# Meta's smallest model is the one we can't run (slim)

> Vlad Cealicu on Muse Ember, Meta's smallest and most efficient model, released on 9 November 2026. It's good for the industry and cheap to rent, it costs the same per token as Claude Haiku 5.5 and GPT-6 Luna, and it's Meta's smallest model, yet the only way to use it is to rent it.

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By Vlad Cealicu, 9 November 2026. 736 words, about 3 min to read.

Meta released Muse Ember today, and calls it its smallest and most efficient model [[1]](#ref-1).

## Is it available?

It's available as a service.

There's nothing to download, though.

## Why it's good

Most of what an agent does isn't hard.

## A third of the cost of what?

The launch thread says Muse Ember gets more intelligence per dollar than Haiku, Luna and all other flash models, at a third of the cost or less.

And it's a third of the cost per task, not per token.

That's a real advantage if it holds up, since fewer tokens is also less waiting.

## The one we can't have

Meta does publish open weights.

But an 816B model needs a datacenter, and Muse Glimmer is distilled from Muse Spark, not the model Meta built for this work [[5]](#ref-5).

I'd like to be wrong about this, and for the weights to follow the way they did for Muse Spark.

---

More in [Opinion](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/opinion/index.md)

- Older: [The biggest gap between startups and enterprise we've ever had](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/the-biggest-gap-between-startups-and-enterprise.md)
- Newer: [Just in time society](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/just-in-time-society.md)
- All posts: https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/index.md

Anchor Terminal grades the tools AI agents run on, with a source for every score.

## References

Read on 9 November 2026.

[1] Meta AI Research, Introducing our smallest, most efficient model, Muse Ember, 9 November 2026. Source for Meta calling it its smallest and most efficient model, the comparison with Claude Haiku 5.5 and GPT-6 Luna, matching Haiku's best score at about a third of the cost, the cost per task and scores ($0.136 and 35.8 against $0.411 and 36.2), Haiku leading on FrontierCode 2.0, and the internal benchmarks in the table.

[2] Meta, Muse Ember, Meta Model API documentation.

[3] Meta, Pricing and rate limits, Meta Model API documentation.

[4] Meta, Choose a model, Meta Model API documentation.

[5] Meta, Models, Meta Model API documentation.

[6] Meta, the Muse Ember launch post, Meta for Developers blog, 9 November 2026. Source for the 10,000-photo example costing $1.33, with about $20 for the same requests at Muse Wonder prices.

[7] Anchor Terminal, the Anthropic API listing.

[8] Anchor Terminal, the OpenAI API listing.

[9] Meta, Reasoning, Meta Model API documentation.
