Meta says it worked with Apple to make Muse Spark Open run locally on M5 Ultra Mac Studios, letting users pair two to four Studios to code or do agentic work

Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg have clashed for years, but with John Ternus taking the reins at Apple, the rivals are finding common ground in artificial intelligence.

CNBC 2026-10-16

Context & Ripple Effects

Meta had already made Muse available across mobile, web and a dedicated Mac app, making Mac Studio support a move from a client surface toward local infrastructure for the agent. That expansion also follows a reported Mac-token flaw that Meta said it fixed with a hotfix, keeping account security relevant as Muse gains access to files and apps.

The release pairs Meta's open-weight positioning for Muse Spark Open with Apple-specific deployment work. The ability to join multiple Studios makes Apple hardware part of the model's operating footprint rather than simply a device for accessing an AI service.

First-order effects

Meta gives Muse Spark Open users a local option for coding and agentic tasks on two to four M5 Ultra Mac Studios, reducing reliance on a remote runtime for those deployments.
Apple gains a named open-weight model optimized for its high-end Mac hardware, strengthening the case for Mac Studios as AI workstations.

Second-order effects

Developers evaluating local agent deployments must weigh the added hardware and multi-machine setup against the control offered by running Muse Spark Open on their own Macs.
Competing AI hardware and model providers face a clearer combined alternative: a large open-weight model paired with Apple-specific local and distributed inference support.

Third-order effects

If more model builders target clustered workstations, AI infrastructure will increasingly split between centralized data centers and locally operated hardware for workloads where operators value control.
Agent software is likely to make workstation integration—including files, apps and account credentials—a more important differentiator, raising the stakes for the security of the surrounding client software.

The trend: Open-weight AI is moving toward hardware-specific local deployment, with agent workloads turning high-end workstations into small-scale inference systems.

Discussion

@aaronp613 Aaron on x
So weird to see John Ternus and Zuck interacting on X
@beffjezos @beffjezos on x
John Ternus making moves. Very smart play here to compete with Nvidia / Nemotron
@viticci Federico Viticci on x
yeah, safe to say we're entering a new Apple era indeed
@divestech Dan Ives on x
We believe this could just be the start of Meta and Apple on the AI partnership front @CNBCFastMoney 🍿📺🏆🔥🍎📱
@anantn Anant Narayanan on x
Muse Spark Open weights available today! (And 👌 use of the Muse mac app) https://huggingface.co/... [embedded post]
@avichal Avichal Garg on x
The CEOs of @Apple and @Meta are tweeting about how efficient it is to run inference on Mac Silicon Someone should really build a distributed inference network that runs on top of Mac Silicon. It's probably a $10b company or protocol. 🙃
@shshnkp Shashank Prasanna on x
Today we also published benchmarks and a deep dive into LLM inference on M5 Ultra Mac Studio, covering MLX, GPU Neural Accelerators, tensor and pipeline parallelism, and Thunderbolt 5 RDMA. https://machinelearning.apple.com/ ... [embedded post]
@stammy @stammy on x
meta is just teasing us that they have prerelease M5 Ultra 512GB unified memory Mac Studios https://research.meta.ai/...
@viticci Federico Viticci on x
Meta has released the weights of Muse Spark Open, the most capable U.S. open-weight model to date. Apple worked closely with them to make it work with MLX and RDMA across multiple M5 Ultra Mac Studios. Details: https://www.macstories.net/...
@mweinbach Max Weinbach on x
Meta worked with Apple on optimizing MLX for this, including native multimodal support in mlx-lm and optimizations to MoEs and thunderbolt clustering It should get roughly 20 tokens per second on 2 M5 Ultra but I'm sure that could get way better
@trebolloc Ronan Collobert on x
So proud of the MLX team! Muse Spark Open, on your desk: 816B params at 36+ tokens/sec on 4 Mac Studio computers. We've been hard at work on better M5 GPU Neural Accelerator support, a smoother Thunderbolt experience (including multi-cable meshes), and kernel optimizations for Mo…
@fitz_keith Keith Fitz-Gerald on x
I suggested a while back that $AAPL would bring AI down to the device level first... so this of great. But not crazy about the fact that it is $META Muse I understand Muse is amazing, it's Zuck I don't trust. 🤷‍♂️ https://www.cnbc.com/...
@bubbleboi Bubble Boi on x
Meta released a model that runs better on apple silicon than apple. [embedded post]
@asherdipps Asher on x
@johnternus @finkd This looks like 2 AIs talking to each other lmfao
@mehulmpt Mehul Mohan on x
M5 Ultra (and beyond) might be the future of local AI
@bzamayo Benjamin Mayo on x
Nvidia, Netflix, now Meta ... Apple really is putting old feuds to rest https://x.com/...
@mattdeitke Matt Deitke on x
Muse Spark Open is live on @huggingface! 🤗 - Strong agentic model (especially for personal agents) - Multimodal from the ground up - 816B parameter model - 42B Active parameters Models link: https://huggingface.co/... [image]
@chancehmiller Chance Miller on x
Zuckerberg having to use X to thank Ternus because Apple doesn't use Threads is fascinating.
@johnvoorhees John Voorhees on x
Meta Muse Spark Open weights have been released and it's been tuned through a collaboration with Apple and the MLX team to work great on the M5 Ultra Mac Studio. More on @macstoriesnet: https://www.macstories.net/... [image]
r/apple r on reddit
Apple and Meta team up to make Muse AI model run on Mac computers
r/SillyTavernAI r on reddit
Meta releases Muse Spark Open. Another open weights model and a pretty strong one too. Not for anyone without a datacenter at home though, but news for the subreddit regardless.
r/actutech r on reddit
Meta a créé un immense modèle d'IA open-weight pour Mac, mais il vous faudra 1 To de RAM pour le faire fonctionner.
@alexandr_wang Alexandr Wang on x
great doing business with you john apple 🍎🤝
@beffjezos @beffjezos on x
Meta just keeps winning. Ended up teaming up with Apple too!!! Beginning of the Golden Age of Local Superintelligence

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