Apple and Meta Partner to Run Muse AI Model Locally on Mac

Summary

Apple and Meta are collaborating to let developers run Meta's Muse Spark Open model locally on high-end Mac Studio computers. Muse Spark Open is an 816-billion-parameter open-weight model built with a mixture-of-experts architecture; Meta says it is released under a license permitting limited commercial use. Developers can download its weights and use two to four Mac Studios for coding, video analysis, and other agentic tasks. Running the model locally avoids sending those workloads to cloud data centers, which the companies say can improve security and reduce costs, but the setup requires expensive hardware and multiple machines. A Mac Studio with the required M5 Ultra chip and 256GB of memory starts at $10,799, while a 512GB version is due later in October. Apple tuned the model for its silicon, published new chip benchmarks and technical documentation, and said its MLX framework can split open models across multiple computers. Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang said most personal computers lack enough memory for models of this size, making Apple’s systems a practical target. The collaboration is notable because Apple and Meta have long been rivals, including disputes over privacy changes that Meta estimated would reduce its 2022 revenue by $10 billion. The companies declined to say whether the project will lead to a broader relationship. For Meta, the release supports its renewed open-weight strategy while remaining less capable than its proprietary Muse Wonder model. For Apple, it provides another demonstration of local AI performance as investors and customers continue to criticize the company’s AI progress. The partnership follows Apple’s earlier arrangements with OpenAI and Google, and could increase pressure on cloud-focused AI providers while highlighting Apple’s position in AI hardware.