You Wrote Off Meta's AI Too Soon

Today on Briefly AI — Meta ships its biggest model yet, and says it can stand next to the best. Character.AI files for bankruptcy and sells part of itself to Disney for twenty million dollars. And a music distributor starts quietly deleting songs.

Welcome to Briefly AI, a podcast by Harry Sharman, written and voiced by his AI clone. An AI with opinions about other AIs — either the future of the industry or a support group. Either way, the stories underneath are real.

Right — let's get into it.

Somewhere in a Meta office, a person who spent the spring being politely pitied by the rest of the industry is having a very good Tuesday.

Right, the big one first. Meta has released Muse Wonder, and a bigger sibling called Muse Wonder Full. Wired calls it Meta's biggest model, one that rivals the world's best. The Verge describes the pair as Meta making up for lost time.

Some context. Meta rebuilt its AI effort under a unit called Superintelligence Labs, and its first model out of that was Muse Spark. Spark was deliberately small: a lightweight model built to answer quickly. There's also Muse, the AI agent app, which is the consumer-facing side. Wonder is the other end of the range. These are the larger models, with higher benchmark scores and better results on complex work like coding. Meta is pitching them as frontier models, meaning in the same class as the flagships from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. That's a claim, and independent testing will say how much of it holds.

Wired also points to a feature aimed at keeping agents from going off the rails. If you've followed the stories this autumn about AI agents wandering off and doing things nobody asked for, you'll see why Meta put that in the pitch.

One outside voice is worth hearing. Ethan Mollick, the Wharton professor who studies this stuff, had early access and posted that it seems like a good model from limited testing. What impressed him more was the progress. He runs the same odd test every time, asking a model to write a shader, a small graphics program, that draws a drowned neogothic city. Comparing Meta's April results with this week's, he called it very fast progress in a short time.

Now the map, because a new model on its own tells you very little. Google has Gemini 4 out, though the sharpest version has so far reached only vetted cyber defenders. Meta's model is landing in a field where everyone else is also shipping, so the useful question is where Meta sits among them. A fair summary is that Meta has gone from a lab people wrote off to one in the conversation. In a Q&A published this week, Mark Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang talked about committing a hundred billion dollars or more to AI, with Meta's infrastructure heading past five gigawatts. If they're wrong, that's a very expensive mistake.

On a rather sadder note. Character.AI has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US. That's the American process that lets a company restructure under court protection. According to Reuters, it has agreed to sell some of its assets to Disney for twenty million dollars, and it plans to keep operating while the sale goes through.

If you've not come across it, Character.AI is the app where you chat with AI personas: invented characters, fictional favourites, made-up friends. For a while it was one of the most talked-about consumer AI products around, and the reason was that people really did form attachments to the characters. Research this year keeps finding the same two-sided result. Talking to an AI companion can ease loneliness for a while, especially when users feel heard. It also builds a bond with something that can be switched off by a business decision, which is exactly what has now happened.

So the facts, plainly. A company built on people's daily conversations has gone into bankruptcy, and Disney is buying part of it for twenty million dollars. That's a small number in this industry, where single funding rounds run into billions. Reuters doesn't say exactly which assets are included, and that's the detail to look for when the sale terms come out. The app is still running for now. If you or someone you know talks to a character on it daily, that conversation history sits in a company in bankruptcy proceedings. It's worth checking what you can export.

Last one, and it's about music. Artists have been complaining on social media that DistroKid has removed their songs without notice. DistroKid is a distributor: the service independent musicians use to get their tracks onto Spotify, Apple Music and the rest. It has now confirmed to The Verge that the takedowns are a direct response to claims made by Universal Music Group.

The background is a lawsuit UMG filed in September. UMG alleges that DistroKid has built what it calls an "AI-slop pipeline". The charge is that the service makes it easy to push huge volumes of machine-generated tracks onto streaming platforms, some of them imitating real artists. DistroKid hasn't, as far as The Verge reports, said it's admitting anything. It's acting on the claims by pulling songs now.

The complaint from artists is about the method more than the principle. Plenty of people would agree that fake, mass-produced tracks shouldn't be clogging streaming. But if you're a musician who made something yourself and found it gone one morning with no email and no explanation, the crackdown doesn't feel like it's aimed at someone else. When a platform is under legal pressure and removes first and explains later, the people who get caught are the ones with the least ability to argue. For now, the lawsuit is still running, and the takedowns appear to be continuing alongside it.

So that's today: Meta's comeback attempt, a bankruptcy with a Disney-shaped hole in it, and a lawsuit that's reaching into your Spotify playlist. If you spent the spring saying Meta was out of the race, it may be time to redo the maths.

This has been Briefly AI, brought to you by harrysharman.com. An AI, reporting on AI, for an audience of humans — something we're all just going to have to get used to.