Muse Ember: Our smallest, most efficient model

dvaplima 279 points 116 comments November 09, 2026
research.meta.ai · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

simonw

Six effort levels (minimal, low, medium, high, xhigh, max), so here are six pelicans (actually five, "high" didn't return a complete SVG): https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... There's usually a reasonably strong correlation between thinking level and visual quality of the pelican. This is the first time I've seen that correlation appear to break - more reasoning tokens doesn't seem to produce an obviously better SVG.

open-paren

I believe this is what the “crouton alpha” stealth model was https://openrouter.ai/stealth/crouton-alpha

Starlevel004

Luna 6 is getting a bit long in the teeth now. It's two full months old, but it was only a slight step above Luna 5.6, which is already four months old (Imagine saying this about anything else). So I'm not too surprised that a newer small model is beating it handily. I've been hoping for Luna 6.1/2 as the next model release for a few days now.

caaqil

I'm always a bit surprised to see Meta talking about models. They have become (almost*) entirely irrelevant to the LLM race, which is weird because their AI lab used to be decent before LLM was cool. What happened to zuck? Was the metaverse this destructive? (*) Feeling charitable today

dom96

Super frustrating that I still can’t give Muse Wonder Full a spin.

gopalv

Model refusals should be a -ve score, not zero? Treating the refusal as a 0 score erases the difference between lack of capability and a lack of willingness to perform.

Pragmata

No weights? Shame

aaroninsf

Never Meta. Seriously. Moral harm is real and there is no excuse.

BatchJob

it is our most modestly priced receptacle...

ecshafer

I would love it if Meta would release these models to use locally to build up some usage while they are lagging.

kbrannigan

This is starting to feel just like the early PC days. A bunch of Computer models coming out, all shapes and color, but eventually it settled around mouse keyboard, monitor most people, use the office suite: Word, Spreadsheet , presentations, database. I bet we're going to see the exact same thing with LLMs at specialized models instead of the everything models. One for lawyers, coders, Accountants, Designers, etc…

slopnt

I use haiku and luna for support on most my SWE tasks since they are cheap and fast. I find them enough for most things if you are patient, and the fact an even cheaper model for comparable intelligence is out there now is great news!

johnnyApplePRNG

Good for summarizing your tweets or what?! Is this a model for ants?!

mococa

Not open weight? Meh... I'll wait for the Chinese releases :)

v9v

Why no comparisons with DeepSeek?

minimaxir

> It costs $0.10 per million input tokens, $0.004 per million cached input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, Notable cache cost of 4% input, compared to Luna/Haiku's 10% of input.

segmondy

What makes it small? Anyone know the size? I don't see it anywhere. Small in relation to their current line up? Anyways, last I tried Meta was llama4. I stepped aside not because of how bad llama4 got, but also because of Zuck's move. Anyone here using Meta? I don't know anyone in my circle using it, but I'm sure folks are using it.

cheesecompiler

Kind of burnt out on all the model updates at this point.

syntaxing

What does smallest mean? Even smaller than Muse Glimmer which I doubt? Though it is interesting to see US frontier labs trying to push models that outcompete deepseek flash 1017. It’s a good move from the Deepseek federal government ban. Both Inkling 2 small and this seems to try to fill that gap cost vs performance wise. But I like inkling 2 small more due to open weight even though it has a restrictive license.

Retro_Dev

When they said the model was the "smallest" of their models yet, I was really hoping it would be open weights. I can't find any weights, how sad :(

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