Apple and Meta are working together to bring one of the most powerful open-weight AI models to the Mac, with Apple CEO John Ternus and Mark Zuckerberg publicly celebrating the partnership on X.
Meta announced its new Muse Spark Open model Thursday, saying it was optimized to run locally on Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studio.
“Muse Spark Open — weights releasing today — runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Ternus replied, “Congrats to the team! 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 friendly exchange caught everyone by surprise, given the companies’ history of disagreements.
Meta calls Muse Spark Open the “most capable US open-weight model to date.” It has 816 billion parameters, with 42 billion active at once, and can handle up to one million tokens of context. The model is built for coding, software development and AI agents that can complete complex tasks.
Using Apple’s MLX framework, Meta says two M5 Ultra Mac Studios can run the entire model locally, without relying on cloud servers. That won’t be cheap for Canadians. Each Mac Studio starts at $7,799 CAD, putting two machines at roughly $15,600 before taxes. Configurations with the required memory would cost a whole lot more.
Meta demonstrated the model editing iOS app code and controlling DaVinci Resolve to produce videos locally.
According to Axios, Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang said the companies had been collaborating for months. “We’re excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again,” Wang joked.
Wang also said on X, “great doing business with you john apple,” giving Ternus the same treatment when President Donald Trump referred to Tim Cook as “Tim Apple”.
Alright, who’s going to set this up and give it a try?
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