Apple and Meta Partner to Run 816B Muse Spark Open AI Model Locally on M5 Ultra Mac Studios

Apple and Meta announced a technical collaboration on Thursday that allows developers to run Meta's 816B-parameter Muse Spark Open mixture-of-experts AI model locally across two to four paired M5 Ultra Mac Studio computers. Each Mac Studio equipped with the required M5 Ultra chip and 256GB of memory costs at least $10,799, meaning a minimum two-machine cluster starts at $21,598 ahead of a 512GB RAM version arriving later this month. Meta tuned Muse Spark Open to run faster on Apple silicon without extra configuration on platforms like Hugging Face, while Apple released new chip benchmarks and technical documentation for its MLX framework to split models across multiple machines. The agreement is the first public partnership between the two companies since 2017 and follows John Ternus succeeding Tim Cook as Apple CEO last month, as well as Meta purchasing hundreds of Macs earlier this year for its Superintelligence team. "We worked with Apple to bring leading Agent capabilities to your desktop for the first time on the Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios, so you know we're really excited about this." — Alexandr Wang, Meta AI Chief.