'Mommy and daddy playing nice again': Meta and Apple team up to launch rival-beating AI model on Macs

Meta's chief AI officer Alexandr Wang disclosed that the two companies had spent months collaborating on the project, with Meta billing the model as the most capable US-built open-weight AI released to date. Long-time Silicon Valley rivals Meta and Apple have set aside their differences to unveil Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter AI model that runs locally on two linked Apple Mac Studio computers equipped with M5 Ultra chips. Mark Zuckerberg publicly thanked Apple CEO John Ternus on X, who responded with praise for the model's ability to operate at such scale from a desktop machine.

Meta claims Muse Spark Open matches or outperforms Chinese open-weight rivals including Alibaba's Qwen and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3.

The model is free to download and use commercially, running locally on Mac Studios via Apple's MLX framework — sidestepping the privacy concerns that long divided the two firms.

Apple CEO John Ternus, who replaced Tim Cook, congratulated Zuckerberg on X, calling it 'amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open's calibre and scale this efficiently, right from your desk.'