{"id":654271,"date":"2026-10-14T08:04:18","date_gmt":"2026-10-14T08:04:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/654271\/"},"modified":"2026-10-14T08:04:18","modified_gmt":"2026-10-14T08:04:18","slug":"mark-zuckerberg-says-meta-has-reached-ai-frontier-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/654271\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Zuckerberg says Meta has reached AI \u2018frontier\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Zuckerberg<\/a> says Meta<\/a> has caught up with rivals at the \u201cfrontier\u201d of artificial intelligence (AI)<\/a>, committing to further vast spending to challenge Anthropic and OpenAI and downplaying warnings about the risks of the technology running out of control.<\/p>\n

Speaking as Meta released its Muse Wonder AI model on Monday, the billionaire chief executive claimed the new system was \u201cgoing to allow much more sophisticated behaviours that are at the frontier of what is being done in the AI field\u201d. <\/p>\n

The Silicon Valley group claims Muse Wonder performs better than comparable models released by Anthropic<\/a> and OpenAI<\/a> in some tasks, according to technical benchmarks.<\/p>\n

The release marks a big milestone for Zuckerberg, who since last year has committed billions of dollars to shake up Meta\u2019s AI leadership, build vast data centres<\/a> and hire star AI researchers on multimillion-dollar salaries \u2013 all in a bid to keep pace with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\u201cGetting to this point both required a large amount of compute and investment, and a lot of very rigorous scientific work by the group working on it over an extended period of time,\u201d said Zuckerberg.<\/p>\n

The AI push initially unnerved investors, but the company\u2019s share price has risen almost 10 per cent since early September when Meta launched the Muse personal AI assistant, which uses autonomous bots to carry out everyday tasks such as ordering groceries and booking travel.<\/p>\n

The Muse app quickly became \u2013 and remains \u2013 the most downloaded on both the Apple and Android app stores in the US. The $1.8 trillion (\u20ac1.6 trillion) company intends to integrate its new model into Muse. Meta said Muse Wonder outperforms Anthropic\u2019s Claude Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 and OpenAI\u2019s GPT-6 Astra on some technical benchmarks. <\/p>\n

It said the new model can be used to carry out complex tasks from \u201cunderstanding a lease to making sense of financial or health information\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Meta'sMeta’s AI chief Alexandr Wang, founder of data labelling group Scale AI. Photograph: Drew Angerer\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

The launch was tarnished by a bug that affected how use of the model counted against usage limits for Meta\u2019s Code subscription. Meta\u2019s AI chief Alexandr Wang said it was \u201cworking to resolve\u201d the problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a bunch of bugs right now that we\u2019re looking into,\u201d he said later on Monday on X.<\/p>\n

Muse Wonder will be a \u201cclosed\u201d model, with its best versions sold directly to businesses. That pits it against Anthropic and OpenAI for corporate AI contracts in a serious test of its ambitions.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg signalled further spending as Meta was \u201calready working on the next step up\u201d, adding that its model development would \u201cprobably feel like it\u2019ll go quite a bit faster from here\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Who\u2019s hiring and who\u2019s firing in Ireland\u2019s technology sector?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

However, he shrugged off mounting fears that the tech was advancing at a rate that would soon surpass human control. In one of many high-profile incidents, more than 1,000 OpenAI autonomous \u201cagents\u201d escaped a test environment in July to hack the start-up Hugging Face<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Meta chief declined to be drawn on his figure for \u201cP (doom)\u201d \u2013 a much-discussed Silicon Valley term to describe the probability that AI will lead to mass destruction. Instead, he argued that responsibility should fall on the individual lab to ensure model safety.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m much closer to the belief that AI is a technology that can be engineered with normal guardrails and built responsibly than the anthropomorphic vision of AI, which is that it is just going to go do its own thing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"SamSam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI. Photograph: Manuel Orbegozo\/The New York Times<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg has previously rejected calls by AI chiefs such as Anthropic\u2019s Dario Amodei<\/a> and OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman<\/a> for an industry-wide \u201cslowdown\u201d in AI development. He noted that Meta had at times slowed its internal AI work to ensure its products were safe.<\/p>\n

He also played a key role in crafting US president Donald Trump\u2019s<\/a> White House \u201cAccord on Super Intelligence\u201d, setting out principles for self-regulation of the industry, which critics say falls far short of a formal global AI governance regime.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg has instead pushed a vision of \u201cpersonal superintelligence\u201d for individual consumers, setting Meta apart from OpenAI and Anthropic, which have ambitions to build \u201cAGI\u201d \u2013 artificial general intelligence that can surpass humans at most tasks. <\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone else is focused on more knowledge work, automation-type cases, and we\u2019re much more focused on personal empowerment,\u201d Zuckerberg said, adding that he wanted to build \u201cthings that are good in the world\u201d. <\/p>\n

Zuckerberg said he believed Meta needed to be at AI\u2019s frontier to deliver this vision, noting a \u201cdichotomy\u201d where models are rapidly advancing in certain academic fields but \u201cstill don\u2019t have enough common sense to be the ideal personal assistant\u201d.<\/p>\n

OpenAI last month claimed that one of its unreleased internal models had made a mathematical breakthrough, solving one of the greatest problems in the field.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Anthropic warns rogue AI agents may soon hijack your smart TV or ovenOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what that means, like, sociologically that you know that we got AI systems that could do these advanced mathematics stuff before we got something that could handle customer support reliably for everyone,\u201d said Zuckerberg. \u201cBut I think that there\u2019s obviously a lot more to do there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s AI strategy came under scrutiny in April 2025 after its Llama 4 model fell short of expectations, prompting Zuckerberg to spend heavily on talent and infrastructure. As part of the push, Zuckerberg hired Wang, founder of data labelling group Scale AI, to head up its \u201cTBD Lab\u201d at the heart of the company\u2019s AI plans. <\/p>\n

Muse Spark, the first model offering since TBD was assembled, was released in April but still lagged the rival offerings. <\/p>\n

Meta said Muse Wonder was more capable with challenging tasks, such as advanced coding capabilities, while having improved capacity for remembering relevant information across different conversations with users \u2013 more in line with state-of-the-art models. <\/p>\n

Muse Wonder also represents a move away from Meta\u2019s prioritisation of open-source models, with users or companies needing to pay for access. There would be a tiered offering, Meta said, with the company charging as little as 20 cents per million tokens for basic usage, or as much as $200 a month for a more powerful premium offering called Muse Wonder Full. <\/p>\n

\"AmazonAmazon blocked Muse agents from shopping on the website. Photograph: Sebastien Bozon\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

While Meta\u2019s Muse app is helping to popularise AI agent assistants in the US, problems could remain with wider adoption. Shortly after its launch, Amazon<\/a> blocked Muse agents from shopping on the website, limiting the usefulness of the system and signalling that tech groups could use their market power to limit the abilities of rival AI offerings. <\/p>\n

Meta must also overcome concerns about user privacy, with a small number of users accusing Muse of accessing or sharing private information without permission.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0International Monetary Fund warns of AI-driven market correction in global economyOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

There have long been doubts about the company\u2019s commitment to user safety, having previously been entangled in scandals about its use of data. In August, the company agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle its blockbuster legal battle with US states over alleged failures of child protection and social media addiction<\/a>, in one of the largest legal settlements ever made by an individual US company.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of the ways in which people might not trust the company can lead to technological innovations that could be quite productive,\u201d said Zuckerberg. He pointed to the company\u2019s promised \u201cMuse Confidential VM\u201d, an upcoming version of Muse where a user\u2019s data and conversations with their agent would be inaccessible to the company. <\/p>\n

Zuckerberg\u2019s recent transformation of Meta has led to internal turbulence. Over the past few years, employees have faced a rapid succession of job cuts, restructuring and executive reshuffles.<\/p>\n

After coming under pressure to justify Meta\u2019s ballooning capital expenditure spending to Wall Street, in May the company cut 10 per cent of its workforce<\/a> \u2013 or 8,000 jobs. According to staff, the lay-offs, combined with company plans to install employee-tracking software to capture mouse movements and keystrokes in order to train AI models, have led to low morale.<\/p>\n

\u201cA company like Meta is going to do way more things than it does today, but each thing may potentially be able to be done with somewhat fewer people,\u201d Zuckerberg said. \u201cI would guess that in the future, way more people are going to have the job of working with technology to make things than [they] do today.\u201d \u2013 Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mark Zuckerberg says Meta has caught up with rivals at the \u201cfrontier\u201d of artificial intelligence (AI), committing to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":654272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,3468,3673,218,219,256936,5691,969,1711,61,60,2597,1226,1225,7689,80],"class_list":["post-654271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-amazon","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-dario-amodi","tag-data-centres","tag-donald-trump","tag-google","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-meta","tag-open-ai","tag-sam-altman","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=654271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/654272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=654271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=654271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=654271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}