Apple and Meta team up to run Meta’s Muse Spark Open model on Macs

Apple and Meta worked together so that Meta’s new open-weight model, Muse Spark Open, runs on Apple’s Mac Studio desktops. The companies revealed the work on Thursday. The two rivals had not struck a public partnership since 2017, CNBC reported.

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced it on X, and Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, replied.

“Muse Spark Open, weights releasing today, runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple.” Mark Zuckerberg, on X

“Congrats to the team! Amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open’s caliber and scale this efficiently, right from your desk.” John Ternus, on X

How it runs

Muse Spark Open has 816bn parameters, 42bn of them active at a time, according to Meta. Meta says it is the first model in its class to run on a desktop. It needs two Mac Studios with Apple’s M5 Ultra chips and its MLX framework. Users can link two to four machines to code, analyse video or run agents, CNBC reported.

Each Mac Studio’s graphics processor can use up to 512GB of memory, Meta said. Two machines can hold the whole model. Because the model runs locally, Meta does not see users’ prompts, Axios reported.

It is not cheap. A Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra and 256GB of memory costs at least $10,799, according to CNBC. A 512GB version is due later this month. Apple also published a technical post on running large models across several Macs.

Old rivals

Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, told Axios that the companies had worked together for several months.

“We’re excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again.” Alexandr Wang, Meta chief AI officer, to Axios

Wang said Daniel Gross, a former Apple director now at Meta, helped bring the two sides together. Their relationship worsened after Apple’s 2021 privacy changes, which Meta estimated would cut its 2022 revenue by $10bn.

Apple and Meta declined to say whether the work is the start of a deeper relationship, CNBC reported. Ternus succeeded Tim Cook as Apple’s CEO on 1 September.