§04 · Compare & choose
Muse Spark Open vs Muse Glimmer. Which one to use
Meta currently offers two Muse models with downloadable weights. This page compares them and points to where to find comparisons with other open-weight models.
Specs
| Muse Spark Open | Muse Glimmer | |
|---|---|---|
| Released | 2026-10-15 | 2026-08-10 |
| Size | 816B total / 42B active (MoE) | 30B |
| Modalities | Text, image, video, audio in | Multimodal |
| License | Muse Model License (with conditions) | Apache 2.0 |
| Local hardware | ~700GB+ VRAM, or two 512GB Mac Studios | One high-end GPU or a single Mac |
Which to pick
- Best quality, and you have server-class hardware: run Muse Spark Open yourself
- Best quality, without the hardware: use Muse Spark Open through a hosted API
- Local and offline on a personal machine: Muse Glimmer
- Permissive license, e.g. redistribution or a large commercial API: Muse Glimmer (Apache 2.0)
Against other open-weight models
At xhigh reasoning, the official model card benchmarks Muse Spark Open against Qwen3.8, GLM 5.3, Kimi K3, Mistral Large 4, Nemotron 3 Ultra and others on agentic, tool-use, coding and science QA tasks. Results are mixed, and no single model wins everywhere.
See the Hugging Face model card for the full table. Meta says a full evaluation report is coming.
What usually matters more:
- How it does on your own tasks, so run a small eval on your own data
- Hardware cost, which you can estimate with the hardware calculator
- Whether the license fits your business
FAQ
Q.Should I use Muse Spark Open or Muse Glimmer?
A.Without ~700GB of VRAM or two large Mac Studios, Muse Glimmer is the practical local choice. If you need flagship quality, use Muse Spark Open through a hosted API.