Meta and Apple are partnering to run an open 816B-parameter AI model on Mac Studios

The model has 816 billion total parameters, 42 billion of them active, and a 1 million-token context window, Meta said. It is designed for coding and agentic work. Developers can download the weights from Hugging Face, Amazon $AMZN SageMaker AI, Google $GOOGL Cloud Model Garden and Microsoft $MSFT Foundry Models. Meta is releasing the model under the Muse Model License, which has limited commercial terms that let many developers use it for free.

Meta said the model runs on two M5 Ultra Mac Studios using Apple's MLX framework. Each machine can give its GPU up to 512GB of unified memory.

In a technical post, Apple said the model needs about 493GB of memory in a 4-bit format and, with the extra memory required during inference, cannot fit on a single Mac Studio. The model has to be split across machines linked by Thunderbolt cables. Apple said four Mac Studios generate more than 36 tokens per second with the model, and two machines running tensor parallelization generate about 25 tokens per second. Apple also said the M5 Ultra delivers up to 4.6 times faster time to first token than the previous-generation M3 Ultra.

Meta said it tested agentic workflows running on-device with its Muse Code tool. The tests included shipping iOS changes to Ice Cubes, an open-source Mastodon client, and driving DaVinci Resolve to find and crop video moments.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on X $TWTR that the model "runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple," according to CNBC. Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang said numerous high-performing open-weight models exceed what most personal computers can handle, but Mac Studios offer enough memory to make running Muse Spark Open realistic, according to CNBC.

A Mac Studio equipped with an M5 Ultra and 256GB of RAM costs at least $10,799, according to CNBC. A 512GB version is due this month, and users need more than one machine.

Meta and Apple announced a collaboration to run Muse Spark Open on Mac Studio after years without joint public ventures. Apple's 2021 privacy changes curtailed ad targeting, and Meta put the resulting revenue hit at $10 billion for 2022. Representatives from both companies would not say if the project marks the beginning of a closer partnership.

Muse Spark Open is less advanced than Muse Wonder, a closed Meta model that debuted earlier this week. "These aren't the most capable models that we've developed or released," Wang told CNBC.