Meta and Apple have worked together to bring Muse Spark Open, Meta’s latest open-weight AI model, to the Mac Studio. Announced on October 15, the model runs locally on two Mac Studios powered by Apple’s M5 Ultra chip, allowing developers to handle advanced AI workloads without relying on cloud servers.
Meta describes Muse Spark Open as its most capable US-developed open-weight model, designed for coding, complex reasoning, and autonomous AI agents. The collaboration also highlights Apple’s growing focus on local AI processing, particularly as we previously covered improvements to MLX support on Apple silicon Macs.
Muse Spark Open Brings 816 Billion Parameters to Mac Studio
According to Meta’s official announcement, Muse Spark Open contains 816 billion total parameters, with 42 billion active parameters per token. It uses a mixture-of-experts architecture and supports a context window of approximately one million tokens.
Don’t miss the best of The Mac Observer
Set us as a preferred source and our Apple reporting ranks higher in your Google Search results and Discover feed — one tap, no account changes.
The model can process text, images, audio, and video inputs, making it suitable for software development, extended reasoning, and multi-step automation.
Running the model locally requires two M5 Ultra Mac Studios with 512GB of unified memory each, although developers can also use four machines with 256GB each.
Apple’s MLX Framework Makes Local AI Processing Possible
Apple optimized its MLX framework to distribute the model across multiple Macs using Thunderbolt 5 and RDMA technology.
This configuration allows the machines to share processing workloads while keeping model weights in local memory. Apple reports that four Mac Studios can generate more than 36 tokens per second.
As we previously covered, the M5 Ultra Mac Studio supports up to 512GB of unified memory, making it particularly suitable for memory-intensive AI applications.
Developers can now download Muse Spark Open through Hugging Face or access it through supported cloud providers. Meta distributes the model under its Muse Model License, which includes commercial-use restrictions.
Discussion