"Mommy and daddy" play nice: Apple and Meta team up to bring open-source Muse to Macs

Axios · 10/15/2026, 5:00:05 PM

Apple and Meta, whose leaders have spent years trading barbs over privacy and the future of computing, are joining forces to bring one of America's most powerful open-weight AI models to Apple's high-end Macs. Why it matters: The collaboration marks a striking detente between two longtime Silicon Valley rivals, underscoring how the AI race is reshaping relationships across the technology industry. The companies still compete over devices and the next generation of computing, but both see an opportunity in bringing powerful AI capabilities to personal computers. "We're excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again," Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang told Axios. Driving the news: Meta is releasing Muse Spark Open, a model similar to Muse Spark 1.3 that it says is the most powerful U.S.-developed open-weight AI model available. Meta joins a host of Western AI companies that have released powerful open-weight systems that promise to slash AI costs, provide companies with more control and offer an alternative to the Chinese AI ecosystem. Nvidia on Tuesday released updated versions of its Nemotron family of models, and U.S.-based Reflection AI and France's Mistral both released new open-source models last week. As proof of Muse Spark Open's capabilities, Meta worked with Apple to make the model run locally across two or four connected Mac Studios powered by Apple's M5 Ultra chips, using Apple's MLX framework. Zoom in: The prospect of a powerful model — it has 816 billion parameters — running on Apple hardware offers a proof of concept for how companies could build their own AI systems. That could give companies more alternatives to Nvidia GPUs and proprietary models from leading AI companies, potentially shifting some of the economics of AI. Meta's model will be free to download, with a license allowing commercial use, and will also be available through cloud providers and developer tools. What they're saying: Wang said the companies have been working together for severa