Meta Shares Rise for Second Straight Day as Muse Wonder AI Model Family Impresses Analysts

Meta released Muse Wonder on Monday afternoon in two versions: Muse Wonder and a more advanced version called Muse Wonder Full. The company said Muse Wonder is available to developers through Meta’s Model API and its Muse Code agent for writing software, while Muse Wonder Full is available to paying subscribers of Muse Code. Meta said Muse Wonder will soon come to its Muse personal agent app, starting first with paid subscribers.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the Cheeky Pint podcast, also published Monday, that the model family marks a “big step forward” in Meta’s AI efforts. “Now that we are kind of at the frontier, now everything that we do going forward will just kind of be pushing the frontier,” Zuckerberg said. He added that development should accelerate, saying, “the time between each subsequently bigger class of models, I think, will now start to kind of compress.”

Wells Fargo said Meta has reached the “AI frontier” with Muse Wonder Full. Based on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Wells Fargo wrote that Muse Wonder Full ranks among the industry’s most advanced offerings, behind only Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5. Baird called the release “another example of tangible product progress” from Meta’s heavy AI investments. KeyBanc said it “reinforces Meta has the right mix of talent, data, distribution, and compute capacity to compete in AI.” Meta also received a wave of bullish analyst notes and price target hikes after the launch.

The releases could help Meta attract more paying users and strengthen its consumer-facing AI offerings, creating new revenue opportunities beyond advertising. CNBC’s Investing Club said it was encouraged by Meta’s steady pace of AI releases following Muse Spark in April, though it described Wonder as an incremental development rather than a major catalyst on its own. It added that it remains unclear how meaningful the resulting subscription revenue could become, but the progress offers growing evidence that Meta’s substantial AI investments are producing competitive products with monetization potential, easing earlier concerns about spending without a clear payoff.

The broader market was lower Tuesday afternoon, as key members of the AI buildout trade continued to struggle. Micron, SK Hynix and other memory stocks fell sharply for a second straight day after Chinese rival CXMT touted progress over the weekend on a more efficient way of making memory chips. The iShares Semiconductor ETF and VanEck Semiconductor ETF were each on pace for a sixth negative day in a row, their longest losing streaks since May 2025.

Not all technology stocks were in the red. Salesforce and Microsoft rose 2% and 1%, respectively. Apple clung to modest gains after unveiling its biggest push yet into connected home devices. Johnson & Johnson was the biggest laggard in the CNBC Investing Club portfolio, down about 6%.

Banks opened third-quarter earnings season Tuesday morning. Results from JPMorgan, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs were mostly healthy, with credit metrics pointing to a resilient economy and investment banking activity still robust, though less robust than in the second quarter. JPMorgan was slightly lower, Citigroup fell 4%, and Wells Fargo dropped 2%. Goldman was the outlier, up about 0.5%. RBC Capital Markets analyst Gerard Cassidy said less powerful estimate revisions versus the second quarter and expectations for fewer stock buybacks going forward helped explain the moves. The CNBC Investing Club said it upgraded Goldman, which had been battered into the print.

No major earnings reports were due after the bell. Wednesday morning was expected to bring results from semiconductor equipment giant ASML and financial firms Bank of America, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley and State Street. The consumer price index was the big economic report on Wednesday.