Meta and Apple bury their rivalry to run 816-billion-parameter Muse Spark Open AI model on Mac Studio

Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO John Ternus have exchanged public praise following Meta's release of Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter AI model built to run locally across two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studio desktops — a notable thaw between two companies with a long history of acrimony over privacy and data. Meta calls it the most powerful open-weight AI model produced by a US company, able to handle text, images, video and audio. The collaboration leverages Apple's MLX framework to spread the model across two Mac Studios with a combined 1TB of memory.

Zuckerberg posted on X that Muse Spark Open 'runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple.'

Of the model's 816 billion parameters, only 42 billion are active at any one time, and a 1-million-token context window makes it suited to complex coding and multi-step reasoning.

Meta is making the model available as a free commercial download, though experts warn that powerful open models could fall into the hands of bad actors and be weaponised for cyberattacks or biological threats.