Meta's parent company announced Muse Image, its first picture-generating model developed within the Alexandr Wang-led Meta Superintelligence Lab, on Tuesday. Muse Image will take over image generation duties for Meta AI and some experiences within WhatsApp and Instagram, powering more than 30 new AI effects, and will soon be available on Facebook and Messenger. Advertisers will also soon be able to use Muse Image as part of Meta's Advantage+ tool. Meta says Muse Image is free for "everyday creation," with more usage available via a subscription option. Meta also previewed Muse Video, a movie-generating model coming soon to Meta AI. With the new Muse Image-powered Meta AI, users can tag public Instagram accounts and incorporate photos from those profiles into generated images; Instagram users can opt out, but the feature is enabled by default. Meta says Muse Image generally surpasses Google's Nano Banana 2 and trails only ChatGPT's image generator. Meta is still evaluating whether to make Muse Image available to outside developers, and developers still lack access to Muse Spark, the language model introduced in April. Meta plans to release an open model based on Spark and is on track to release a significantly more powerful model using vastly more compute power. The release comes amid reports of frustration inside Meta over the pace of its AI progress and methods used to accelerate development, including reassigning thousands of engineers and a paused program collecting AI training data from employee work activity after a privacy failure.