An unexpected Apple-Meta partnership
Meta has fine-tuned its open-weight Muse Spark Open model specifically to deliver high throughput on Apple devices. This suggests Apple is choosing to partner with a company already investing heavily in frontier-scale models rather than building its own.
Model architecture
Muse Spark Open has 816 billion parameters but activates only 42 billion at a time. This sparse design lets it deliver strong performance without running the full model.
Performance
The model reaches a throughput of 20 tokens per second on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios. That is notable for showing a large model can run on desktop hardware.
Why it matters
Apple appears to be betting on a partnership with Meta for on-device AI rather than developing its own flagship model. The collaboration highlights the growing importance of hardware-software cooperation for local AI.
