Meta's 816B Open Model Runs on Two Mac Studios

Meta's 816B Open Model Runs on Two Mac Studios Meta released Muse Spark Open on October 15 — 816 billion total parameters with 42 billion active per request, a one-million-token context window, and native handling of text, image, video and audio — and calls it the most capable US open-weight model to date, built for coding and long-horizon agentic work. The specification that separates it from prior releases in its size class is the deployment path: Meta says it runs on desktop hardware, specifically two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios using Apple's MLX framework, with the weights also available immediately through Hugging Face and Together AI. The threshold crossed is location rather than capability — an organization that owns hardware can now run a model Meta positions at the top of the American open-weight field, which turns a cloud-vendor trust question into a procurement decision for privacy-sensitive buyers. Two things remain unconfirmed and both matter: what Apple's actual involvement was, since compatibility with a two-year-old Apple framework is not the same as a partnership, and how fast the model runs on that two-machine configuration. Every capability claim in the announcement is Meta's own, with no independent benchmarking yet. STORIES COVERED Meta and Apple partner to run Muse Spark Open, Meta's most capable open-weight model, locally on Mac — @AIatMeta on X | TechCrunch AI | Financial Times Tech | Hugging Face Blog | Together AI Blog Disclaimer: The Context Report is an AI-produced podcast. Every episode goes through multiple layers of automated verification and review, but no system is perfect — accuracy gaps are possible and claims should not be taken as absolute fact. This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or professional advice. Listeners should independently verify any information before making decisions. We are actively improving with every episode. If you spot an inaccuracy, contact us at [email protected]