Meta has released a new AI model called Muse Glimmer, and it runs locally on your computer instead of some company’s server.
Most AI you use today lives in the cloud, so when you type something, it travels to a data centre, an answer comes back. Muse Glimmer doesn’t work that way as it runs on a relatively decentMac or PC, no internet needed.
Meta built it for what the industry calls agents, meaning AI that does things for you instead of just chatting. Sorting files, drafting messages, managing your calendar. That work needs access to your personal stuff, which is exactly what a lot of people don’t want leaving their laptop.
Local AI has always been too big and too slow. Meta shrunk this one to fit on a normal graphics card and made it answer roughly one and a half to three times faster, depending on your hardware. It’s free to download from Hugging Face, the open-source platform and community hub for hosting, sharing, and building AI models and datasets. Meta says it’s also available commercially too.
Here’s how that differs from the other big players and their frontier AI models. Anthropic has never released Claude this way, as it stays on company servers, which lets Anthropic watch how it’s used and fix problems after launch. CEO Dario Amodei argued last month that once an AI’s inner workings are public, safeguards can be stripped out and copies run privately, beyond anyone’s reach.
As for OpenAI, it has put out a couple of downloadable models, but they’re kept separate from ChatGPT and the main API, which stay in the cloud.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a huge post today, titled, ‘The Future is for Everyone’, where his argument was about the balance of power and distributing AI capabilities to individuals rather than centralizing them:
“Humanity is not a monoculture. People’s diverse values represent different tradeoffs they would make on important issues. There is no technological solution that can align with everyone’s opposing interests and values at once. Any singular superintelligence would have to prioritize some values over others and in the process would be incapable of being benevolent to everyone. Instead, we propose that it is more productive to view each of these concerns through the lens of achieving the right balance of power, as western society has in democratic governing institutions. People and institutions with competing interests naturally check and balance each other to lead towards positive outcomes. The best and most realistic path to building a positive AI future is by delivering superintelligence to everyone.”
When AI superintelligence arrives–do you agree with Zuckerberg that it should be available to all?
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