Meta returns to open weights with Muse Glimmer, a 30B Apache-2.0 agentic model

2026-08-10★★★★after cutoffopen-sourceMetaconfidence: high

On 2026-08-10 Meta released Muse Glimmer, a 30B-parameter open-weight model under Apache 2.0, optimized for local, always-on agent workflows and designed to run on a single consumer GPU or Mac. It was Meta's first open-weight release of the Muse era and its first under a fully permissive license (Llama used a custom license).

Key facts

Released 2026-08-10; 30 billion parameters; weights at huggingface.co/meta-models/Muse-Glimmer-30B
License: Apache 2.0 (unrestricted commercial use)
Dense model (per MindStudio) with a dedicated perception encoder for multimodal input
Quantized weights under 20GB; fits in 24GB or 32GB memory envelopes
DFlash speculative decoding: 3.1x faster decode on RTX 5090, 1.8x on M5 Max, 1.5x on M4 Max
Compared by Meta against Gemma4-31B and Qwen3.6-27B on agentic benchmarks

What happened

Meta published Muse Glimmer, a 30B open-weight model built for agentic work (multi-step reasoning, tool use, long trajectories, coding-harness compatibility) that runs fully on consumer hardware. It ships with a lightweight DFlash drafter for speculative decoding and a perception encoder for images.

Why it matters

After shifting its frontier Muse models to closed weights in April, Meta re-entered the open-weight race - under a more permissive license than Llama ever had - directly against strong Chinese open models (Qwen) and Google's Gemma in the local-agent segment.

Changelog

2026-09-29: created

Related events

2026-08-05Meta launches Muse Code terminal coding agent powered by Muse Spark 1.2 ★★★
2026-04-08Meta Superintelligence Labs debuts Muse Spark, its first model ★★★★

Sources (5)

id: 2026-08-10-meta-muse-glimmer-open-weights · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline