Meta teams with Apple to run Muse Spark Open model on Macs

Meta Platforms ↗ 0.17% released the weights for Muse Spark Open on Thursday, Oct. 15, and calls it "the most capable US open-weight model to date." The company said it worked with Apple ↘ 0.09% to tune the model to run locally on the Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra chip, according to 9to5Mac. The deal brings together two companies that have been rivals for years, and Axios calls it a "striking détente."cnbc.com+1

The model and the hardware

Muse Spark Open handles multiple input types natively. It has 816 billion total parameters, 42 billion of them active at once, and a 1-million-token context window. Meta built it for coding and agentic work, according to a blog post quoted by 9to5Mac. The model runs on two or four connected Mac Studios using Apple's MLX framework. It is free to download, with a license allowing commercial use, Axios reported. CNBC said Meta describes the license as allowing limited commercial use.cnbc.com+2

The hardware is expensive. Engadget notes that running the model needs about 1TB of RAM. Meta says each Mac Studio can give the GPU up to 512GB of memory, so "two Mac Studios behave like one supercomputer with a terabyte of unified memory". Apple hasn't set a price for the 512GB version, which is due in late October. A setup with four 256GB machines would cost about $38,000. Meta's benchmarks suggest the model beats the Chinese models GLM 5.3 and Kimi K3 on agentic tasks and visual reasoning, Engadget reported.engadget.com

A truce between rivals

"We're excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again," Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang told Axios. He said Daniel Gross, a former Apple executive who now works at Meta, helped bring the two companies together. The two sides fell out badly in 2021, when Apple's privacy changes limited ad targeting. Meta estimated those changes would cut its 2022 revenue by $10 billion, according to CNBC. CNBC also noted that the companies hadn't announced a public partnership since 2017. This one comes soon after John Ternus succeeded Tim Cook as Apple's CEO.axios.com+1

Because the model runs on users' own machines, Meta never sees their prompts. "Meta has no control or visibility to any of that," Wang said.axios.com

Strategic stakes

According to Axios, running a model this large on Apple hardware could give companies an alternative to Nvidia ↘ 1.47% GPUs and to proprietary models. Apple published new chip benchmarks and technical documentation on how MLX splits models across several machines. Neither company would say whether the partnership will go further.cnbc.com+1

Wang said the open model trails Meta's proprietary Muse Wonder, which came out earlier this week. "These aren't the most capable models that we've developed or released," he told CNBC. "But we think that there will be a lot of companies and developers who sort of use this model and tinker with it at small scale and then seek to ramp up and scale up their usage."cnbc.com