They say, “better late than never,” and this is likely Meta’s case in the AI race. After trailing behind Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is finally bouncing back with its Muse Spark AI model. Muse Spark 1.1 just defeated the best Gemini AI models in certain benchmarks, and to commemorate this, Meta’s AI chief Alexandr Wang shared a special message for Google.

On X, AI expert Tae Kim posted a screenshot from the Artificial Analysis Intelligence benchmark. In the chart, Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 managed to outperform Gemini 3.6 Flash, the most advanced Google model yet.

Alexandr Wang, who leads Meta’s AI efforts, reshared the post and took a dig at Google in the process. He added, “Gemini who?”

Alexandr Wang shares a message after Muse Spark outperforms Gemini.

Alexandr Wang’s Muse Spark defeated Gemini in 1 year?

Keep in mind that Muse Spark 1.1 was trained in less than a year, with Alexandr Wang joining Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL) only in July last year. That is, within this period, Meta managed to train an AI model capable of outperforming Gemini.

Tae Kim wrote, “Google getting beaten by Alexandr Wang this early, when Meta's new AI team is tiny in comparison, is absolutely embarrassing for Google.”

Alexandr Wang joined Meta after Mark Zuckerberg paid over $14 billion to acquire his startup Scale AI. Since joining Meta, Wang has stepped up the company’s AI efforts following the mediocre release of Meta’s open-weight Llama models. Meta’s Llama AI models had failed to match rivals, putting the company on the backfoot in the AI race.

While Muse Spark has managed to beat Gemini, it still trails behind more advanced models from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. Chinese open-weight models, Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2, also score higher.

Muse Spark is the first AI model to be developed by Wang’s MSL team, being released in April. Earlier this month, Meta launched Muse Spark 1.1 with a major focus on coding. Muse Spark 1.1’s release was so important that Mark Zuckerberg broke his hiatus from X to announce it.

Coding has increasingly become one of the most important domains for AI models as demand from enterprise users continues to rise. Meta promises Muse Spark 1.1 can deliver strong coding performance for lower costs than models from OpenAI or Anthropic.

Meanwhile, Google has reportedly delayed the release of the Gemini 3.5 Pro AI model for allegedly not meeting internal goals for coding tasks.

Apart from Muse Spark, Meta has also released Muse Image, its new AI image generator. Though the image generator sparked controversy as it initially allowed anyone to create AI images of users with public Instagram accounts. Meta has since disabled this feature.

- Ends

Published By:

Armaan Agarwal

Published On:

Jul 22, 2026 10:58 IST