Meta's Muse Spark Open Runs Locally on Apple Macs via MLX Update

Meta released its open-weight AI model Muse Spark Open, and Apple updated its AI software tool MLX so the model runs smoothly on the Mac, according to digitaltoday.co.kr. Meta also presented a setup that runs Muse Spark Open locally on two M5 Ultra Mac Studios, each with 512GB of unified memory.

MLX allows multiple Macs to be connected so that AI workloads can be split across them. Meta Chief AI Officer Alexander Wang said in an interview that most hardware is not suited to the model, but that it runs well on the Mac.

Running Muse Spark Open this way requires buying multiple Macs to reach over 1 terabyte of combined memory, which costs more than 40,000 dollars.

Wang also said the two companies are looking for ways to cooperate productively. The report was based on an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Open-weight rivals

Muse Spark Open is Meta's second open-weight model since it reorganized its AI organization last year, placing it alongside other open-weight offerings such as Alibaba's Qwen, models from Chinese AI company DeepSeek, Moonshot's Kimi K3, and the US models Thinking Machines Inkling and Nvidia Nemotron.

Ties between Meta and Apple have been strained since 2021, when Apple limited user tracking for advertising purposes. Meta said in 2022 that Apple's policy would cost it more than 10 billion dollars in revenue.