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Morning Edition · Friday, August 21, 2026Published at 2:31 AM EDT · New York
Meta Now Sells Its Frontier Model by the Token While Open-Sourcing Only the Smaller One
Muse Spark is metered through an OpenAI-compatible application programming interface (API) at $1.25 and $4.25 per million input and output tokens, while the 30-billion-parameter Glimmer model ships with downloadable weights under a permissive license.
Meta's model business now operates in two separate parts, and the split matters because Meta spent three years arguing that open weights were the strategy. The top-tier Muse Spark line is sold through the Meta Model API, an OpenAI-compatibl…
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Part of a tracked trend
Hyperscalers Enter the Frontier API Market
Large platform companies increasingly convert in-house frontier models into metered, incumbent-compatible APIs, competing on switching cost and distribution rather than pure capability.
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