Apple and Meta have found something they can agree on. Apparently, it takes a very large AI model.
The longtime rivals have teamed up to make Meta’s new Muse Spark Open model run locally on Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studios. Announced Oct. 15, the release lets developers download and customize the new open-weight model, though two connected Apple desktops are required to power it. “The result is two Mac Studios behave like one supercomputer,” Meta wrote in a blog post.
“We’re excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again,” Meta’s AI chief Alexandr Wang told Axios.
An unusual way to describe a corporate collaboration, sure. But these companies do have some history. As recently as January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg was criticizing Apple on Joe Rogan’s podcast for its lack of innovation and restrictions on other companies’ products. Now, Meta is helping show off what Apple’s silicon can do.
Muse Spark Open builds on the Muse Spark model family Meta introduced in April. Meta calls it the most capable U.S. open-weight model available, a claim based on its own evaluations. “Open-weight” means developers can download the model’s learned parameters and run them themselves, subject to the model’s license, rather than accessing it exclusively through a company’s app or cloud service.
Meta says the model is designed for coding, multistep reasoning, and “agentic” work — using tools to complete tasks. In its tests, the company says it used Muse Code, powered by the new model, to make changes to the Mastodon app Ice Cubes and operate video editor DaVinci Resolve, reviewing footage and cropping clips vertically. (To learn more, read Meta’s methodology.)
There is a sizable catch to the desktop pitch, however. This is an 816-billion-parameter model, and Meta’s highlighted setup uses two M5 Ultra Mac Studios with up to 512GB of unified memory each. It runs through Apple’s MLX machine-learning framework. So, your everyday MacBook is sitting this one out.
The release follows Muse Glimmer, Meta’s smaller model designed to run on a laptop or PC. Both reflect the appeal of running AI on hardware you control, allowing local processing without sending each prompt to a hosted model.
That also gives Apple and Meta a way around a longstanding source of tension: privacy. Wang told Axios that Meta has no visibility into developers’ local use of the model.
For now, the collaboration is about making Meta’s AI work on Apple hardware. Whether that working relationship extends to the AI features most Apple users actually encounter is the next question.
Muse Spark Open is available now via GitHub, as is the MLX Adapter required to run it.
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Source: https://mashable.com/tech/apple-meta-muse-spark-open-mac-studio
