Muse Spark 1.1 • Hacker News Board

Re: Muse Spark 1.1

#101

Post by jacobgold » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

Maybe Zuck should double down on his "spoiler" role with models rather than compete head-to-head.

He doesn't have to match Anthropic or OpenAI model revenue if he can deflate theirs by 99%.

All he has to do is keep spending a few billion dollars developing frontier models, release them as open weights, and turn coding models into a commodity. He also needs a good OSS reference harness to match. Very few people are in a position to do this and for it to make business sense.

That's quite likely where things are headed regardless, and he could speed it up significantly.

We should all hope models move from proprietary products to commodities the way compilers did.

This may be one of the best things Zuck could do for the world.

Re: Muse Spark 1.1

#102

Post by throwaway27448 » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #82

throwaway27448 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You've implicitly assumed here that AI systems will always be worse at contextualizing and framing questions than the average engineer. How would they know what to ask or contextualize if they don't know what the user wants?

By asking the user to explain what they want whenever there's ambiguity. Plus all the other things that software engineers generally have not learned to a professional level even if they picked up the basics on the job by osmosis, because figuring out the customer's needs (and what they'll pay you for which may be different) is the job of a business analyst, a PM, or a UX researcher, and those are different skills an…

And when an LLM runs up costs for a small company by getting them to lease a bunch of infrastructure they don't need, who can they sue? A contractor or advisor you can't hold liable is just a liability.

Re: Muse Spark 1.1

#103

Post by ben_w » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

throwaway27448 wrote: post #102

ben_w wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By asking the user to explain what they want whenever there's ambiguity. Plus all the other things that software engineers generally have not learned to a professional level even if they picked up the basics on the job by osmosis, because figuring out the customer's needs (and what they'll pay you for which may be different) is the job of a business analyst, a PM, or a UX researcher, and those are different skills an…

And when an LLM runs up costs for a small company by getting them to lease a bunch of infrastructure they don't need, who can they sue? A contractor or advisor you can't hold liable is just a liability.

Same person they'd sue if they used any other power tool themselves and it didn't work out right.

Plus, this is software "Engineering" we're talking about, which famously gets scare quotes in comparison to all the other forms of engineering because unlike them we don't have as standard things like professional liability insurance to cover serious professional errors of judgment the way someone who signs off on a bridge that collapses would have.

Re: Muse Spark 1.1

#104

Post by paytonjjones » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #90

paytonjjones wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we'll start to see that pattern with every new release. Tool use likely changes rapidly, so the newest, rather than most intelligent, model may always have an edge.

What you mean.. The tools are all just invoking bash and terminal/cli cmds and http requests. Paradigms that have existed and stayed mostly unchanged for decades.

These do make up a huge % of tool calls, but I don't think these make up a huge % of tool call failures.

I see models fail on tool calls that involve API requests to a specific API, internal or cloned Makefile calls, npm run commands, etc.

Re: Muse Spark 1.1

#105

Post by anthonypasq » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #53

anthonypasq wrote: post #46

Everyone has been loving to shit on the Alexander Wang acquisition but this seems legitimately impressive to me? Meta's AI org when from a total mismanaged dumpster fire for multiple years to delivering a competitive model in less than a year on essentially their first try?

How is it their first try? They were leading the race with Llama 3.x a few years ago.

As far as i remember, the entire AI org was essentially gutted and replaced with whoever Wang wanted to hire, and tbh that org completely failed to train llama 4 and I honestly doubt whatever techniques they used to ship llama 3 are at all relevant now. That was before reasoning models and the heavy emphasis on RL/post-training.

so yeah, this is essentially their first try with a completely new org.

Re: Muse Spark 1.1

#106

Post by anthonypasq » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 4:11 PM UTC

postalcoder wrote: post #76

anthonypasq wrote: post #46

Everyone has been loving to shit on the Alexander Wang acquisition but this seems legitimately impressive to me? Meta's AI org when from a total mismanaged dumpster fire for multiple years to delivering a competitive model in less than a year on essentially their first try?

Not their first try. There’s been reporting about how they’ve kept pushing their model releases back because of underwhelming performance.

... i dont think internal iteration counts dude. thats just called in-development.

Re: Muse Spark 1.1

#107

Post by simonw » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

I had a few days of preview access, which was long enough to put together a plugin for LLM. You can try the model out in the terminal like this:

  uv tool install llm
  llm install llm-meta-ai
  llm keys set meta-ai
  # paste API key here
  llm -m meta-ai/muse-spark-1.1 "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle"

Here's the result: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...

For comparison, here's the pelican I got from Muse Spark 1: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/8/muse-spark/

Re: Muse Spark 1.1

#108

Post by fmind-dev » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

Glad to see Meta back on track! Users will benefit greatly from this competition.

Re: Muse Spark 1.1

#109

Post by ffsm8 » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #50

How is every company able to show itself at the top of every benchmark?

They're being called "trust me bro benchmarks" for a reason ( ･ั ﹏･ั )

Re: Muse Spark 1.1

#110

Post by simonw » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

linkjuice4all wrote: post #35

cpt100 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think it is definitely great. Having said that, I am still debating in my mind whether the volume of software engineers needed in the AI era is going to increase or decrease because of all of these advancements. On the one hand, because it is easy to build products, more and more people will build. And more and more products and features will be built. However, a lot of people who are non-technical will also…

I see some similarities to 3D printing here. It’s great that everyone can make their own toothbrush holder (or whatever) but I’m probably not going to pay for someone’s weekend project. I’m “seeing” more devs stepping into the SendCutSend stage where they’re cleaning up/fixing/productizing vibe coded projects so maybe there will be some new demand in that space?

A comparison I find useful here is Excel (and spreadsheets in general). Those enabled huge numbers of non-programmers to build software-like things, while the demand for expert developers grew enormously at the same time.

I'm hoping vibe-coding plays out the same way.