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

Apple and Meta collaborated to help developers run Muse Spark Open locally on high-end Mac computers.[1] The model is an open-weight release: developers can download its parameters and run it on different hardware.[1] Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the weights were releasing that day and that the model ran well on new Mac Studios after work with Apple and John Ternus.[1] Ternus said he was amazed that a model of this caliber and scale could run efficiently from a desk.[1]

Meta says Muse Spark Open has 816 billion total parameters, of which 42 billion are active, and a context window of 1 million tokens.[2] It accepts text, image, audio and video input and produces text output.[3] Meta says it is built for coding and agentic work, including long-horizon tasks, complex software engineering and multi-step reasoning.[2] The model routes each token to a small subset of experts, and Meta says per-token compute tracks the 42 billion active parameters.[3]

Meta says a desktop can run Muse Spark Open using two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios and the MLX framework.[2] CNBC reported that customers can pair two to four Mac Studio computers to use the model.[1] The hardware requirement has a substantial memory implication: Meta says serving the model still requires loading all 816 billion weights into GPU memory.[3] CNBC reported that a Mac Studio with the required M5 Ultra chip and 256GB of memory costs at least $10,799, and that Apple planned a more expensive 512GB RAM version later that month.[1]

The companies said running the model locally rather than in the cloud adds security and can save users money.[1] Meta says its on-device tests included using the model to ship iOS changes to the Ice Cubes app and to review footage and crop it vertically in DaVinci Resolve.[2] Developers can also access the model through listed API platforms, while its weights are available through several cloud and model-hosting services.[2] Meta released the weights under its Muse Model License, which it says allows many developers to use the model for free under limited commercial terms.[2] Axios noted that open-weight models raise concerns about bad actors removing safeguards for cyberattacks or biological threats.[4]