Meta thinks its newer, cheaper AI is the best way to beat ChatGPT and Gemini

The AI race has mostly been about who can develop the most powerful model. Meta now wants to turn the conversation to who can offer one for the cheapest price.

Meta is taking a swipe at rivals with the launch of Muse Spark 1.1, its first paid AI API for developers. As noted by Bloomberg, the company will charge about 25% of what the top AI providers do to access Muse Spark. This will make it a much cheaper option than OpenAI and Anthropic models.

So far, the company has built its ecosystem largely on open-weight AI models and free access to developers. Muse Spark 1.1 introduces a new pricing model: developers are able to use the model for free up to a token limit and then pay for additional usage via the new Meta Model API. It’s the first time Meta has seriously charged companies to access one of its flagship AI models.

The strategy comes amid Meta’s efforts to justify the massive amounts it is investing in AI. The company has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to new data centers, chips, and talent, as investors have wondered how those investments will ultimately pay off. Meta keeps its free consumer AI experiences while charging for API access, opening a new revenue stream.

Low prices don’t mean much if performance isn’t competitive, and Meta is betting Muse Spark 1.1 does both. The model is a significant step forward in coding, tool use, multimodal reasoning, and agentic capabilities — artificial intelligence systems that can perform complex, multi-step tasks with minimal user input, the company said. It can handle text, images, video, audio, and PDFs; has a context window of up to one million tokens; and is built to drive everything from coding assistants to enterprise AI agents.

Meta says Muse Spark 1.1 is competitive with today’s AI models on several benchmarks, including coding and reasoning tasks. The same model will power Meta AI across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, its standalone app, and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, as the company previously said when it introduced Muse Spark.

The bigger question is whether low pricing is enough to disrupt a market where OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have built up strong developer ecosystems. Meta is betting it can get developers to take its AI stack seriously by offering competitive performance at lower prices — and make its enormous AI spending a viable business in the process.