Vote of confidence: Apple and Meta team up to bring new Muse AI model to Macs

Meta Platforms and Apple on Thursday announced a collaboration that will allow users to run Meta’s new open-weight AI model on Apple’s most powerful desktop computers. For Meta, the collaboration represents an important vote of confidence in its revamped AI strategy, CNBC writes.

The collaboration between the two tech giants will allow users to link two to four Mac Studio computers to run Muse Spark Open for coding, video analysis, and other agentic tasks. The model runs locally rather than in the cloud, improving data security and reducing costs, the companies stated.

Muse Spark Open is the most capable U.S. open-weight model to date, according to Meta. It has been released under a license allowing limited commercial use. The model has 816 billion parameters.

Many powerful open-weight models are too large to run on most personal computers. Apple’s Mac Studio computers, however, give users enough memory to make running Muse Spark Open locally practical, Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang explained in an interview with CNBC. “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,” Wang said.

Mac Studio computers are expensive, however, and running this AI model requires Apple’s fastest chips and as much memory as possible, CNBC notes. A Mac Studio with the required M5 Ultra chip and 256 gigabytes of memory currently costs at least $10,799 in the U.S. And users will need to buy several of these computers to run Muse Spark Open.

The partnership illustrates how the AI boom is reshaping traditional alliances and rivalries in Silicon Valley, CNBC believes. For years, Apple and Meta regarded each other warily and avoided public partnerships. Relations soured decisively after Apple changed its privacy rules in 2021, limiting digital advertising companies’ ability to target users. In early 2022, Meta estimated that the changes would reduce its revenue that year by around $10 billion.

Representatives from Apple and Meta declined to tell CNBC whether the Muse Spark Open collaboration could mark the start of a deeper partnership. Even now, however, official support for Muse Spark Open represents an important vote of confidence in Meta’s revamped AI strategy and could intensify competition with OpenAI and Anthropic. At the same time, the collaboration could signal Apple’s growing strength in AI chips, a market Nvidia has dominated to date, CNBC notes.