Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg spent years throwing shade. With John Ternus now running Apple, the rivals just found common ground — and it is 816 billion parameters sitting on a desk.
Apple and Meta announced Thursday that developers can run Meta’s new open-weight model, Muse Spark Open, locally across two to four high-end Mac Studio machines. The model uses a mixture-of-experts architecture and ships under a license that allows limited commercial use. Weights are available to download; the companies say it runs on Apple silicon via the MLX framework without cloud round-trips — more privacy, lower bills.
Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang told CNBC the Studios’ memory makes a model this size practical on personal hardware. The catch: you need the fastest chips and a lot of RAM. A Mac Studio with the required M5 Ultra and 256GB of memory starts at about $10,799, and you may need more than one. A 512GB version lands later this month.
Zuckerberg posted that Muse Spark Open “runs great on new Mac Studios” thanks to work with Ternus. Ternus fired back congratulations on running a model of that scale “right from your desk.” Wang credited team ties — including former Apple director Daniel Gross — for helping thaw a relationship that cratered after Apple’s 2021 privacy changes, which Meta once estimated would cost it about $10 billion in a year.
OpenAI and Anthropic just got a new headache: a frontier-adjacent open-weight model that never leaves the desk. The old Silicon Valley cold war just shipped a joint product.
Sources: CNBC — Apple and Meta Muse on Mac · Axios — Apple and Meta bury the hatchet for AI
Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.
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