Meta and Apple Collaborate on High-End AI Model for Macs

META, the parent company of Facebook, has announced a partnership with Apple to bring a powerful new open-weight artificial intelligence (AI) model to high-end Mac computers. The collaboration aims to make it easier for developers, researchers, and businesses to run complex AI tasks on their own desktops.

The new AI model, called Muse Spark Open, is described by Meta as the most capable US open-weight model to date. It boasts an impressive 816 billion total parameters, although its architecture activates only about 42 billion parameters for a given processing step. This means that users can run complex tasks such as long-horizon planning and multi-step reasoning on their Macs with ease.

The partnership between Meta and Apple is significant because it allows developers to access the internal components of the AI model, making it more transparent and easier to understand how decisions are made by the AI. Unlike traditional AI services that rely on company data servers, open-weight models can be downloaded and run on a user’s own hardware, giving them greater control over their data.

The collaboration also involves Apple updating its MLX machine-learning framework to support Muse Spark Open. This allows users to take advantage of Apple silicon’s unified memory architecture, which provides fast access to large amounts of memory. Two Mac Studio units, each with an M5 Ultra and 512 GB of RAM, can hold the entire model, making it possible for users to run complex AI tasks on their own desktops.

The result is two Mac Studios behaving like a single supercomputer with a terabyte of unified memory. This level of performance would be difficult to achieve using traditional cloud-based services, but with Muse Spark Open and Apple’s MLX framework, developers can now access powerful AI capabilities from the comfort of their own desks.