Overview
- The companies announced this technical collaboration this week, with Apple’s MLX using Thunderbolt 5 and remote direct memory access to make multiple Mac Studios act as one machine.
- Muse Spark Open is an 816‑billion‑parameter mixture‑of‑experts model that activates about 42 billion parameters per token and supports a one‑million‑token context window.
- Meta published the model weights under its limited‑commercial‑use license on hubs like Hugging Face and tuned the model for Apple Silicon; the compressed weights total about 493GB before runtime overhead.
- No single Mac Studio can run the model: Apple and Meta say minimum local configs require either two M5 Ultra 256GB machines or four standard 256GB Mac Studios, which makes the setup costly and aimed at developers and enterprises rather than home users.
- Meta demonstrated local workflows on Saturday that fixed iOS Mastodon client bugs and controlled DaVinci Resolve, and both companies declined to call this the start of a broader strategic partnership.