Longtime rivals Meta and Apple have announced a collaboration to create a new open-weight AI model designed to run on the latter’s Mac computer line.
Meta’s Muse Spark Open is a downloadable version of the software and social media company’s latest AI models, which it claims to be its most capable open model to date. It is an 816 billion parameter model built on a mixture-of-experts design.
The news marks the latest move by Apple to partner with more advanced AI providers as its own models remain behind the curve.
The two companies have clashed multiple times in the past over Apple’s App Store policies and have tended to avoid public partnerships. A post on X by Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, suggests this may be changing under Apple’s new leadership.
“Muse Spark Open — weights releasing today — runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple,” he wrote, tagging Apple’s recently-appointed chief executive.
John Ternus, previously head of hardware at the company, responded: “Congrats to the team! Amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open’s calibre and scale this efficiently, right from your desk. Mac Studio keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI!”
Muse Spark Open is designed to help with coding tasks and to run AI agents, autonomous entities that can carry out tasks on their own. The company added that it was released the model with “limited commercial terms,” allowing many developers to use the model for free.
The hardware is a different story. The model’s high complexity makes it memory hungry, and it is currently being touted to run on Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studio, which costs at least $10,799 with 256GB of RAM. A more expensive version with 512GB of memory will be released later this year.
