Meta releases "Muse," its new family of AI models
By Steven Van ·
PLUS: Bolt open sources "Bolt Slides," Figma acquires the "Bud" team, and more.
Meta releases "Muse," its new family of AI models
PLUS: Bolt open sources "Bolt Slides," Figma acquires the "Bud" team, and more.
Steven Van
July 18, 2026
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In today's issue:
Meta released "Muse", a new model family: Muse Image (its most advanced image model yet), a preview of Muse Video, and Muse Spark 1.1, plus a new Meta Model API for developers.
Bolt open sourced "Bolt Slides", building blocks that let any AI agent create interactive presentations.
Figma acquired the team behind Bud (formerly Orchids).
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
📸 Meta releases "Muse Image & Video”
Meta released the “Muse” family of AI models, including Muse Image, Muse Video, Muse Spark 1.1, and the Meta Model API.
Muse now powers creative tools across Meta’s apps, from 30+ AI effects for Instagram Stories to image generation in WhatsApp chats with Meta AI, rolling out first in select countries.
Personalized presets in Instagram (powered by Muse)
Everything started rolling out right away:
Muse Image: Landed in the Meta AI app and on the web, plus Instagram Stories (starting in the US) and WhatsApp in limited countries, with more regions coming.
Muse Spark 1.1: Went live in "Thinking" mode in the Meta AI app and website.
Muse Video: Built on the same foundation as Muse Image with native audio support, got a preview and is coming to creators and Meta AI soon.
For the leaderboard watchers: Muse Image currently ranks #2 on Arena for text-to-image and editing, and Muse Video ranks #3 for text-to-video.
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DESIGN
🎉 Bolt open sources "Bolt Slides"
Bolt (formerly known as StackBlitz) open sourced “Bolt Slides,” a set of building blocks that let AI agents design and build full interactive presentations.
What does "open sourcing" mean? The code is published for anyone to use, modify, and build on for free. In this case, it means Bolt Slides isn't locked to Bolt's own product. Any agent, like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor, can use it to make slides.
The pitch was simple: AI-generated slides tend to be slop, and slides shouldn't be static anyway. So the Bolt team built composable blocks with bespoke layouts, real typography, considered animations, and interactive anything.
Every deck is a responsive web app, so sharing one is just sending a link.
There were two ways to start: prompt it directly on bolt.new with no setup, or grab the open source repo and bring your own agent.
DESIGN
🤝 Figma acquires the “Bud” team
Figma acquired the team behind Bud (formerly Orchids), an AI app-building platform focused on making software creation accessible to non-coders.
What's an acqui-hire? It's when a company buys a startup mainly to bring its team on board rather than to keep its product running. The product often winds down, and the people go build the same vision inside the bigger company.
That's the shape of this deal. The Bud team said the real bottleneck to building great software was never technical knowledge, and that "human ingenuity and creativity are where value eventually accrues."
They picked Figma because it's where ideas start, iterate, and come to life, and they'll be building AI-powered software creation there next.
Heads up if you've built anything on Bud: The platform will stay online through July 18, 2026, after which hosted projects go offline. Download your work or push it to GitHub before then.