{"id":2037994,"date":"2026-07-09T20:45:47","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T17:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2037994"},"modified":"2026-07-09T20:45:47","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T17:45:47","slug":"mark-zuckerberg-wants-to-save-you-from-the-permanent-underclass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2037994","title":{"rendered":"Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Save You From the Permanent Underclass"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/app\/uploads\/2026\/07\/MarkZuckerberg-1200×675.jpg”]<\/p>\n

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Meta just dropped a new AI model, and Mark Zuckerberg is shouting the news from some very un-Zuck-like rooftops.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Meta founder and CEO is known for many things, but a cozy relationship with traditional journalism is not one of them. Following the reelection of Donald Trump early last year and sporting his newly cultivated Cool Guy look, Zuckerberg said in a <\/span>video<\/span> published online that Meta was removing its journalistic-style fact-checkers, replacing them with a user-based verification system similar to X\u2019s Community Notes, which he said was part of Meta\u2019s effort towards \u201crestoring free expression on [its] platforms.\u201d He\u2019s also tended to liken social media to a more open and democratically friendly public forum than the \u201clegacy media,\u201d which, in his view, is fraught with biased censorship. And these days, if he\u2019s going to do a sit-down interview, he tends to call on influencers like Theo Von.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But he\u2019s apparently deemed Meta\u2019s latest model to be a monumental enough event to warrant an <\/span>interview<\/span> with Bloomberg. He\u2019s also made an exceedingly rare <\/span>appearance on X<\/span> to mark the occasion.<\/span><\/p>\n

The new model, called Muse Spark 1.1, specializes in agentic tasks and digital tool use, according to Meta. <\/span>Testing results<\/span> show that the model outperformed Anthropic\u2019s Opus 4.8 and OpenAI\u2019s GPT-5.5 on four agentic benchmarks, including Humanity\u2019s Last Exam. It lagged behind in coding and multimodal capabilities, though much less so in almost every case than the <\/span>original Muse Spark<\/span>, which Meta launched in April.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Models\u2019 \u201cagency\u201d\u2014i.e., their ability to execute long-running tasks with little to no human oversight\u2014has become the major selling point for big tech developers over the past year. Much of those companies\u2019 PR efforts have focused on convincing developers and business customers that in the not-too-distant future, autonomous AI agents will be able to handle the work of individual employees, and maybe not so long after that, of entire teams, perhaps even at some point of entire organizations. (For the time being, though, there are still plenty of bugs to work out; agents are prone to misinterpret instructions and behave unpredictably, sometimes with disastrous results.)<\/span><\/p>\n

But businesses aren\u2019t going to ditch their Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions en masse just because Meta\u2019s new model shows promise in a handful of benchmarks. Zuck must be aware of this, which is why he\u2019s playing up the cost factor.<\/span><\/p>\n

Developers will be able to use Muse Spark 1.1 via a new Meta Model API for free until they reach a certain token limit, after which they\u2019ll be billed on a usage-based system that charges roughly one-quarter of the cost of industry-leading models, Zuckerberg told Bloomberg.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It gels with Meta\u2019s ongoing effort to brand itself as a kind of people\u2019s champ in the age of AI, the company that will democratize access to the technology at a time when its competitors\u2014according to Zuckerberg\u2019s line of thinking\u2014are attempting to control it exclusively for their own financial benefit. \u201cMeta\u2019s vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone,\u201d he wrote in a <\/span>blog post<\/span> last year. \u201cWe believe in putting this power in people\u2019s hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives. This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Zuckerberg is specifically throwing shade on Anthropic, which he told Bloomberg \u201cis sort of keeping a model for themselves and releasing a kind of simpler version of a model,\u201d referring to that company\u2019s recent rerelease of Fable 5, which is much more heavily guardrailled than the much-hyped Mythos. The claim directly mirrors some fearful predictions that have been circulating online about Anthropic and the prophecy of a \u201cpermanent underclass\u201d\u2014a segment of society that can\u2019t afford to use the biggest and best AI models, and as a result has to essentially live under the thumb of those who can. And he might find a receptive audience among some business leaders who have recently <\/span>said<\/span> they\u2019re ditching Anthropic due in part to the company\u2019s high token costs.<\/span><\/p>\n

To call Meta a champion of democratic ideals, though, would be like calling Texaco a pillar of environmental stewardship. The company\u2014previously known as Facebook\u2014has a long, ignominious, and well-documented history of deploying algorithms trained to optimize user engagement above all else. The Facebook algorithm has been shown to have played a role in fueling the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar in 2017, for example, and Meta is now facing $1.4 trillion in state lawsuits alleging its platforms hooked young users and harmed their mental health.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s going to take a lot more than a cheap AI model and a trendy wardrobe for Meta\u2019s CEO to sell himself as the people\u2019s champ in the age of AI, in other words.<\/span><\/p>\n

READ MORE:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Betting on People\u2019s Worst Instincts Has Kind of Always Been Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s Thing<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

\n

Meta just dropped a new AI model, and Mark Zuckerberg is shouting the news from some very un-Zuck-like rooftops.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Meta founder and CEO is known for many things, but a cozy relationship with traditional journalism is not one of them. Following the reelection of Donald Trump early last year and sporting his newly cultivated Cool Guy look, Zuckerberg said in a <\/span>video<\/span> published online that Meta was removing its journalistic-style fact-checkers, replacing them with a user-based verification system similar to X\u2019s Community Notes, which he said was part of Meta\u2019s effort towards \u201crestoring free expression on [its] platforms.\u201d He\u2019s also tended to liken social media to a more open and democratically friendly public forum than the \u201clegacy media,\u201d which, in his view, is fraught with biased censorship. And these days, if he\u2019s going to do a sit-down interview, he tends to call on influencers like Theo Von.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But he\u2019s apparently deemed Meta\u2019s latest model to be a monumental enough event to warrant an <\/span>interview<\/span> with Bloomberg. He\u2019s also made an exceedingly rare <\/span>appearance on X<\/span> to mark the occasion.<\/span><\/p>\n

The new model, called Muse Spark 1.1, specializes in agentic tasks and digital tool use, according to Meta. <\/span>Testing results<\/span> show that the model outperformed Anthropic\u2019s Opus 4.8 and OpenAI\u2019s GPT-5.5 on four agentic benchmarks, including Humanity\u2019s Last Exam. It lagged behind in coding and multimodal capabilities, though much less so in almost every case than the <\/span>original Muse Spark<\/span>, which Meta launched in April.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Models\u2019 \u201cagency\u201d\u2014i.e., their ability to execute long-running tasks with little to no human oversight\u2014has become the major selling point for big tech developers over the past year. Much of those companies\u2019 PR efforts have focused on convincing developers and business customers that in the not-too-distant future, autonomous AI agents will be able to handle the work of individual employees, and maybe not so long after that, of entire teams, perhaps even at some point of entire organizations. (For the time being, though, there are still plenty of bugs to work out; agents are prone to misinterpret instructions and behave unpredictably, sometimes with disastrous results.)<\/span><\/p>\n

But businesses aren\u2019t going to ditch their Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions en masse just because Meta\u2019s new model shows promise in a handful of benchmarks. Zuck must be aware of this, which is why he\u2019s playing up the cost factor.<\/span><\/p>\n

Developers will be able to use Muse Spark 1.1 via a new Meta Model API for free until they reach a certain token limit, after which they\u2019ll be billed on a usage-based system that charges roughly one-quarter of the cost of industry-leading models, Zuckerberg told Bloomberg.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It gels with Meta\u2019s ongoing effort to brand itself as a kind of people\u2019s champ in the age of AI, the company that will democratize access to the technology at a time when its competitors\u2014according to Zuckerberg\u2019s line of thinking\u2014are attempting to control it exclusively for their own financial benefit. \u201cMeta\u2019s vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone,\u201d he wrote in a <\/span>blog post<\/span> last year. \u201cWe believe in putting this power in people\u2019s hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives. This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Zuckerberg is specifically throwing shade on Anthropic, which he told Bloomberg \u201cis sort of keeping a model for themselves and releasing a kind of simpler version of a model,\u201d referring to that company\u2019s recent rerelease of Fable 5, which is much more heavily guardrailled than the much-hyped Mythos. The claim directly mirrors some fearful predictions that have been circulating online about Anthropic and the prophecy of a \u201cpermanent underclass\u201d\u2014a segment of society that can\u2019t afford to use the biggest and best AI models, and as a result has to essentially live under the thumb of those who can. And he might find a receptive audience among some business leaders who have recently <\/span>said<\/span> they\u2019re ditching Anthropic due in part to the company\u2019s high token costs.<\/span><\/p>\n

To call Meta a champion of democratic ideals, though, would be like calling Texaco a pillar of environmental stewardship. The company\u2014previously known as Facebook\u2014has a long, ignominious, and well-documented history of deploying algorithms trained to optimize user engagement above all else. The Facebook algorithm has been shown to have played a role in fueling the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar in 2017, for example, and Meta is now facing $1.4 trillion in state lawsuits alleging its platforms hooked young users and harmed their mental health.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s going to take a lot more than a cheap AI model and a trendy wardrobe for Meta\u2019s CEO to sell himself as the people\u2019s champ in the age of AI, in other words.<\/span><\/p>\n

READ MORE:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Betting on People\u2019s Worst Instincts Has Kind of Always Been Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s Thing<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/mark-zuckerberg-wants-to-save-you-from-the-permanent-underclass-2000783776″]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/app\/uploads\/2026\/07\/MarkZuckerberg-1200×675.jpg”] Meta just dropped a new AI model, and Mark Zuckerberg is shouting the news from some very un-Zuck-like rooftops. The Meta founder and CEO is known for many things, but a cozy relationship with traditional journalism is not one of them. Following the reelection of Donald Trump early last year and sporting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[226,53],"class_list":["post-2037994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-crawlmanager","tag-gizmodo-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2037994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2037994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2037994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2037994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}