.3 billion in Scale AI. Now it has launched a proprietary model called Muse Spark, closing the door on the open-source playbook that made Llama famous.
Breaking down the buzz:
The logic behind the acquisitions is easier to follow than the headlines suggest. Manus, a Singapore-based AI agent startup that reached $100 million in annualized revenue in just eight months, brought Meta a team capable of building agents that execute complex tasks including research, coding and data analysis. Scale AI, where Meta invested $14.3 billion in June 2025 in a deal that brought founder Alexandr Wang onto Meta's AI leadership team, runs the data labeling pipelines that make AI models smarter in the first place. Layering Manus's agent execution capability on top of Scale's training data infrastructure and Llama's model base produces something that looks, at least on paper, like a vertically integrated AI stack.
The latest product from that stack is Muse Spark, a proprietary closed model and a departure from the open-source identity that made Llama a developer favourite, driven partly by the fact that Chinese models from Alibaba and DeepSeek began outpacing Llama 4 on general knowledge and coding benchmarks by early 2026. Wang confirmed the team rebuilt Meta's AI stack from scratch over nine months and said future versions will be open-sourced.
Why this matters:
Meta's AI pivot is happening at serious cost, with capital expenditure reaching $70 to $72 billion in 2025 and total expenses projected to grow faster still in 2026, so that spend needs to translate into revenue. The Manus acquisition is its best attempt to make it do so. With 200 million WhatsApp Business users on the platform, bundling AI agent capabilities into a subscription product gives Meta a direct monetisation path beyond advertising, which is both cyclical and increasingly contested.
The bull case is that Muse Spark earns developer credibility and Manus agents embed into WhatsApp Business workflows at scale, giving Meta a fundamentally different revenue profile by year-end. The bear case is that $135 billion in projected capital expenditure produces a model that still trails OpenAI and Anthropic, and an agent product that loses its identity inside a 75,000-person organisation.
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