Meta Spent $14.3B to Kill Open-Source AI. The Muse Spark Benchmarks Tell a Different Story.

Originally published at news.skila.ai Zuckerberg's 2024 open-source manifesto promised AI would stay open. Meta's new Muse Spark model — built by the $14.3B Alexandr Wang hire — launched fully closed. The benchmarks reveal a specialist that dominates medical AI but trails badly on coding. Chinese models like Qwen now own 69% of the open-source ecosystem Meta built. Here's what that means for every developer who built on Llama. Mark Zuckerberg wrote a 2,000-word manifesto in July 2024 declaring "open source AI is the path forward." Eighteen months later, Meta released Muse Spark — their first-ever closed-source model — and locked it behind an API with no public weights. The manifesto is still live on Meta's blog. The words haven't changed. Meta's strategy has. The $14.3 Billion Pivot Nobody Predicted In June 2025, Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% nonvoting stake in Scale AI. The real prize wasn't the company — it was Alexandr Wang, Scale's co-founder and CEO, who became Meta's first-ev