Meta’s Muse rally keeps unwinding; shares fall with peers and close near the low

Meta opened flat on Friday, then slid 3.7% to finish near the session low. All eight related stocks fell, with the middle performer down 2.9%, while the Nasdaq lost 2.1% and the S&P 500 fell 1.1%. Meta’s volume was 20.7 million shares, close to its usual 21.0 million: it fell harder than the group, but without an unusual rush to sell.

The retreat follows the rally earlier this week around Muse Wonder, Meta’s AI models for personal and professional agents. Even after the pullback, Meta is down 1.3% over five trading days, less than the typical related stock’s 2% decline. Over 21 trading days, it remains up 4%, versus 0.85% for that peer benchmark, so investors have unwound only part of its relative gains around AI.

Before the open, reports said Meta had released an open-weight Muse Spark model for coding and tasks carried out by AI agents.^[1] The model, called Muse Spark Open, was also designed to run on Macs.^[2] Open weights let developers download and adapt the model, which can broaden its use without establishing how much revenue Meta will earn from it.

The next business test comes with Wednesday’s earnings report on October 21. In commentary reported during trading, Bank of America forecast revenue above consensus as AI supports advertising growth.^[3] Advertising supplies nearly all of Meta’s revenue, so the results can show whether AI is helping the business that already pays the bills. If the peer group steadies and Meta keeps losing ground against it, that would point to a concern specific to Meta.