Meta has announced the release of Muse Spark Open, which it calls the "most capable U.S. open-weight model to date." Meta worked with Apple to bring the model to the Mac, and it can run on a desktop setup with two 512GB Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios running the latest MLX framework. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thanked Apple CEO John Ternus for working with Meta.
Muse Spark Open has 816 billion total parameters, 42 billion active parameters, and a 1 million-token context window. It is meant for coding and agentic work, and Meta says it excels at extended tasks, multi-step reasoning, and software engineering. Meta says the Mac Studio paired with the model is the "best way to run a powerful model on your own desktop." Apple's unified memory architecture lets the M5 Ultra's integrated GPU use up to 512 GB per Mac Studio, so two machines can hold an entire model. The chip's 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth is fast enough to read the small slice each token needs.
Apple has not yet released the 512GB Mac Studio, but it is expected later this month. It will not be cheap, since the 256GB Mac Studio is already priced over $10,000. Muse Spark Open is available through API platforms including Baseten, Fireworks AI, Groq, Modal, Nebius, OpenRouter, and Together AI, and its weights can be downloaded from Amazon SageMaker AI, Google Cloud Model Garden, Hugging Face, and Microsoft Foundry Models. The model is free to download and carries a license allowing limited commercial use.
The partnership is a surprise, given that Apple and Meta often compete. Meta's AI chief Alexandr Wang told Axios, "We're excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again."
Source: MacRumors · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing