Meta and Apple Collaborate to Enhance Muse AI Performance on Macs

Meta has unveiled the Muse Spark Open AI model, touting it as the “most capable US open-weight model to date.” This model is also the first of its kind that can operate on your desktop using just two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios, leveraging the latest MLX framework.

In a surprising twist, Meta and Apple, usually seen as competitors, have collaborated on this launch and are openly supporting one another. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared on X, “Muse Spark Open — weights releasing today — runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple.” In response, Apple’s new CEO John Ternus expressed his excitement, stating, “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!”

Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, remarked to Axios about the renewed collaboration, saying, “We’re excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again,” highlighting the ongoing partnership between the two companies over the past few months.

The Muse Spark Open model is described as a “natively multimodal model” with a staggering 816 billion parameters, designed to excel in long-horizon tasks, complex software engineering, and multi-step reasoning. Additionally, Apple has released a technical post detailing MLX, an “array framework” for machine learning tasks on Apple Silicon, along with Muse Spark Open and two other open models.