The stretch in between was turbulent. Meta was long the most important source of open models thanks to Llama, but Llama 4 flopped and drew criticism over massaged benchmark numbers. The largest version of the family never shipped at all. Zuckerberg rebuilt the AI group as Meta Superintelligence Labs, poured billions into data provider Scale AI and into poaching top researchers, and reorganized the unit several times. Chief scientist Yann LeCun, the face of Meta's AI research for years, left the company. Muse Glimmer is the new unit's first open model.
Meta is competitive, but not dominant
Meta compares Glimmer with Google's Gemma4-31B and Alibaba's Qwen3.6-27B, the two leading open models in this size class. Glimmer wins most benchmarks, especially on agent tasks like tool use, web search, and long-context work. Qwen is clearly better at driving a computer desktop and at terminal tasks. On multimodal tasks, all three are even.
So Meta is back in the game among small open models, but not ahead of it. And as always with vendor-run benchmarks, take the numbers with a grain of salt. Meta gathered most of the comparison data itself and admits in its methodology report that its test setup isn't tuned for the rival models.
