Why Meta is selling AI models now

My chat with Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang. Also: Sun Valley watching, and the AI writing app fighting AI slop.

When I got Alexandr Wang on the phone ahead of Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 release, I wanted to know how serious Meta was about its new API business for selling access to the model, which now puts it in more compeitition with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Wang said that Meta sees the API as a real business, not just a learning exercise. Tokens are “gigantic and growing very, very quickly,” he told me, and capturing even a slice of that “can be a very meaningful business even for Meta at our scale.”

Every new API account comes with $20 in free credits, then $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output, making it “one of the most attractive pricing levels in the market,” as Wang put it. The API also plugs into the OpenAI SDK, so developers can point their existing stack at Meta’s model. Wang said that was deliberate: “We wanted adoption of our model to be very efficient and easy for developers starting out.” A Meta-native stack will come with time. Claude SDK compatibility isn’t part of this release, but he didn’t rule it out either.