Apple and Meta announced a collaboration on Thursday that lets developers run Meta’s new open-weight Muse Spark Open model locally on high-end Mac desktops.
Zoom in: Muse Spark Open is an 816-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, the most capable Meta has released under a license that allows limited commercial use. Customers can pair between two and four Mac Studios to code, analyze video or run other agentic work.
- Mark Zuckerberg posted on X that the model "runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple," alongside a picture of a Meta agent working on a Mac.
- Apple’s John Ternus replied: "Amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open’s caliber and scale this efficiently, right from your desk. Mac Studio keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI!"
The backstory: The two companies avoided public partnerships for years and the relationship bottomed out after Apple’s 2021 privacy changes limited ad targeting. Meta estimated in early 2022 that the change would cut its revenue that year by $10 billion.
Between the lines: Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang said most powerful open-weight models are too big for the majority of personal computers, and that Mac Studio frees up enough memory to make running Muse Spark Open practical.
The big picture: Running a model locally instead of in the cloud adds a layer of security and saves users money, the companies said. It also points at Apple’s growing strength in AI chips, a market Nvidia has dominated.
Yes, but: Representatives from Apple and Meta declined to say whether the Muse Spark Open work is the start of a deeper relationship. The partnership followed months of quiet collaboration.
Why it matters: A frontier-scale model that runs on a desk full of Macs puts pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic, whose businesses rest on renting access to models that live in data centers.
