Meta and Apple team up to make Muse AI models run better on Macs

Meta has a fresh brag for its Muse Spark Open AI model: the company says it is the most capable US open-weight model it has released so far. The more interesting part is where it runs. Meta says this model is the first in its class that can run on a desktop setup using two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios with the latest MLX framework.

That puts Meta and Apple in the same sentence for once without the usual competitive edge. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on X that the open weights are being released today and that the model runs well on the new Mac Studios, crediting Apple staff by name. Apple’s new CEO John Ternus replied with congratulations of his own.

The launch is notable less because of the usual model-hype language and more because of the hardware claim. Running a capable model locally, on Apple desktop machines, gives the whole announcement a different feel from the usual cloud-first AI rollout. It’s a quiet signal that these systems are starting to fit inside ordinary workstation setups, at least in this case.

And there’s a bit of theater in the timing. Meta and Apple are usually competitors, not collaborators, so publicly praising each other over an AI model is not exactly standard industry behavior. But that’s what makes this story stick: not just a new model, but two companies that don’t often share a stage doing it anyway.