Apple and Meta team up to run Muse Spark Open locally on Mac Studio
According to an analysis published on Huxiu, Meta's open-weight model Muse Spark Open will be able to run locally on clusters of M5 Ultra-equipped Mac Studio machines, with Apple providing on-device inference through its MLX framework and multi-machine coordination. The article says the model has roughly 816 billion total parameters and about 42 billion active parameters, and that Apple's machine learning team found it needs more than 1.6TB of memory at native precision and still about 493GB with 4-bit quantization, requiring several Mac Studios in parallel. It places the move alongside Apple's earlier integration of ChatGPT into Siri and of Google Gemini into Apple Intelligence, arguing Apple wants more models to run well on its hardware while Meta trades open weights for developer adoption and enterprise deployment.
It shows the competitive focus shifting from which model is strongest to how models, chips, frameworks and use cases are packaged for delivery, with hybrid local-cloud deployment becoming an enterprise option.