Mark Zuckerberg looks on at UFC Freedom 250 at the White House on June 14, 2026 in Washington, DC.
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Meta On Tuesday, Muse released Image, a new artificial intelligence model for creating images, as the company looks to attract creators and advertisers to its offerings.
The AI technology, originally codenamed Mango, is the second major release from Meta Superintelligence Labs under the leadership of Alexandr Wang, who in April oversaw the unveiling of the large language model Muse Spark, which succeeded the company’s previous Llama family of models.
Muse Image will be available free to consumers via the Meta AI app and website, WhatsApp direct messages and Instagram Stories. Power users and creators will need to sign up for one of Meta’s new monthly subscriptions, which launched in May, to create many AI-generated images and access certain features. When users reach their free limit, they can purchase a Meta One subscription or wait until their limit is reset, the company said.
Muse Image will also support advertiser-specific image generation tools as part of Meta’s AI-powered Advantage Plus service, making it easier for brands to develop creative for their marketing campaigns and automate certain tasks. Meta said it worked with companies and advertisers as part of the launch of Muse Image.
“Muse Image brings native reasoning to the creative process to customize elements, swap styles and create variations based on advertiser creativity, resulting in high-quality, on-brand ad variations with fewer iterations,” the company said in an enterprise blog post. “In the coming weeks, advertisers and agencies can expect image variants powered by Muse Image.”
The new image generation model and efforts to monetize it show how Meta is trying to expand its core business of online advertising and develop new revenue streams tied to its heavy spending on AI-related infrastructure.
OpenAI And alphabet Google has had a head start on Meta in offering similar image generation models, with Google’s Nano Banana becoming a hit with consumers when it was released last fall.
Meta also revealed internal benchmark tests that show Muse Image lags behind OpenAI’s latest GPT Image 2 model, but outperforms the Nano Banana 2 model in tasks such as single and multiple image editing.
The social media giant has previously leveraged third-party AI models such as Midjourney and Black Forest Labs to power various image and video generation functions within its Meta AI app and website. The company said it plans to use its new AI model to reduce reliance on similar third-party technologies.
Meta also plans to release an AI video generation model called Muse Video at a later date, adding in a technical blog that it “offers competitive performance in terms of fast adherence, visual fidelity and temporal consistency.”
Muse Image will be available on Facebook and Messenger, as well as other areas of Instagram and WhatsApp services later this year.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/07/meta-ai-muse-image.html
