THE HOOK
Meta just redefined running a model locally as owning a terabyte of Apple unified memory.
THE GIST
Meta released the weights for Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 42 billion active parameters and a 1-million-token context window. Built with Apple, it runs on two 512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studios via MLX, or on four Nvidia Blackwell GPUs in the datacentre.
THE TAKE
This is a real open-weight win, wrapped in very clever Mac marketing. But "runs on your desktop" is doing heavy lifting when the 512GB Mac Studio isn't even on sale yet. Hobbyists won't touch this; hosts and labs will. Awkward week for the closed-model crowd.
OPINION
TechCrunch notes you need at least a terabyte of RAM, which tells you who the real customer is. Meta's own hardware guide lists four Blackwell GPUs or eight AMD MI355X cards for the datacentre route, so these weights matter more for cheap hosting than home tinkering. That's still a big deal for anyone tired of renting closed APIs.
- Story type: Important story
- Impact: High
- Confidence: High (official announcement)
- Audience: Developers
- What changed: Meta released open weights for an 816B-parameter model that can run on two Mac Studios.
- What to watch: Whether the 512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studio ships later this month, and what hosts charge to serve Muse Spark Open.
- Reading time: 1 minute
