Apple and Meta Partner to Run Muse Spark AI Locally

Apple and Meta announced a partnership on Thursday to enable developers to run Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter open-weight AI model, locally on high-end Mac Studio hardware. The collaboration allows users to link two to four Mac Studios equipped with M5 Ultra chips and up to 512GB of memory to perform agentic tasks, including video analysis and coding, without cloud reliance.

Apple and Meta have historically clashed over advertising revenue and user privacy, making this agreement a significant détente between the Silicon Valley rivals. The partnership was facilitated by Rex Grossman, a Meta AI researcher and former Apple director. The move leverages Apple's MLX AI framework and M5 Ultra hardware while advancing Meta's open-source AI strategy.

Industry observers view the collaboration as a direct challenge to proprietary AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI. Additionally, the ability to run such large models on Mac hardware presents a potential alternative to the current market dominance of Nvidia GPUs.