Meta Quietly Swapped the AI Brain in Its Smart Glasses, and It Tells You Everything About Its Priorities

Meta AI on Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses is no longer running on Llama. As of May, the assistant on most of Meta's glasses is powered by Muse Spark, the first model released by Meta Superintelligence Labs, and the change says a great deal about where the company thinks the smart glasses race will be won.

The first product of the billion dollar hiring spree

Meta Superintelligence Labs is the group Mark Zuckerberg assembled last year after the Llama series fell visibly behind OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and xAI. The recruiting campaign produced some of the largest compensation packages in the history of the industry, along with layoffs across the team that built Llama. Muse Spark, announced in April, is the first public output from that reorganization.

The Muse series formally succeeds Llama, and there is one notable philosophical change: Spark is not open source. Meta says it hopes to open future versions of the model, which is the kind of statement that costs nothing to make. For a company that spent years positioning open weights as its core AI identity, the quiet retreat is worth noting.

Small model, fast answers

Spark is deliberately small. Meta says it matches the performance of Llama 4 Maverick, its previous best model, while using a tenth of the compute. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index it scores 52, against 57 for Gemini 3.1 Pro, 60 for GPT-5.5, and 61 for Claude Opus 4.8. So it is not a frontier model, but it no longer trails the pack by an embarrassing margin, and on glasses the speed matters more than the ceiling. When you ask your glasses what building you are looking at, a two second answer from a decent model beats a ten second answer from a brilliant one.

There is one exception to the rollout. Meta Ray-Ban Display, the flagship with the in-lens screen, still runs a custom version of Llama 4 because many of its responses are visual, drawing on web images rather than just spoken text. Migrating that pipeline to Muse takes longer, which means Meta's most expensive glasses currently have its least capable assistant. UploadVR's review of the Display called Llama 4 an anchor on the product, and that anchor has not been lifted yet.

The Gemini clock is ticking

The urgency here is not abstract. Google's Gemini-powered glasses from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster are expected this fall, and Gemini is the one piece of that hardware nobody doubts. Google shipped Gemini 3.5 Flash in May and is expected to release 3.5 Pro this month. Meta's entire long-term pitch for glasses, the always-on contextual AI future that Michael Abrash and Zuckerberg keep describing, only works if the model in your frames is actually good.

Muse Spark does not win that fight. What it does is keep Meta in it. The company has gone from shipping a clearly outdated model on its most important hardware category to shipping a competitive small one, with a bigger successor already in development. Whether MSL can produce a frontier-class model is still an open question. The glasses on store shelves just stopped being the evidence against it.