After years of rivalry: Apple and Meta announce rare collaboration

Apple and Meta have announced a rare collaboration in developing the Muse Spark Open artificial intelligence model, optimized to run on Mac Studio computers with M5 Ultra chips. The collaboration is unusual given the long-standing rivalry between the companies but aims to counter the monopoly of Google and Microsoft in the cloud.

Apple and Meta have announced a rare collaboration in developing the Muse Spark Open artificial intelligence model. The multimodal model, with 816 billion parameters, is optimized to run on Mac Studio computers with M5 Ultra chips, without relying on the cloud. The collaboration is unusual given the long-standing rivalry between the companies, which peaked in 2021 with Apple's privacy mechanism that cost Meta $10 billion a year. Apple's new CEO, John Ternus, and Mark Zuckerberg publicly acknowledged each other. However, the high cost of the hardware and the gap compared to open Chinese models like Qwen and DeepSeek limit accessibility.