Meta announced on Thursday a new open-weight model, Muse Spark Open, built for coding and agentic work, alongside a collaboration with longtime rival Apple to run it locally on high-end Mac computers. Apple has updated its MLX software toolkit so the model runs well on the Mac mini and Mac Studio machines that developers increasingly use to run sophisticated models at home or in the office.

Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang framed the partnership as a bet that much of the world will run on open models, and that those models should be American. Open-weight releases make their core components downloadable by anyone, and Meta is pitching Muse Spark Open as a US-made option in a field where Chinese open models from Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot are popular.

Meta acknowledged that Chinese open models are still stronger for software development and some other tasks. Muse Spark Open is the second open-weight model Meta has released since it overhauled its AI efforts last year, and it lands three days after the Muse Wonder launch put Meta back in the frontier race.

Evening update: the weights are downloadable today, so this is a release, not just an announcement. MacRumors and TechCrunch put the model at 816 billion total parameters with 42 billion active and a 1 million-token context window, natively multimodal and built for coding and agentic work. Running it locally takes two high-end Mac Studios pooling about a terabyte of unified memory; it is also available through several API platforms and model catalogs on launch day.