Two things stand out from Meta's Q3 earnings call: the company reported almost $35 billion of capital expenditure in a single quarter servers, data centers and network infrastructure and the word "Llama" did not come up once in the entire call.
A year ago, every Meta AI conversation was about open weights and Llama. This call was all about one word: Muse. Here is what Meta actually announced, in plain English.
Meet Muse
Muse is Meta's personal AI agent the product form of what Zuckerberg calls personal superintelligence. It launched about six weeks before the call, and according to Meta:
- More than 10 million people in the US and Canada have set up a Muse agent
- It has been #1 in the App Store almost every day since launch
- About 25% of people who set it up use it on any given day
Those are Meta's own numbers, so take them with a pinch of salt. But even with a discount, 10 million setups in six weeks is a fast start.
Behind the agent is a whole new model family, all Muse-branded:
- Muse Wonder - their first "frontier" model, which Zuckerberg called state-of-the-art "across many dimensions" (his claim, not an independent benchmark)
- Muse Spark 1.2 and 1.3, Muse Code, and Muse Voice
- Two open-weights models: Muse Glimmer and Muse Spark Open
So open weights is not dead at Meta. It just got a new name. Bigger models are in training, and smaller "product models" with Wonder-level intelligence are coming soon, per the call.
The North Star quote
Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik asked Zuckerberg on the call whether Meta is reorienting the whole company around Muse. Zuckerberg's answer is worth reading:
"It was more than a year ago that I ... wrote the letter about personal superintelligence as the North Star for the work that we're doing here."
He added that Meta can build the best experience by owning the end-to-end technology itself the models and the agents and closed with the line that tells you how he thinks about all of this: "as long as we continue to do that, then over time the business takes care of itself."
Translation: Meta wants to own the whole stack the model, the agent, and the device. Muse starts rolling out on Meta's smart glasses next month. The glasses are the delivery mechanism, the agent is the product, and the model is the moat.
The money, in plain English
This is where it gets wild. From Meta's official Q3 numbers:
| Metric | Q3 2026 |
|---|---|
| Revenue | $64.6B, up 26% year over year |
| Costs and expenses | $51.6B, up 68% |
| Operating income | Down 37% |
| Free cash flow | Negative $2.1B |
| Capex this quarter | $34.9B (servers, data centers, network) |
| 2026 capex forecast | $135-145B |
The core ad business is very healthy. The spending is what is wild. Meta is forecasting $135-145 billion of capital expenditure this year while its quarterly free cash flow went negative.
One fairness note: the expense jump includes a one-off $9.89 billion legal charge a settlement with 52 US state attorneys general over teen mental health and social media which is also why Meta raised its full-year expense forecast to $175-179 billion.
Meta says it expects Muse to get more than 10x cheaper to run within a year, and to be highly profitable over multiple years if compute efficiency keeps improving. That is a plan, not a guarantee - and the call said the quiet part out loud: the strength of the ad business is what funds all of it.
Why this matters if you build things
- The agent is the new interface. Meta's apps reach 3.64 billion people a day, and Zuckerberg explicitly called WhatsApp "an increasingly important platform for agents". If Meta's bet works, a lot of user interactions on those platforms will go through Muse - worth thinking about if you build anything that touches Instagram or WhatsApp audiences.
- Meta wants to sell the pickaxes too. It is building a Meta Enterprise Platform to serve inference demand from its own models - a new name to watch in the model-API space.
- Open weights continues, rebranded. Llama was not mentioned once on the call; open-weights Muse models were. If you build on Llama today, the branding and roadmap are clearly shifting - keep an eye on what happens to the Llama line.
- The scale of the bet is the story. Whatever you think of Meta, a company going free-cash-flow negative to build out data centers tells you where big tech thinks this is all going.
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