Meta Releases Open-Weight Muse Spark Open, Built to Run on Apple Mac Studios

Meta is open-sourcing a new large language model called Muse Spark Open, and the company says it is the most capable American open-weight model released so far. The 800-billion-parameter model is optimized for Apple Silicon. Anyone who wants to run it locally, though, will need a staggering 1TB of memory.

Meta has argued that the United States should not allow Chinese labs to lead in open-source AI. The company's own benchmarks suggest Muse Spark Open outperforms two leading Chinese models, GLM 5.3 and Kimi K3, on agentic tasks and visual reasoning. Those results come from Meta and have not been independently verified.

Muse Spark Open is also the first model Meta has optimized to run locally on Apple's M5 Ultra-equipped Mac Studio. Apple's unified memory architecture lets the M5 Ultra's integrated GPU access up to 512 GB per Mac Studio. Two machines can therefore hold the entire model. "The result is two Mac Studios behave like one supercomputer with a terabyte of unified memory," Meta said in its announcement.

Mark Zuckerberg posted on X on Oct. 15 that the weights were releasing that day and credited Apple for the work on local performance. The post named Apple executive John Ternus, who is referenced in the post's handle.

The hardware is the hard part. Apple has not announced pricing or a ship date for the 512GB Mac Studio, only that it will be available in "late October." Meta says Muse Spark Open can also run on four 256GB M5 Ultra Mac Studios, which would cost roughly $38,000. That puts the setup well out of reach for individual developers and hobbyists.

For larger organizations, the math may look different. Companies that have been spending heavily on API tokens could see a few Mac Studios as a reasonable one-time investment, assuming the model performs as well as Meta claims. Those claims, for now, rest on the company's own testing.

Muse Spark Open is available to download now from Hugging Face.

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