Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg have been at odds for years, but John Ternus has taken control. applethe rivals are finding common ground in the field of artificial intelligence.
Meta and Apple on Thursday announced a new collaboration to make it easier for developers. meta A new open-weight AI model in Apple’s high-end desktop computers.
Mehta said the collaboration is centered around the Muse Spark Open, the company’s most capable open-class model released under a license that allows limited commercial use. This is an 816 billion parameter model using a so-called expert mixture architecture. As an open-weight model, developers can download technology parameters or weights from the Internet and run the model on a wide range of hardware.
Customers can pair two to four Mac Studio PCs to use Muse Spark for coding, video analysis, or other agent work. This model runs locally rather than in the cloud, adding an extra layer of security and saving costs for users, the companies said.
Thursday’s announcement, after months of collaboration, signals how the AI boom has changed a historic partnership in Silicon Valley. Apple and Meta have been wary of each other and avoided public partnerships for years, but the relationship hit rock bottom after Apple introduced privacy changes in 2021 that limited the targeting capabilities of digital advertising companies. Meta estimated in early 2022 that the changes would reduce revenue by $10 billion that year.
Apple and Meta representatives declined to say whether the Muse Spark Open collaboration was the beginning of a deeper relationship.
Zuckerberg posted a photo of the Meta agent running on a Mac computer on X. He wrote, “Muse Spark Open — weight released today — works great on the new Mac Studio thanks to @johnternus and our collaboration with Apple.”
Ternus responded, “Congratulations to the team! It’s great to be able to run Muse Spark Open’s great models and efficiently scale them right from your desk. Mac Studio continues to push the boundaries of on-device AI!”
A new Apple Mac Studio computer and Studio Display are on display shortly after its release at the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on March 18, 2022 in New York City, New York.
Mike Seeger | Reuters
Meta AI head Alexandr Wang said in an interview that many powerful openweight models are too large to run on most personal computers, but Apple’s Mac Studio has plenty of memory available to users, making it practical to run Muse Spark Open.
The move is a significant sign of confidence in Meta’s rebooted AI efforts and could pose a challenge to OpenAI and Anthropic. This could also indicate that Apple is growing its strength in the AI chip market. Nvidia Its prevalence in large data centers has made it mainstream so far.
“We worked with Apple to bring cutting-edge agent capabilities to the desktop for the first time with Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios, so you know we’re really excited about this,” said Wang. Developers can download versions of the AI model from websites like Hugging Face without any additional configuration for Apple’s silicon. Muse Spark Open has also been tuned to run faster on Apple’s hardware, with the iPhone maker revealing new benchmarks for the chip and publishing technical documentation about the MLX AI framework’s ability to split open-source models across multiple machines.
However, Mac Studio isn’t cheap, and this AI model requires the fastest Apple chips and as much memory as possible.
Currently, a Mac Studio with the required M5 Ultra chip and 256 GB of memory costs at least $10,799. A more expensive version with 512GB of RAM is expected to be released later this month.
Additionally, users need to purchase multiple machines.
Commonalities about open source
The two companies are collaborating on open source AI, which has become a point of contention in Washington as politicians worry that China’s free model could undermine U.S. AI. Meta once centered its AI strategy on its old open weight Llama family of models, but has since focused on developing its own models under Wang’s leadership. Wang joined Meta last year when the company invested more than $14 billion in its previous startup, Scale AI.
Apple and Meta (then known as Facebook) partnered on iPhone extensions more than a decade ago, but haven’t had a public partnership since 2017 after Apple removed system-level Facebook integration from the iPhone.
“Most of the animosity predates my arrival, but clearly there’s a long history between Meta and Apple,” Wang said, citing one member of his team, AI researcher and former Apple board member Daniel Gross, as a reason for the collaboration. Gross, along with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, was a big hire by Facebook founder Zuckerberg last year as he overhauled his company’s AI strategy.
Meta CEO. Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
John Putman | Anadolu | Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Their leaders also exchanged harsh words.
Cook, who was Apple’s CEO until Tarnas took over last month, criticized Zuckerberg during the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, saying, “I wouldn’t be in this situation.” Cook has often criticized Meta for violating users’ privacy.
Zuckerberg has also publicly disparaged Apple, telling Joe Rogan last year that the company “hasn’t invented anything great since the iPhone.” Mr. Zuckerberg has long sought to find a platform for Meta to own so that it would not be beholden to Apple.
Ternas, a hardware engineer, has already begun transforming Apple, including the timing of product releases.
And Meta developers couldn’t resist Apple’s product. The company purchased hundreds of Mac computers earlier this year so its superintelligence team could experiment with local AI and agents.
Apple’s multiple partners
Meta is just the latest AI model developer to partner with Apple.
In 2024, Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into Siri, but the integration was “significantly underperforming” and did not lead to an increase in OpenAI users, OpenAI said in a filing that was part of Elon Musk’s legal dispute with xAI. Apple sued OpenAI in July alleging trade secret theft, an allegation OpenAI denied.
Earlier this year, Apple announced the following deals: googleusing Gemini models on Apple Intelligence and Google Cloud infrastructure.
Still, Apple’s AI strategy has drawn criticism from investors and customers, in part because the company’s new version of Siri, released last month, is not as advanced as chatbots or agents from major labs.
Meta, meanwhile, has bet big on becoming a top-tier lab, but has struggled to keep up with the competition, and its business remains almost entirely dependent on advertising. Recent developments such as Meta’s Muse personal agent app released earlier this week and its latest proprietary foundation model Muse Wonder are starting to excite investors optimistic about new AI business opportunities.
Open source is still part of Zuckerberg’s AI strategy. In August, Meta debuted a small weightless AI model called Muse Glimmer, and Zuckerberg promised to eventually release a larger, more powerful one.
Muse Spark Open isn’t as advanced as its own product, Muse Wonder, but Wang said more programmers may upgrade.
“These are not the most high-performance models we have developed or released,” Wang said. “But we think there will be a lot of companies and developers that will use this model, tinker with it on a small scale, and then try to increase usage and scale.”
WATCH: Apple is making its biggest smart home push ever under CEO John Ternus.
