Frenemies? Meta and Apple team up to bring open-weight AI to Macs.

Think the enemies-to-lovers storyline is reserved for romcoms and Survivor alliances? Think again. 

Longtime rivals, Meta and Apple have joined forces to put open-weight AI on Mac Studio desktop computers. Specifically, Meta’s newest model, Muse Spark Open.

This strategic truce comes amidst America's not-so-friendly competition with China. Because many popular, affordable open-weight models are Chinese (Alibaba's Qwen, DeepSeek, and Moonshot's Kimi K3), US-based developers have fewer homegrown options.

Quick recap: Open-weight models are publicly available, which means anyone can download and run them locally. 

So with the release of Mac-compatible Muse Spark Open, users can now use an American-made model for R&D and video production. Though they need some serious hardware, since the system requires at least 1TB of RAM to function.

For those who can muster the memory, Meta’s new model earns its keep. Their demo showcased its range: from fixing a Mastodon client (a decentralized social network app) to cropping video footage in DaVinci Resolve.

Not bad for a pair of frenemies.

A truce with benefits:

Meta and Apple aren’t the only two betting on open-weight models. This past Thursday, Nvidia released three new Nemotron systems, joining Meta and Thinking Machines in the US open-weight field.

And while Muse Spark Open’s natively multimodal design is a big draw, it’s worth noting that it’s only the second open-weight release to come out of Meta since the company’s AI overhaul last year. 

Even so, Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang predicts the world will run on open models. And he wants them to be American. 

Which means this AI race may have just become a relay.

New reality show idea: The AI-mazing Race. - TL