GoKawiilMeta and Apple collaborate on Muse Spark Open AI model for M5 Mac Studio Ultra
Meta released Muse Spark Open, an open-weights AI model with 42 billion active parameters and a one-million-token context window, built with help from Apple's hardware team to optimize it for the M5 Mac Studio Ultra. The model's weights are now publicly available on HuggingFace under Meta's Muse Model license, though running it on Apple hardware requires two $5,499 M5 Mac Studio Ultras.
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The partnership pairs two companies long seen as AI rivals with sharply different philosophies—Meta's aggressive open-weights push versus Apple's cautious, privacy-focused approach—suggesting each may be pursuing complementary rather than competing roles in the AI race. Meta's chief AI officer Alexandr Wang's comment framing the deal as companies 'playing nice again' hints at a notable shift in the relationship, though the full strategic rationale from either side remains unstated.
- Muse Spark Open has 42 billion active parameters and a one-million-token context window with multimodal, agentic and coding capabilities.
- Apple's hardware team helped optimize the model to run on its M5 Mac Studio Ultra, requiring two units at $5,499 each.
- The collaboration marks an unusual alliance between companies with historically divergent AI and privacy strategies.
Apple Mac Studio (M2 Ultra) — If you're intrigued by running powerful open-weights AI models locally, the Mac Studio's unified memory architecture makes it one of the best consumer machines for local AI workloads. It's the kind of machine developers use to experiment with large multimodal models like the one described in this article. A great pick for anyone wanting serious on-device compute for AI and coding tasks.
See Apple Mac Studio (M2 Ultra) on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: cnet.com — Katelyn Chedraoui, 2026-10-16
Published there as: “Surprise! Meta and Apple Worked Together on a New Open-Source AI Model”
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