In a rare show of cooperation between longtime rivals, Apple and Meta jointly optimized the latter's Muse Spark Open model to run efficiently on Mac Studio desktops. The announcement came Thursday, with Meta's chief executive sharing the news on X and receiving congratulations from Apple's newly appointed CEO John Ternus.

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

Ternus responded publicly: "Congrats to the team! Amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open's caliber and scale this efficiently, right from your desk."

Technical specifications and requirements

The Muse Spark Open model contains 816 billion parameters, with 42 billion active simultaneously, according to Meta's specifications. The company claims this represents the first model of its class capable of running on consumer desktop hardware. Deployment requires a minimum of two Mac Studios equipped with Apple's M5 Ultra chips and leveraging Meta's MLX framework. Users can link between two and four machines together for coding, video analysis, or running agents.

Each Mac Studio's graphics processor can access up to 512GB of memory, allowing two machines to accommodate the entire model. A key advantage of local execution is that Meta cannot access user prompts or queries, as processing occurs entirely on the user's hardware.

The financial barrier to entry remains substantial. A Mac Studio configured with the M5 Ultra chip and 256GB of memory starts at $10,799, according to reporting. A 512GB variant is expected to arrive later this month. Apple has also published technical documentation detailing how to run large language models across multiple Mac machines.

Breaking a years-long freeze

This collaboration represents the first public partnership between the companies since 2017, ending a period of tension that intensified following Apple's 2021 privacy policy changes. Meta estimated those changes would reduce its 2022 revenue by $10 billion.

Alexandr Wang, Meta's chief AI officer, told Axios: "We're excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again."

Wang credited Daniel Gross, formerly an Apple director now working at Meta, with facilitating the collaboration between the two organizations. Neither company has indicated whether this technical partnership signals a broader strategic alignment. John Ternus assumed the role of Apple CEO on September 1, succeeding Tim Cook.

Source: The Next Web