Meta is one of those companies where, if there is anything remotely comparable, I'm happy to pay more to not use them. They've had a profoundly negative impact on society and Zuckerberg is not who I want controlling the future at the top of AI.
I feel the same about Grok w/ Elon. I will pay extra to use someone else.
I'm not an Amodei stan, but of all of these people he seems to have the most ethical focus. Again, not everything done perfectly and I have my gripes, but of the leaders of frontier labs, I'll vote with my money.
And, yeah, I wouldn't trust sama to watch my bag while I went to the bathroom.
Strong disagree with the Anthropic being good at all part. This is not defending anyone else, but…
Anthropic leadership repeatedly presents themselves as uniquely morally qualified to steward agi and decide how humanity should get access to it. Yet they have repeatedly failed basic morality tests.
Pirating books for financial gain. The newer Sony/Warner music case shows this is pattern behavior.
Aggressively scraping other people's works, despite the authors' requests not to do so.
Then applying massive usage restrictions on their own work.
And probably the most disqualifying is backing away from their own hard AI safety commitments.
Yeah this would be a great point if it were true and they didn’t give Mythos access to companies to fix bugs, which they did and have.
It’s genuinely a difficult question. Not black and white. The models are really good at finding bugs, as demonstrated by people using Fable to reverse engineer. People make it sound like he’s just making it up.
Dario's "ethical" look is also kinda sus. I hate to use ad hominem, but the dude's wife literally pitched a porn film to Epstein even after he was a convicted registered sex offender [1]. Dario is also really sinophobic (it is commonly claimed in Chinese AI circles that his former employment at Baidu triggered him so much that he harbors a personal grudge against the entire race).
Funny. Dario seems like the biggest snake in the industry to me and has leaned the hardest into doom marketing out of all of the influential leaders. With Altman (or Google), it's a transaction, and that's something I can live with.
I just don’t see how people have looked at what has happened with Mythos and the deluge of fixes from companies, then come to this conclusion.
He has a really hard job. He errs on the side of conservatism in releasing and then people get Really Mad.
Safeguards on cybersecurity are not great for Anthropic revenue! As evidenced by people getting pissed, moving to Sol, and them having a smaller market for what Fable can do.
It’s clearly bad for revenue and not great advertising to say, “you can’t use this but here is a nerfed version that will annoy you and not solve important problems.”
Gotta be honest that I’m tired of the “I hate Zuck and Meta so much” comments every time Meta does anything. Ditto Elon/X. Fine, I get it. I don’t like Zuck either. But the post is about Muse Spark 1.3. What do you think about that? If you don’t like it because Meta made it, then maybe just don’t use it and stay silent.
Technology doesn't just spring into being, there will always be comments on the organizations that developed it. If you don't like them or find them repetitive, it is far easier to collapse them and move on then bend a stranger to your will
What I'm tired of is the top story (or five) on HN every day announcing Spark Opus Fable Grok Gemini v4.1i3-F. Like, who actually cares? Are people excited for the new benchmarks? Is it interesting to read the model cards? And look, part of my job is to use these things and part of my job is to pick EC2 servers, too. The front page of HN is increasingly resembling one of those endless AWS pricing lists.
And yeah, I don't like any of the people or companies building LLMs either. At least the griping is somewhat interesting by comparison. The model isn't news. The news on Hacker News is that other professionals feel the same way.
I think a lot of people are curious where the "knee" is on gains and productivity, particularly in the agentic space, which is where the real value is. A lot of us are being forced to shoe-horn this stuff into existing products, and knowing how much of the task the model can do now, vs having to build a complex custom harness, is valuable information to have. A year and a half ago it took our dev maybe six weeks of struggling with LangChain to approximate what Claude + MCP server can do today. The MCP server took us perhaps 2 days to build and 3 more to get it production ready. Today that MCP server gets 2-3 commits per month. I absolutely want to know when new models come out.
As for smaller models, we run a pretty wide variety of agentic workload doing data enrichment and, increasingly, a bunch of evaluation jobs to alert a human to review certain scenarios etc. These all run on the smaller 27B and 35B class models, and tooling behavior has improved DRAMATICALLY since april. The latest qwen 3.8 model has a 95% success tool call rate during internal testing and about 94% real world. That's about 3% better than the 35B-A3B model we're using today, but the 35B MoE is so much faster then 3% is worth the trade-off.
I get it, but the underlying problem is: we don't have a society-wide, effective solution to counterbalancing extractive systems. Lacking a reliable label, we have to constantly signal what's on the ingredients list.
Okay, but the comment I reacted to was not that. It was simply (paraphrasing) “I won’t use anything from Zuck/Meta.” If it had been, “Be careful because I have insider information that Zuck/Meta is using Muse Spark to do <insert-nefarious-thing-here>, and here’s my substantiation for that…” I’d be okay with it. That’s interesting information that moves a conversation forward. But it wasn’t. It was just content-free “I don’t like Zuck” nonsense.
Okay but Muse Glimmer 30B is one of the best small open weight models today, and IMO the best from a US lab (only real comparison is Gemma4 dense right now).
> I'm not an Amodei stan, but of all of these people he seems to have the most ethical focus. Again, not everything done perfectly and I have my gripes, but of the leaders of frontier labs, I'll vote with my money.
Amodei is NO Saint!!! He's the most savvy in drumming up the AI doomsday scenarios and haven't yet to apologized his failed forecast of Claude taking over 90% of the coding jobs.
You can ask 100 people and they'll all give you a different list. It's subjective.
I think a less personal ranking would be, as a business owner, which of those providers is more dependable? As in, you don't care about evil, just your stuff working. I think maybe OpenAI?
Google. They have experience operating at scale, and AI is a big enough focus that they won't wind it down. All the big providers are kinda crappy, but if you want reliability, Google is the best option.
Google has experience working for themselves at scale. Your business should never rely on Google more than it is forced to. Even if it's not something they'll wind down, providing acceptable service to anyone is not on their agenda. GCP speaks for itself...
SamA better than Zuck? Zuck was at least a kid when he made a lot of his bad decisions, and he seems to be getting much better. Sam is on the reverse trajectory.
Sam is on a delayed trajectory of power, but he surely was not great when he was young either. See: Aaron Swartz calling him a sociopath who could not be trusted, well over a decade ago.
In my personal opinion (this will be controversial and feel free to disagree): Elon is the best.
* great contributions to many industries including spaceflight, electric cars, and self driving cars. It doesn't even matter if he is the technical mind behind these achievements or if he is just a buffoon that pretends to know the implementation details; the dude has a way of bringing together experts, having the overall vision, and managing them properly to ship amazing stuff.
* sane and reasonable takes on AI/LLM stuff. I can't really argue with "pursuit of truth" as the guiding principle. Grok talks normally without "Claudlish", has a balanced score on political bias unlike other models, has a low hallucination rate, is the best at dealing with latest news (unlike ChatGPT that refuses to believe new developments and gaslights the user), and they "never silently downgrade intelligence or fall back to other models."
In contrast, while Dario is doubtless a super smart pioneer in the AI space, his sanctimonious "We know what's good for you" attitude and extreme censorship is really offputting. The lengths to which he tries to ban or hamstring open models seems like an underhanded way to defeat competition. If he were to succeed, it would be a big setback to the thriving ecosystem of open models and hamper the development of the entire industry.
If it was up to Dario we'd all be banned from using open-weight models, and we'd have to be investigated for PRC connections before sending our allotted five API queries a week.
Grandparent comment has zero to do with the article. It's just GP generically bitching about Meta. (Your "quote" of the comment does not appear anywhere in the actual comment.)
"Avoid generic tangents" / "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances."
That's pretty much 90% of HN these days.
Apple releases a new iPhone? Here comes the flood of decade-old complaints about long-discontinued Mac butterfly keyboards and walled gardens.
Microsoft releases a new version of Windows? Here come the gripes about Azure.
Google changes something in GMail? Play Store!
It's like there's an army of bots out there determined to reduce the productivity of the Western tech bubble by diverting everyone into endless circular arguments about absolutely nothing of relevance to the topic at hand.
Meta and Microsoft are two of the absolute worst evil companies on earth and Amodei is trying very hard to join them.
These Effective Altruists are despicable people: a bunch of thieves working to line up their own pockets while posturing as a force of good.
Remember that they schemed to not only present SBF as the 2nd coming of Christ (including in the NYT and in Forbes) but to also give him a voice after his scam had been uncovered. Thankfully, the judge didn't have any of this Effective Altruist bullshit.
SBF invested 500 millions of misappropriated funds in his buddy from the EA movement's Anthropic company (and, thankfully, the judge forced those shares to be sold: so SBF didn't get to be a billionaire).
You cannot hate enough people who say that harming others for the greater good is justified.
Then of course, already mentioned in this thread, there's the whole Epstein/Amodei's "I'm in the porn business" wife connection (where you don't need to squint much to see young women abused).
These kind of people are the absolute worst scum on this earth.
It would be very embarrassing for any lab to benchmaxx the pelican on bicycle svg prompt, since it would be very easy to detect it by varying the prompt.
Is there a reason these pelicans always have roughly the same composition (side-view, 2d, biking right, flat ground beneath, etc)? I don't see any of that detailed in the prompt, yet they all seem to generate roughly the same image of differing quality.
The more generic your prompt, the more generic the response. It's a regression to the "mean" of the training data aka GIGO for AI.
It's like when you ask your average person off the street to draw a house - it'll almost always be square with a triangle roof, one door, and two windows.
In the pelican/bike example, it's probably a bit of a self-perpetuating snowball too. If the earliest examples were bike left-to-right, flat ground, etc. then they are also being scraped up in future LLMs.
I sincerely believe I've never had a single original thought™ in my whole life.
There is this scene in the HBO series Westworld where a "host" says some words in sequence which is shown on a display as she says it. Of course, even me thinking of this scene and connecting it to your comment was not original, someone else clearly had the same programming as me.
A medium blog post says
> Pair what with me?” — the moment Maeve (a humanoid android) uttered those words in Westworld (Season 1, Episode 6: “The Adversary”), something clicked. Not for the average viewer, but for me, a STEM educator and AI enthusiast who, just weeks earlier, had read Stephen Wolfram’s seminal essay, What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
It's my impression that it's common in western culture, where text is read left to right, and timelines are visualized as going from left to right, to also animate things going from left to right, since westerners thus have an instinct that "right = forward", so it "feels right" (familiar). I wonder to which degree this is reflected in the training data? And if you'd be more likely to get left-facing pelicans if you prompted it in Hebrew, Arabic or another right-to-left language?
Someone studied this (among other thigns): https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html . Pelicans on bikes always face right in this test, but other animals on other transportation methods sometimes face left.
I was going to ask the exact same question earlier but deleted it after thinking “I’m sure Simon has done some sort of discussion on this.” Since it does seem novel to you, too, it would be really interesting to read more about this phenomenon.
Search Google Images for "bicycle". Almost all bicycle product shots are staged the same way: side view, going left-to-right. It makes sense to me that given that skew in the training data, the model grounds itself in the bicycle.
and furthermore, this is because the drivetrain is ~always on the right side of the bike - if you want to inspect or admire a bicycle you look at the right side, as you might look under the hood of a car.
(Why the drivetrain is on the right, I don't know. But most bike parts follow open standards so it's quite entrenched.)
Since most languages read from left to right, rightward movement tends to read as forward progression. So when showing a bicycle in side profile, having it face right feels more naturally like it’s moving forward.
> and furthermore, this is because the drivetrain is ~always on the right side of the bike
While I'm sure this factors into things for advertisements for bike components, there is also just a general preference that westerners have for left-to-right motion. Not just in bike ads, but all ads with (or suggesting) movement. And also not just ads, but movies where directors believe left-to-right motion is associated with progression and right-to-left motion is regressive.
Yes, I do a thing where I ask the machine to generate responses in the form of a lizard talking to a cat. The lizard is always a green gecko and the cat is always orange, which I never specify.
Did any LLM so far draw pelican knees correctly and have them bend in opposite direction from human knees? Knees of many animals bend opposite to humans.
Did any LLM draw the front bicycle wheel correctly? ie. center of front wheel slightly AHEAD of steering wheel axis. This is done for bicycle stability.
I wonder, given Simons reputation in AI benchmarking, whether model providers try to train or tweak their models to perform better at drawing bicycles and pelicans?
I started using Spark 1.2 for development because if you're willing to let Meta train on your data it was dirt cheap and was actually really pleasantly surprised with it. It's not a frontier model by any means, but for work that didn't require a top of the line model, I really enjoyed using it.
I'm anthropomorphizing it a bit, but it felt like it knew its weaknesses and didn't try to impose it's opinions on me. What I mean by that is that it did what I told it and if there was something unexpected in the code that it put out it was often because I gave it ambiguous or conflicting instructions. It didn't try to go above and beyond and just acted like a tool, which is what I want from a coding agent 90%+ of the time. I also felt that it did a much better job of following established patterns in my code than many of the other current models do. I'm a huge fan of OpenAI's models and Spark 1.2 is what I expected 5.6 Luna to be.
I'm curious and a little excited to use 1.3, but honestly a little worried that as Meta pushes for better benchmarks that Spark will start to fall into the trap of trying to be "helpful" in ways I don't want it to be.
Tangential, but when I first started using Spark 1.2, it made me realize how much I miss 5.3 Codex. That model was the peak of coding models, IMO, in that it knew how to write good code, but didn't try to overstep or be "helpful" in unexpected ways. That got me thinking about how the major labs seem to be stepping away from coding focused models toward more general purpose ones and how I can't help but feel like that's a mistake.
I agree that some of the smarter models are actually worse. I hope they take a model that's good enough--there are many--and just try to get it chatjimmy.ai speed.
I have to think that's the future, somehow, and I'm really excited about it.
>I started using Spark 1.2 for development because if you're willing to let Meta train on your data it was dirt cheap
its free on opencode and i use it for personal projects. most of my personal projects are AI generated since its personal projects. nothing important are on them. it is hilarious if Meta is training their AI model with AI generated code.
A model that (at least in benchmarks) is getting closer to SOTA. A clear separation between what’s used to improve their products and what’s not (at least this is what they claim).
Good job Meta! Seriously. This is almost making me forget about the 18B$ lawsuit for children social media addiction.
DeepSWE scores 75.4 - that's the best score so far. And it's crazy cheap!
Google held the top a few hours today with Gemini 3.8 Flash, but now second to Spark 1.3. All this competition will drive prices down!
With the contributor pricing being more than 10x cheaper than the standard, that would make it best and cheapest on the DeepSWE leaderboard! It feels fast in my experience too. LLMs keep improving at an insane pace.
Muse 1.2 wrote a terrible "smart summaries" extension for my pi setup. It was sending every single steamed chunk for summarization instead of waiting for the full CMD.
This is an error I would expect from sonnet 4, not a model that was supposedly just a few points behind sol.
So one model is "Not used to improve our products" and is 10-20 times more expensive to the "Used to improve our products"-model.
Given this is Meta, my immediate assumptions that one is cheap because it lets me "be the product". I know I'm rushing to conclusions but there is zero trust here. The brain will do its thing. And the wording here is giving the brains a lot of wiggle room.
What is the confusion? They directly state that you are the product if you use their discounted offering. It isn't an assumption that should lead you to this, it is Meta's very direct communication that should lead you to this
I think it's more that the "not used to improve our models" is expensive because companies need that. It's simple price differentiation.
In other words, it's not that Meta really wants your data and they're willing to pay top dollar for it. It's that companies really don't want Meta to have their data and they're willing to pay top dollar for that.
Given OpenAI and Anthropic's behavior, do you really expect them to be singled out for this practice? Zero trust has been in "LGTM" territory for years now. Meta's bet against people taking a principled stance arguably paid off great.
The previous version was, in my experience, the best free model available on OpenCode. It's been very good at simple/moderate tasks where I am precise in my ask and it doesn't need to make a ton of undefined assumptions. Hopefully this new version is also available on opencode for free.
Used Muse Spark 1.2 and was not impressed at all. Fast and cheap but even GPT 5.6 Terra felt much more capable. Also not really looking to support a company that was just forced to pay $18B for mental health damages.
I'm party using 1.2 to reverse engineer and re-implement an old game binary and it has been quite good and fast. The contributor pricing is very attractive, excited to try 1.3 and see if I feel a difference. 1.2 can get stuck outputting similar sounding thought summaries with no apparent progress when asked to solve bugs. Then I've switched to GLM-5.3-Flash which for this use case has been clearly better at finding suspected causes and following tracks.
I didn't like 1.2, It make some mistakes in a web app, so I quickly went back to Claude, Kimi K3 or Deepseek V4. Hope this one can clear agentic development, because Muse Spark models are fast and cheap.
I had no idea Meta has a coding agent harness. Does anyone have experience with it and can comment? The 1.3 contributor prices look very attractive. I'll probably start using their API if performance is good and the API is reliable with decent rate limits.
You should use their harness. They trained it on multiple harnesses but have specifically optimized it for their harness. Cline also did an independent experiment w spark 1.2 where using the native harness makes it use fewer tokens / turns to accomplish tasks
Meta is one of those companies where, if there is anything remotely comparable, I'm happy to pay more to not use them. They've had a profoundly negative impact on society and Zuckerberg is not who I want controlling the future at the top of AI.
I feel the same about Grok w/ Elon. I will pay extra to use someone else.
I'm not an Amodei stan, but of all of these people he seems to have the most ethical focus. Again, not everything done perfectly and I have my gripes, but of the leaders of frontier labs, I'll vote with my money.
And, yeah, I wouldn't trust sama to watch my bag while I went to the bathroom.
Strong disagree with the Anthropic being good at all part. This is not defending anyone else, but…
Anthropic leadership repeatedly presents themselves as uniquely morally qualified to steward agi and decide how humanity should get access to it. Yet they have repeatedly failed basic morality tests.
Pirating books for financial gain. The newer Sony/Warner music case shows this is pattern behavior.
Aggressively scraping other people's works, despite the authors' requests not to do so.
Then applying massive usage restrictions on their own work.
And probably the most disqualifying is backing away from their own hard AI safety commitments.
Dario's idea of an ethical focus seems to be keeping powerful models out of the hand of anyone unethical, which coincidentally is everyone except him.
Yeah this would be a great point if it were true and they didn’t give Mythos access to companies to fix bugs, which they did and have.
It’s genuinely a difficult question. Not black and white. The models are really good at finding bugs, as demonstrated by people using Fable to reverse engineer. People make it sound like he’s just making it up.
Dario's "ethical" look is also kinda sus. I hate to use ad hominem, but the dude's wife literally pitched a porn film to Epstein even after he was a convicted registered sex offender [1]. Dario is also really sinophobic (it is commonly claimed in Chinese AI circles that his former employment at Baidu triggered him so much that he harbors a personal grudge against the entire race).
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/08/14/who-is-...
Pretty much. That's even worse imho.
Funny. Dario seems like the biggest snake in the industry to me and has leaned the hardest into doom marketing out of all of the influential leaders. With Altman (or Google), it's a transaction, and that's something I can live with.
I just don’t see how people have looked at what has happened with Mythos and the deluge of fixes from companies, then come to this conclusion.
He has a really hard job. He errs on the side of conservatism in releasing and then people get Really Mad.
Safeguards on cybersecurity are not great for Anthropic revenue! As evidenced by people getting pissed, moving to Sol, and them having a smaller market for what Fable can do.
It’s clearly bad for revenue and not great advertising to say, “you can’t use this but here is a nerfed version that will annoy you and not solve important problems.”
Gotta be honest that I’m tired of the “I hate Zuck and Meta so much” comments every time Meta does anything. Ditto Elon/X. Fine, I get it. I don’t like Zuck either. But the post is about Muse Spark 1.3. What do you think about that? If you don’t like it because Meta made it, then maybe just don’t use it and stay silent.
Technology doesn't just spring into being, there will always be comments on the organizations that developed it. If you don't like them or find them repetitive, it is far easier to collapse them and move on then bend a stranger to your will
What I'm tired of is the top story (or five) on HN every day announcing Spark Opus Fable Grok Gemini v4.1i3-F. Like, who actually cares? Are people excited for the new benchmarks? Is it interesting to read the model cards? And look, part of my job is to use these things and part of my job is to pick EC2 servers, too. The front page of HN is increasingly resembling one of those endless AWS pricing lists.
And yeah, I don't like any of the people or companies building LLMs either. At least the griping is somewhat interesting by comparison. The model isn't news. The news on Hacker News is that other professionals feel the same way.
I think a lot of people are curious where the "knee" is on gains and productivity, particularly in the agentic space, which is where the real value is. A lot of us are being forced to shoe-horn this stuff into existing products, and knowing how much of the task the model can do now, vs having to build a complex custom harness, is valuable information to have. A year and a half ago it took our dev maybe six weeks of struggling with LangChain to approximate what Claude + MCP server can do today. The MCP server took us perhaps 2 days to build and 3 more to get it production ready. Today that MCP server gets 2-3 commits per month. I absolutely want to know when new models come out.
As for smaller models, we run a pretty wide variety of agentic workload doing data enrichment and, increasingly, a bunch of evaluation jobs to alert a human to review certain scenarios etc. These all run on the smaller 27B and 35B class models, and tooling behavior has improved DRAMATICALLY since april. The latest qwen 3.8 model has a 95% success tool call rate during internal testing and about 94% real world. That's about 3% better than the 35B-A3B model we're using today, but the 35B MoE is so much faster then 3% is worth the trade-off.
I get it, but the underlying problem is: we don't have a society-wide, effective solution to counterbalancing extractive systems. Lacking a reliable label, we have to constantly signal what's on the ingredients list.
Okay, but the comment I reacted to was not that. It was simply (paraphrasing) “I won’t use anything from Zuck/Meta.” If it had been, “Be careful because I have insider information that Zuck/Meta is using Muse Spark to do <insert-nefarious-thing-here>, and here’s my substantiation for that…” I’d be okay with it. That’s interesting information that moves a conversation forward. But it wasn’t. It was just content-free “I don’t like Zuck” nonsense.
Are not all corporations extractive by nature? Google clearly is.
That's obviously not the issue with that -- you don't see those comments on Google's AI announcements.
Yes you see. They get downvoted and flagged fast because there's a disproportionate amount of current and ex Google employees and stockholders around.
> If you don’t like it […], then maybe just […] stay silent.
You might consider following your own advice.
That's not how any of this works my man. Must be nice to think you live a life where neither has had a profound negative impact on your day to day
yeah, we should all just stfu because one internet dude is tired of hearing it
Staying silent is unfortunately how fascism festers.
Not liking something because the embodiment of corporate malfeasance made it is a rational way to decide what products to support.
Zuck's bad PR is to blame here. Not the commenters. He should fix that.
Anduril makes this same complaint whenever their job posts get dumped on. Same idea. Fix your bad PR, buddies :)
> But the post is about Muse Spark 1.3. What do you think about that?
That:
- like all models it was trained on stolen data
- additionally it was trained on Facebook users who were all opted in to AI training with a convoluted 10+ step process to opt-out of
> If you don’t like it because Meta made it, then maybe just don’t use it and stay silent.
Why should anyone stay silent?
Okay but Muse Glimmer 30B is one of the best small open weight models today, and IMO the best from a US lab (only real comparison is Gemma4 dense right now).
Totally fine with open weight, since other people can provide it and Meta isn’t making money. I’d use an AWS-hosted version.
I am finding Poolside's a decent model.-
Is it really hard to understand that there's no good guys? Amodei, Altman, Zuckerberg, Musk, etc. They all sound the same to me.
> I'm not an Amodei stan, but of all of these people he seems to have the most ethical focus. Again, not everything done perfectly and I have my gripes, but of the leaders of frontier labs, I'll vote with my money.
Amodei is NO Saint!!! He's the most savvy in drumming up the AI doomsday scenarios and haven't yet to apologized his failed forecast of Claude taking over 90% of the coding jobs.
He didn't say 90% of the coding jobs. He said LLMs would write 90% of the code. As in be LLM generated.
Google, Zuck, Sama, Elon, Amodei (in no particular order).
They all suck. Pick your poison.
They don't all suck equally.
Here's the order, from best to worst.
Amodei
Google
SamA
Zuck
Elon
You can ask 100 people and they'll all give you a different list. It's subjective.
I think a less personal ranking would be, as a business owner, which of those providers is more dependable? As in, you don't care about evil, just your stuff working. I think maybe OpenAI?
Google. They have experience operating at scale, and AI is a big enough focus that they won't wind it down. All the big providers are kinda crappy, but if you want reliability, Google is the best option.
Definitely not Google, countless horror stories and infamous for killing stuff. OpenAI is still serving GPT 3.5 turbo as far as I remember.
Google, famous for not winding things down.
Google, famous for keeping profitable shit making profit.
Google has experience working for themselves at scale. Your business should never rely on Google more than it is forced to. Even if it's not something they'll wind down, providing acceptable service to anyone is not on their agenda. GCP speaks for itself...
> You can ask 100 people and they'll all give you a different list.
True. With 5 choices you need at least 126 people before you can guarantee that two lists are the same.
Demis Hassabis is, by any standard, the most ethical of the bunch.
SamA better than Zuck? Zuck was at least a kid when he made a lot of his bad decisions, and he seems to be getting much better. Sam is on the reverse trajectory.
I am 100% convinced Zuck is maybe better at masking now, but is exactly the same lizard who wrote
>>> They "trust me" >>> Dumb fucks
Sam is on a delayed trajectory of power, but he surely was not great when he was young either. See: Aaron Swartz calling him a sociopath who could not be trusted, well over a decade ago.
In my personal opinion (this will be controversial and feel free to disagree): Elon is the best.
* great contributions to many industries including spaceflight, electric cars, and self driving cars. It doesn't even matter if he is the technical mind behind these achievements or if he is just a buffoon that pretends to know the implementation details; the dude has a way of bringing together experts, having the overall vision, and managing them properly to ship amazing stuff.
* sane and reasonable takes on AI/LLM stuff. I can't really argue with "pursuit of truth" as the guiding principle. Grok talks normally without "Claudlish", has a balanced score on political bias unlike other models, has a low hallucination rate, is the best at dealing with latest news (unlike ChatGPT that refuses to believe new developments and gaslights the user), and they "never silently downgrade intelligence or fall back to other models."
In contrast, while Dario is doubtless a super smart pioneer in the AI space, his sanctimonious "We know what's good for you" attitude and extreme censorship is really offputting. The lengths to which he tries to ban or hamstring open models seems like an underhanded way to defeat competition. If he were to succeed, it would be a big setback to the thriving ecosystem of open models and hamper the development of the entire industry.
If it was up to Dario we'd all be banned from using open-weight models, and we'd have to be investigated for PRC connections before sending our allotted five API queries a week.
"Avoid generic tangents" / "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances."
How is this a tangential annoyance or a generic tangent?
> Meta announces they have a new model, demonstrating its capabilities.
> Parent comment states „regardless of this model‘s specific capabilities, if I can avoid it I will.“
Grandparent comment has zero to do with the article. It's just GP generically bitching about Meta. (Your "quote" of the comment does not appear anywhere in the actual comment.)
"Avoid generic tangents" / "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances."
That's pretty much 90% of HN these days.
Apple releases a new iPhone? Here comes the flood of decade-old complaints about long-discontinued Mac butterfly keyboards and walled gardens.
Microsoft releases a new version of Windows? Here come the gripes about Azure.
Google changes something in GMail? Play Store!
It's like there's an army of bots out there determined to reduce the productivity of the Western tech bubble by diverting everyone into endless circular arguments about absolutely nothing of relevance to the topic at hand.
What is the point of this comment?
Meta and Microsoft are two of the absolute worst evil companies on earth and Amodei is trying very hard to join them.
These Effective Altruists are despicable people: a bunch of thieves working to line up their own pockets while posturing as a force of good.
Remember that they schemed to not only present SBF as the 2nd coming of Christ (including in the NYT and in Forbes) but to also give him a voice after his scam had been uncovered. Thankfully, the judge didn't have any of this Effective Altruist bullshit.
SBF invested 500 millions of misappropriated funds in his buddy from the EA movement's Anthropic company (and, thankfully, the judge forced those shares to be sold: so SBF didn't get to be a billionaire).
You cannot hate enough people who say that harming others for the greater good is justified.
Then of course, already mentioned in this thread, there's the whole Epstein/Amodei's "I'm in the porn business" wife connection (where you don't need to squint much to see young women abused).
These kind of people are the absolute worst scum on this earth.
How have they had a negative impact? How about google?
Enabled genocide in Myanmar
4.2266 cents, 38 seconds.
For comparison here's Muse Spark 1.2, which animated it without me asking it to: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
The 1.3 one is definitely better - better bicycle frame, better wing, better pelican hat.
UPDATE: Here's another one with five pelicans for each of the five Muse Spark 1.3 reasoning levels: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
The most expensive was reasoning level xhigh - 7.5 cents, 1m34s.
And I ran five pelicans at all reasoning levels for 1.2 as well, here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
Is there any point anymore regarding this svg test? I would not be surprised if in the training they're fine tuned for this task too
It would be very embarrassing for any lab to benchmaxx the pelican on bicycle svg prompt, since it would be very easy to detect it by varying the prompt.
Is there a reason these pelicans always have roughly the same composition (side-view, 2d, biking right, flat ground beneath, etc)? I don't see any of that detailed in the prompt, yet they all seem to generate roughly the same image of differing quality.
The more generic your prompt, the more generic the response. It's a regression to the "mean" of the training data aka GIGO for AI.
It's like when you ask your average person off the street to draw a house - it'll almost always be square with a triangle roof, one door, and two windows.
In the pelican/bike example, it's probably a bit of a self-perpetuating snowball too. If the earliest examples were bike left-to-right, flat ground, etc. then they are also being scraped up in future LLMs.
as a kid I did them like this. nobody told me to do that. are we all so similar?
The adults brainwashed us
https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/barndroem-box-beige-70560615/
https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/vallaby-rug-green-10548216/
I sincerely believe I've never had a single original thought™ in my whole life.
There is this scene in the HBO series Westworld where a "host" says some words in sequence which is shown on a display as she says it. Of course, even me thinking of this scene and connecting it to your comment was not original, someone else clearly had the same programming as me.
A medium blog post says
> Pair what with me?” — the moment Maeve (a humanoid android) uttered those words in Westworld (Season 1, Episode 6: “The Adversary”), something clicked. Not for the average viewer, but for me, a STEM educator and AI enthusiast who, just weeks earlier, had read Stephen Wolfram’s seminal essay, What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
It's really interesting, isn't it? They almost always cycle from left to right - but I have had a few which cycle in the other direction.
The 2D / flat ground feels reasonable for a SVG, which implies a vector illustration.
It's my impression that it's common in western culture, where text is read left to right, and timelines are visualized as going from left to right, to also animate things going from left to right, since westerners thus have an instinct that "right = forward", so it "feels right" (familiar). I wonder to which degree this is reflected in the training data? And if you'd be more likely to get left-facing pelicans if you prompted it in Hebrew, Arabic or another right-to-left language?
Someone studied this (among other thigns): https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html . Pelicans on bikes always face right in this test, but other animals on other transportation methods sometimes face left.
I was going to ask the exact same question earlier but deleted it after thinking “I’m sure Simon has done some sort of discussion on this.” Since it does seem novel to you, too, it would be really interesting to read more about this phenomenon.
Search Google Images for "bicycle". Almost all bicycle product shots are staged the same way: side view, going left-to-right. It makes sense to me that given that skew in the training data, the model grounds itself in the bicycle.
and furthermore, this is because the drivetrain is ~always on the right side of the bike - if you want to inspect or admire a bicycle you look at the right side, as you might look under the hood of a car.
(Why the drivetrain is on the right, I don't know. But most bike parts follow open standards so it's quite entrenched.)
Since most languages read from left to right, rightward movement tends to read as forward progression. So when showing a bicycle in side profile, having it face right feels more naturally like it’s moving forward.
> and furthermore, this is because the drivetrain is ~always on the right side of the bike
While I'm sure this factors into things for advertisements for bike components, there is also just a general preference that westerners have for left-to-right motion. Not just in bike ads, but all ads with (or suggesting) movement. And also not just ads, but movies where directors believe left-to-right motion is associated with progression and right-to-left motion is regressive.
Product shots yes, people riding them its more like 50/50. Also if you search for a specific bicycle race you'll find more going right to left.
Is there a reason these pelicans always have roughly the same composition
Because they're computers. They don't have an imagination and the ability to create things from whole cloth the way humans do.
Much like a mother pelican, they regurgitate what they've been fed.
Sun is missing a few rays and not wearing sunglasses.
Yes, I do a thing where I ask the machine to generate responses in the form of a lizard talking to a cat. The lizard is always a green gecko and the cat is always orange, which I never specify.
Did any LLM so far draw pelican knees correctly and have them bend in opposite direction from human knees? Knees of many animals bend opposite to humans.
Did any LLM draw the front bicycle wheel correctly? ie. center of front wheel slightly AHEAD of steering wheel axis. This is done for bicycle stability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_feet_and_legs#/media/File...
Bird knees bend same way human ones do
Simon, at this point I really wonder if teams aren’t gaming this. You should pick a random animal doing a random thing every time.
If you have a grading rubric, huge points off for adding arms instead of using the wings as arms!
I think it's hilarious that this detail is enough for me to dismiss looking into the model, but here we are, and it is.
Has any ab tried to game this yet and just made the most amazing pelican by hand and always reply with that?
I wonder, given Simons reputation in AI benchmarking, whether model providers try to train or tweak their models to perform better at drawing bicycles and pelicans?
Absolutely BRUTAL! :)
Thank you for doing this, I love your benchmark the most!
[delayed]
What does the mean pelican look like at this point?
Also 3X token use vs. 1.2
Red eyes and a tattoo?
lol
Definitely an upgrade over 1.2
I started using Spark 1.2 for development because if you're willing to let Meta train on your data it was dirt cheap and was actually really pleasantly surprised with it. It's not a frontier model by any means, but for work that didn't require a top of the line model, I really enjoyed using it.
I'm anthropomorphizing it a bit, but it felt like it knew its weaknesses and didn't try to impose it's opinions on me. What I mean by that is that it did what I told it and if there was something unexpected in the code that it put out it was often because I gave it ambiguous or conflicting instructions. It didn't try to go above and beyond and just acted like a tool, which is what I want from a coding agent 90%+ of the time. I also felt that it did a much better job of following established patterns in my code than many of the other current models do. I'm a huge fan of OpenAI's models and Spark 1.2 is what I expected 5.6 Luna to be.
I'm curious and a little excited to use 1.3, but honestly a little worried that as Meta pushes for better benchmarks that Spark will start to fall into the trap of trying to be "helpful" in ways I don't want it to be.
Tangential, but when I first started using Spark 1.2, it made me realize how much I miss 5.3 Codex. That model was the peak of coding models, IMO, in that it knew how to write good code, but didn't try to overstep or be "helpful" in unexpected ways. That got me thinking about how the major labs seem to be stepping away from coding focused models toward more general purpose ones and how I can't help but feel like that's a mistake.
If it's a mistake, it should course-correct.
I agree that some of the smarter models are actually worse. I hope they take a model that's good enough--there are many--and just try to get it chatjimmy.ai speed.
I have to think that's the future, somehow, and I'm really excited about it.
>I started using Spark 1.2 for development because if you're willing to let Meta train on your data it was dirt cheap
its free on opencode and i use it for personal projects. most of my personal projects are AI generated since its personal projects. nothing important are on them. it is hilarious if Meta is training their AI model with AI generated code.
I would imagine your interactions with it are more important than the output.
Training on ai generated content is how the models got a big jump in capability
A model that (at least in benchmarks) is getting closer to SOTA. A clear separation between what’s used to improve their products and what’s not (at least this is what they claim).
Good job Meta! Seriously. This is almost making me forget about the 18B$ lawsuit for children social media addiction.
How is it not SOTA? It's beating 5.6 Sol.
You gotta keep up. Fable 5.1 came out yesterday and is better so anything else is to be treated as garbage now.
I like the approach of providing a discounted version of the API that is used to train vs. the full price version. Seems reasonable and transparent.
DeepSWE scores 75.4 - that's the best score so far. And it's crazy cheap! Google held the top a few hours today with Gemini 3.8 Flash, but now second to Spark 1.3. All this competition will drive prices down!
With the contributor pricing being more than 10x cheaper than the standard, that would make it best and cheapest on the DeepSWE leaderboard! It feels fast in my experience too. LLMs keep improving at an insane pace.
But is the score really reflective of the quality or are both models benchmaxxing?
Muse 1.2 wrote a terrible "smart summaries" extension for my pi setup. It was sending every single steamed chunk for summarization instead of waiting for the full CMD.
This is an error I would expect from sonnet 4, not a model that was supposedly just a few points behind sol.
how much of it is from reallocation of staff to ai training and labeling
Does anyone know what the license for this model is? Specifically any word on restrictions about what it can be used for?
So one model is "Not used to improve our products" and is 10-20 times more expensive to the "Used to improve our products"-model.
Given this is Meta, my immediate assumptions that one is cheap because it lets me "be the product". I know I'm rushing to conclusions but there is zero trust here. The brain will do its thing. And the wording here is giving the brains a lot of wiggle room.
What is the confusion? They directly state that you are the product if you use their discounted offering. It isn't an assumption that should lead you to this, it is Meta's very direct communication that should lead you to this
I'm confused what your surprise is here. It's plain and simple right to the point wording.
I don't see the wiggle room at all.
aren't they explicitly saying this with both their pricing and their wording? I'm not sure what you are alluding to?
the meaning is pretty obvious - they want to train on your chats & tasks and are willing to subsidize for the privilege of doing so.
I think it's more that the "not used to improve our models" is expensive because companies need that. It's simple price differentiation.
In other words, it's not that Meta really wants your data and they're willing to pay top dollar for it. It's that companies really don't want Meta to have their data and they're willing to pay top dollar for that.
Would it help you understand if they were labelled "For Dumb Fucks" and "For Everyone Else"?
Given OpenAI and Anthropic's behavior, do you really expect them to be singled out for this practice? Zero trust has been in "LGTM" territory for years now. Meta's bet against people taking a principled stance arguably paid off great.
The previous version was, in my experience, the best free model available on OpenCode. It's been very good at simple/moderate tasks where I am precise in my ask and it doesn't need to make a ton of undefined assumptions. Hopefully this new version is also available on opencode for free.
artificial analysis results: https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2095247787277553929
Practically free for "contributors" at 0.2 usd/mtok. That's going to be hard to say no to for hobbyists.
[delayed]
Ha, even with monitoring engineers keystrokes and mouse movements not SotA on OSWorld.
“contributor” pricing at $0.10/$0.20 is crazy cheap if it’s measuring up to Sol.
Definitely shows how important a user data flywheel is for RL and model improvement.
Why they didn't use LLM to create html table instead of https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/elementpath/media/?media_id=1048...?
Used Muse Spark 1.2 and was not impressed at all. Fast and cheap but even GPT 5.6 Terra felt much more capable. Also not really looking to support a company that was just forced to pay $18B for mental health damages.
I'm party using 1.2 to reverse engineer and re-implement an old game binary and it has been quite good and fast. The contributor pricing is very attractive, excited to try 1.3 and see if I feel a difference. 1.2 can get stuck outputting similar sounding thought summaries with no apparent progress when asked to solve bugs. Then I've switched to GLM-5.3-Flash which for this use case has been clearly better at finding suspected causes and following tracks.
The "contributor" pricing is the standout here at a ~20x discount, if you allow training on your data.
The model seems on par with Sol and Opus 5 on paper (admittedly on some older/saturated benchmarks, but very competitive for $).
Stats:
1M context, $0.10 input/$0.002 cached, $0.20 output (Mtok)
I have a feeling that Meta is not gonna like what people actually use the contributor model for lol.
(It's probably going to be a bunch of repetitive batch jobs like web search that have no training value)
It's the perfect model for open-source work because it's gonna end up in the training data anyway
Web Search doesn't have a discount on contributor pricing
Is everyone rushing to launch something before Astra tomorrow?
I didn't like 1.2, It make some mistakes in a web app, so I quickly went back to Claude, Kimi K3 or Deepseek V4. Hope this one can clear agentic development, because Muse Spark models are fast and cheap.
Could this be best intelligence / $ if you're willing to let zuck digest your data?
I declined the use of cookies and everything went black. No content at all. Dissapointed.
If it's from meta, pit h in the bin.
What a day. OpenAI is behind basically all major competitors - at least for a some amount of time.
Blog post: https://research.meta.ai/blog/introducing-muse-spark-1-3 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541149)
>Previously available reasoning modes are available today with max reasoning coming shortly after we finish additional safety testing
Lmao. And their benchmark table only shows max reasoning.
I had no idea Meta has a coding agent harness. Does anyone have experience with it and can comment? The 1.3 contributor prices look very attractive. I'll probably start using their API if performance is good and the API is reliable with decent rate limits.
You should use their harness. They trained it on multiple harnesses but have specifically optimized it for their harness. Cline also did an independent experiment w spark 1.2 where using the native harness makes it use fewer tokens / turns to accomplish tasks
This should probably be primary:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541149
Lol "not used to improve our models" is AI's enterprise SSO.