Meta Says Its First Pay-to-Use AI Model Outperforms Google

Meta has introduced a new artificial intelligence (AI) model that includes a paid tier for developers.

It marks the first time the tech giant has charged businesses to access one of its AI models but will be one of the most affordable options on the market, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with Bloomberg News Thursday (July 9).

“Since this is not an open source model, this is I think the first time that we’re doing a real serious API,” Zuckerberg said, in reference to the application programming interface used to access the company’s AI. “And the pricing is going to be very aggressive and attractive.”

Muse Spark 1.1’s chief improvement, the CEO added, is in its agentic AI capabilities, offering “state-of-the-art or very close to it” agentic reasoning and tool use. Meta has also made significant improvements in the model’s coding abilities, Zuckerberg said, with company employees using it in-house to create products and features for its apps.

Meta will also roll out a new Meta Model API system, which will be used to collect fees from developers. Its API pricing is around 25% of the cost advertised by OpenAI and Anthropic, the report said. Developers will be able to use the model for free, but will need to pay for access once they’ve used a certain level of tokens, Zuckerberg told Bloomberg.

The report added that while Meta has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to its AI efforts, the company’s models have not tested as well as its rivals. However, Muse Spark 1.1 is more competitive, Zuckerberg argued, and tested better than Google’s Gemini in several areas related to agents, coding and multimodal capabilities.

“That is a pretty interesting milestone because I think this may be the first time, at least that I can remember, that Meta’s models are better than all of the Google models,” he said.

In other Meta news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about the company’s debut of Muse Image, the first AI image model from Meta Superintelligence Labs. The product immediately sparked privacy concerns, though PYMNTS noted that it also comes as Meta is facing calls to demonstrate adoption and commercialization of its AI products.

“Muse Image addresses both pressures simultaneously,” PYMNTS wrote. “It gives consumers a free creative tool embedded across platforms they already use and gives advertisers a personalization engine trained on billions of authenticated user identities.”

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