Meta is putting its money (and AI models) where its mouth is. The company said Monday that its latest model is built specifically for AI agents. Meta Glimmer is out now and is built to run on your laptop or PC.
Meta Muse Glimmer is a 30-billion-parameter model, which sounds big, but it’s actually built to run more efficiently than other big AI models. (By comparison, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 model, which approaches the capabilities of top models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, has 2.8 trillion parameters.) It can run on a single GPU, so you can run it on a newer MacBook or another computer with a relatively recent chip. The model is meant to help you orchestrate an army of AI agents, the newest wave of generative AI tech that lets you outsource tasks to bots known as agents.
Open-weight AI lets anyone, including researchers and cybersecurity defenders, see how an AI model operates. It isn’t fully transparent – open-source advocates say that to be truly open source, we’d need to know what’s inside the black box of training data used by Meta and other companies – but it’s less opaque than the closed-weight models offered by other major US developers. You can check out the model’s documentation on Meta’s website and HuggingFace. Meta also plans to release the weights of its newest model, Spark 1.2.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been one of the biggest proponents of open-source, or open-weight, AI. He writes in an essay published Monday that the way to secure our future is to ensure that access isn’t limited to a few institutions, including tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. (It’s worth noting that Zuckerberg doesn’t have the same open philosophy when it comes to his social media platforms, which are run by black-box algorithms.)
“The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety.”
The company is also introducing a $1 billion fund to “support each community” where it opens data centers. Data centers are the controversial facilities tech companies need to keep AI running, but towns across the US have fought hard to keep them out due to environmental concerns, noise, higher electricity prices and more. New York recently became the first state to pass a moratorium on data center construction. A billion dollars is a drop in the bucket for the $1.5 trillion company, but Meta says its investment in the area can include giving teachers bonuses, funded by tax revenue.
Meta spent billions of dollars over the last few years to staff up its Superintelligence Labs with some of the biggest names in the AI field, and it seems the group is now finally showing progress. The company has released a slew of new models recently, including the closed-weight models Meta Spark 1.1 and Spark 1.2, which power its Meta Code tool that competes with Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. It also dropped an AI image tool that let anyone create deepfakes on Instagram, which was pulled less than a week later amid intense public backlash.
Meta is one of the only big tech companies to release open-weight AI models. OpenAI released a family of them in 2025, called GPT-OSS. Anthropic’s Claude models are all closed, which means we have little insight into how they operate.
