Meta releases Muse Spark Open weights; Apple shows it running on Mac Studio clusters with MLX
Announced · Published · By Contractor AI Shop
Meta released Muse Spark Open, an open-weight multimodal model with 816B total parameters (42B active) and a 1M-token context, built for coding and agents. Apple published MLX benchmarks showing it generating over 36 tokens per second on four M5 Ultra Mac Studios.
Key facts
- Muse Spark Open has 816B total parameters, 42B active, and a 1M-token context window, and is released under the Muse Model License, which Meta says has limited commercial terms. Meta AI Research
- Meta says it is the first model in its class to run on a desktop using two M5 Ultra Mac Studios with MLX; it also runs on SGLang, vLLM, llama.cpp and other engines. Meta AI Research
- Apple's MLX post reports over 36 tokens per second decode on four M5 Ultra Mac Studios linked over Thunderbolt RDMA. Apple Machine Learning Research
- TechCrunch, citing Engadget, says running it locally needs at least 1 terabyte of RAM. TechCrunch
- The Verge reports Meta and Apple worked together on the launch. The Verge
Our take: what it means for contractors
This is a frontier-class model you can run in your own office, but only on two to four top-spec Mac Studios. For most contractors, a smaller local model on one machine handles specs, RFIs and submittals fine. Read the Muse Model License before building a business workflow on it.
What we don't know yet
- Exactly what the Muse Model License allows for commercial use by a contracting business
- Real speeds on a single older Mac Studio or with smaller quantized builds
- Total cost of a multi-Mac Studio M5 Ultra cluster
Sources
- Meta AI Research · Introducing Muse Spark Open, The Most Capable US Open-Weight Model to Date · 2026-10-15 · Primary
- Apple Machine Learning Research · Local and Distributed Large LLM Inference with MLX and RDMA on Mac Studio · 2026-10-15 · Primary
- TechCrunch · Meta launches an open-weight AI model that runs on Macs · 2026-10-15 · Secondary
- The Verge · Meta and Apple team up to make Muse AI models run better on Macs · 2026-10-15 · Secondary
- Axios · Apple and Meta bury the hatchet for AI · 2026-10-15 · Secondary