On October 15, 2026, Meta released Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter open-weight multimodal AI model with a 1-million-token context window. Marking a significant détente in their historical rivalry over user privacy, Meta collaborated with Apple to optimize the model to run locally on desktop setups using two M5 Ultra Mac Studios via Apple's MLX framework. The free commercial release aims to offer an American open-source alternative to Chinese models like Qwen 3.8.
Muse Spark Open model release
- ▪Muse Spark Open is available free to download under a commercial license requiring the label 'Built with Muse Spark Open,' while API providers earning over $20 million annually require a separate agreement
- ▪Meta's Muse Spark Open features 816 billion total parameters, 42 billion active parameters, up to 1 million tokens of context window, and native multimodal support for text, image, video, and audio
- ▪Meta released Muse Spark Open on October 15, 2026, describing it as the most capable U.S. open-weight AI model to date
- ▪Meta's JobBench benchmarks show Muse Spark Open leading competitors like Qwen 3.8, GLM 5.3, and Kimi K3 in agentic and multimodal categories, while trailing on coding benchmarks and falling short of Meta's paid Muse Wonder Full models
Meta-Apple AI collaboration
- ▪Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang stated that the Meta-Apple collaboration allows Meta to distribute its models widely while permitting developers to run them locally without Meta receiving prompt data or user information
- ▪Meta and Apple collaborated for several months to optimize Meta's 816-billion-parameter Muse Spark Open to run on high-end Mac computers, with former Apple executive Daniel Gross playing a key role in bringing the companies together
Open-weight AI competition landscape
- ▪Anthropic is leasing up to $15 billion per year of computing capacity from SpaceX, while Microsoft is incorporating Anthropic's Claude models into its own products despite its investment in OpenAI
- ▪Western technology firms including Nvidia, Reflection AI, and Mistral released updated open-weight AI models to offer alternatives to proprietary models and Chinese AI systems like Qwen, GLM, and Kimi
Local on-device AI deployment
- ▪Apple published a technical post detailing Apple's MLX array framework for Apple Silicon alongside optimizations for Muse Spark Open and two other open-weight models
- ▪Muse Spark Open is optimized for Apple's MLX framework and can run locally across two Mac Studio computers equipped with M5 Ultra chips and 512 GB of unified memory each
Meta-Apple rivalry history
- ▪Apple introduced new privacy protections in 2021 that impacted Facebook's ad business, leading Mark Zuckerberg to tell employees that Facebook needed to 'inflict pain' on Apple
- ▪Apple executive chairman Tim Cook and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg clashed publicly in 2018 over privacy during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, with Zuckerberg criticizing Cook's comments as 'glib.'
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