Muse Glimmer: Meta's Open AI Model, Run Locally
Muse Glimmer is Meta's free, open-weight 30B model — run it yourself with Ollama or Hugging Face. Here's how it works and how it compares to Qwen and Spark.
Muse Glimmer is Meta's free, open-weight 30B AI model, released August 2026 under Apache 2.0. Run it yourself with one command in Ollama, or download it from Hugging Face. It scores lower than Muse Spark on independent benchmarks, but it's the only Muse family model you can run entirely offline.
What Muse Glimmer is
Muse Glimmer is Meta's first open-weight model release since Llama 4. Released in August 2026 under the Apache 2.0 license, it's a 30-billion-parameter model built for agent-style tasks — reasoning, tool use, and multimodal understanding — designed to run on a single consumer GPU instead of needing cloud infrastructure.
How to run Muse Glimmer locally
The fastest way is Ollama:
ollama run muse-glimmer
This pulls an 18GB quantized build with a 128K context window. You'll need Ollama 0.32.8 or newer — the previous version lists the model but fails to download on NVIDIA/AMD backends.
Prefer Hugging Face? Meta publishes the weights at meta-models/Muse-Glimmer-30B-GGUF, downloadable with huggingface_hub or directly through llama.cpp.
Hardware needed: roughly 18GB of VRAM on NVIDIA or AMD, or 21GB of unified memory on Apple Silicon, for the standard quantized version. Full precision needs 55GB+.
How Glimmer compares to Qwen and other open models
According to Artificial Analysis, an independent AI benchmarking firm, Glimmer scores 35 on the Intelligence Index — about 5 points above Gemma 4 31B at a similar size, roughly matching Kimi K2.5 despite using 33 times fewer parameters, and just behind Qwen3.6 27B and Ling 3.0 Flash. For a 30B model you can run on one GPU, that's a strong result — it just isn't Meta's strongest model.
Glimmer vs. Spark: which one should you actually use
Use Glimmer if you want to run something locally, need it to work offline, or want to build on Meta's model without paying per token.
Use Spark if you want Meta's best available quality — it scores meaningfully higher (61–62 vs. 35) — and you don't mind using it through Meta AI, the Muse agent, or a hosted API.
Try Spark free, no setup required → · Full Spark breakdown →
FAQ
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FreeMuseAI is an independent, third-party guide and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Meta. Facts on this page are checked against official sources where possible; unverified claims are marked accordingly.