[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] Meta has released its open-weight AI model Muse Spark Open and has also teamed up with Apple, a company it has had an uneasy relationship with, drawing attention.

Muse Spark Open is Meta's second open-weight model since it reorganised its AI organisation last year.

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Meta also presented a local configuration for Muse Spark Open that links two M5 Ultra Mac Studio systems, each with 512GB of unified memory.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Oct. 15 local time that Apple also updated its MLX AI software tools so Muse Spark Open runs smoothly on Macs. Using MLX allows AI work to be split across multiple connected Macs.

Alexander Wang (알렉산더 왕), Meta's chief AI officer, said in an interview, "The two companies are finding ways to collaborate productively." He said, "A significant portion of the world will run on open models, and those models should be made in the United States."

Open-weight models disclose core components so anyone can download them. Chinese companies such as Alibaba Qwen, DeepSeek and Moonshot Kimi K3 have led the open-weight AI model space. U.S. models such as Thinking Machines Inkling and Nvidia Nemotron also offer open-weight models.

Muse Spark Open requires a lot of memory. Wang explained the model does not fit most hardware, but runs well on Macs. He said Macs are popular for running AI models because their internal chips share large memory.

The Wall Street Journal reported that running Muse Spark Open requires buying multiple Macs and pooling memory to secure more than 1 terabyte, which translates to more than $40,000 at current prices.

The Wall Street Journal also reported that renting similar computing resources in the cloud costs thousands of dollars a month, meaning app developers and others can fully recoup the cost of buying Macs.

The two companies have long had an uncomfortable relationship. Their relationship worsened further in 2021 when Apple restricted user tracking for advertising purposes. Meta has also said revenue losses in 2022 would exceed $10 billion due to Apple's policy.

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