Running Meta's Muse Spark Open locally costs at least $21,598 in Mac Studios

Customers will be able to pair between two and four Mac Studio PCs to use Muse Spark to code, analyze video or do other agentic work.

Two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios linked through MLX pool nearly 1 terabyte of unified memory.

A Mac Studio with the required M5 Ultra chip and 256GB of memory costs at least $10,799.

Muse Spark Open has 42 billion parameters active at any given time and a context window of 1 million tokens.

Representatives from Apple and Meta declined to say whether the Muse Spark Open collaboration was the start of a deeper relationship.

The announcement followed months of collaboration between Apple and Meta.

Apple and Meta have not struck any public partnership since 2017, when Apple removed system-level Facebook integration from the iPhone; the relationship hit rock bottom after Apple's 2021 privacy changes, and Meta estimated in early 2022 that the change would cut its revenue that year by $10 billion.

Wang said, "Most of the animosity predates my tenure at the company, but obviously there's been a long history between Meta and Apple."

Wang pointed to Daniel Gross, an AI researcher on his team and a former Apple director, as a reason for the collaboration.

Meta once centered its AI strategy on its open-weight Llama family but has since focused on proprietary models under Wang, who joined when Meta invested more than $14 billion into his former startup Scale AI last year.

Two Mac Studios at the 256GB price cost at least $21,598.

Four Mac Studios at the 256GB price cost at least $43,196.

Two 256GB Mac Studios hold 512GB of memory in total.

512GB across 816 billion parameters is about 0.63 bytes per parameter, roughly five bits.

Two 512GB Mac Studios would pool 1,024GB of memory.

1,024GB across 816 billion parameters is about 1.25 bytes per parameter, roughly twice the 0.63 bytes available on two 256GB machines.

42 billion active parameters is about 5.1% of 816 billion, leaving roughly 95% inactive for any one token.

Muse Spark Open is an 816-billion-parameter open-weight model using a mixture-of-experts architecture; Meta says it is the most capable open-weight model released under a license that allows limited commercial use.

The model runs locally instead of in the cloud, adding a layer of security and saving users money, the companies said.

Cryptobriefing says rivals that keep their best models behind cloud APIs force customers to send data out and pay per use.

CNBC says the collaboration could pose a challenge to OpenAI and Anthropic and could signal Apple's growing strength in AI chips, a market Nvidia has dominated so far.

CNBC calls the announcement a sign that the AI boom has shifted historical alliances in Silicon Valley.