Meta has announced the release of the Muse Spark Open AI model, which the company claims is the most capable US open-weight model to date. According to Meta, it is also the first model in its class capable of running on a desktop using two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios with the latest MLX framework. In a notable collaboration between typical industry rivals, Meta and Apple worked together over several months on the launch and publicly supported each other on social media. Statements were shared by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, new Apple CEO John Ternus, and Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, who noted the companies were playing nice again. The natively multimodal model features 816 billion total parameters and is designed to excel at long-horizon tasks, complex software engineering, and multi-step reasoning. Alongside the release, Apple published a new technical post detailing MLX, an array framework for machine learning tasks on Apple Silicon, alongside Muse Spark Open and two other open models. The collaboration marks a significant step in bringing large-scale open models to local desktop environments through hardware and software optimization.
Meta and Apple team up to make Muse AI models run better on Macs
Meta has announced the Muse Spark Open AI model, described as the most capable US open-weight model to date. In a surprising collaboration, rivals Meta and Apple worked together to optimize the model to run on desktop hardware using two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios and the MLX framework. The natively multimodal model features 816 billion parameters and handles complex reasoning tasks.
Why it matters
This partnership between traditional rivals highlights a growing industry focus on optimizing massive open-weight models for local desktop hardware. It demonstrates how hardware and software ecosystems can adapt to support high-parameter AI models directly on user devices.