Meta releases Muse Spark Open, an open-weight AI model that runs on Macs

Meta has released Muse Spark Open, an open-weight AI model built to run on Apple Macs. It is available now through several API platforms.

The model has 816 billion parameters and handles up to 1 million tokens of context. It works with several kinds of input and targets coding and agent-style work. Engadget reported that local use requires at least 1 terabyte of RAM, with the best results on a Mac Studio using the M5 Ultra chip. Meta says its own evaluations, released Thursday, show the model ahead of other popular open-weight models, and that it is the strongest of its kind in the US.

The article says open-weight models can cost less to run and give users more transparency and flexibility than closed ones. The memory requirement means local use is limited to very well-equipped machines.