SAN FRANCISCO: According to CNBC, Apple and Meta have teamed up so developers can run Meta's AI model Muse Spark Open locally on high-end Mac computers.
Muse Spark Open is an 816-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts open-weight model released under a limited commercial licence. Developers can pair two to four Mac Studio machines to run it locally rather than in the cloud.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted about releasing the weights and running them on new Mac Studios with Apple's John Ternus, who congratulated him. Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang said Mac Studios have enough memory, that the model can be downloaded from Hugging Face without extra Apple silicon configuration and has been tuned for Apple hardware, and that Apple's MLX can split models across machines.
A Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra chip and 256GB of memory starts at $10,799, with a 512GB version due later this month. Multiple machines are needed to run the model.
The two companies have historically been rivals, particularly after Apple's 2021 privacy changes. Ternus succeeded Tim Cook as Apple's chief last month. More on CNBC.