❯ Meta releases Muse Spark Open weights and works with Apple to run the 816-billion-parameter model locally on two Mac Studios

The top US open modelMeta released the weights for Muse Spark Open on October 15, calling it the most capable US open-weight model to date. It is a natively multimodal mixture-of-experts model with 816 billion total parameters, 42 billion active and a 1 million-token context window, built for coding and agentic work. The weights are downloadable from Hugging Face and other platforms under a license that allows limited commercial use.

Two Macs as one supercomputerMeta worked with Apple so the model can run on two M5 Ultra Mac Studios. Meta explains that each machine’s GPU can use up to 512 GB of unified memory, so two can hold the whole model. According to CNBC, users can pair two to four Mac Studios to code or analyze video with it. Mark Zuckerberg thanked Apple CEO John Ternus in a post on X, and Ternus replied with congratulations.

Old rivals at the same tableCNBC notes that relations between the two hit bottom after Apple’s 2021 privacy changes, which Meta estimated would cut its revenue that year by $10 billion. The collaboration took months, and neither side would say whether it will go further. For developers, the main change is that a model near the frontier can run on their own desk without the cloud, though it needs top-spec Mac Studios that are not cheap.

▮ SIGNALAs open models grow, data centers are no longer the only place that can hold them, and personal computers’ memory capacity has become a reason for model companies to pick partners.