Apple and Meta team up to make Muse AI model run on Mac computers

Key points

• Meta and Apple announced a collaboration on Thursday to run Meta's Muse Spark Open AI model on Mac Studio computers.
• Muse Spark Open is an 816-billion-parameter open-weight model that runs locally on two to four Mac Studios.
• The partnership marks a shift in the historically tense relationship between Apple and Meta.

Meta and Apple revealed a collaboration on Thursday that will let developers easily run Meta's new open-weight AI model on Apple's high-end desktop computers. The model, Muse Spark Open, is an 816-billion-parameter system using a mixture-of-experts architecture, and Meta says it is the most capable open-weight model released under a license allowing limited commercial use.

Customers can pair between two and four Mac Studio PCs to use Muse Spark for coding, video analysis or other agentic work. The companies said the model runs locally instead of in the cloud, adding security and saving users money.

What Meta and Apple said

Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang said in an interview that many powerful open-weight models are too big for most personal computers, but Mac Studios make enough memory available to run Muse Spark Open practically. "We worked with Apple to bring leading Agent capabilities to your desktop for the first time on the Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios, so you know we're really excited about this," Wang said.

Representatives from Apple and Meta declined to say if the collaboration was the start of a deeper relationship. Wang also said the model is not among the most capable Meta has developed, but could attract companies and developers to use it at small scale and then ramp up.

These aren't the most capable models that we've developed or released. 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.

— Alexandr Wang

Hardware requirements and cost

Mac Studios are not cheap. A Mac Studio with the required M5 Ultra chip and 256GB of memory costs at least $10,799. A more expensive version with 512GB of RAM will be released later this month.

Developers can download a version of the AI model from sites like Hugging Face without extra configuration for Apple's silicon. Muse Spark Open has also been tuned to run faster on Apple's hardware, and Apple published new chip benchmarks and technical documentation about its MLX AI framework's ability to split open-source models across multiple machines.