Meta releases Muse Spark Open weights, an 816B model that runs on two Mac Studios
- Meta released the weights for Muse Spark Open, an 816B-total-parameter model with 42B active parameters and a 1M-token context window, which it calls the most capable US open-weight model to date.
- The model runs on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios with 512 GB of unified memory each using the MLX framework, and Meta says the pair behaves like one machine with a terabyte of unified memory.
- Hosted API access runs through Baseten, Fireworks AI, Groq, Modal, Nebius, OpenRouter, and Together AI, while weights are on Hugging Face, Amazon SageMaker AI, Google Cloud Model Garden, and Microsoft Foundry Models.
- Weights ship under the Muse Model License, which has limited commercial terms but lets many developers use the model for free.
- The release includes custom auto-tunable Helion GPU kernels in SGLang that deliver 1.03-3.95x kernel-level speedups on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs and a 3% end-to-end speedup on AMD MI350.
Hacker News opinions
Love seeing a major lab ship open weights. Hoping OpenAI and eventually Anthropic follow.
Open-weight means the weights are under an open-source license. A license that limits commercial use doesn't fit that definition, so 'weights available' is the more accurate label.
The article never gives inference speed for the two-Mac-Studio setup. Anyone who has run a quantized version on Apple silicon, post your tk/s and specs.
Two 512GB M5 Ultra boxes is not a cheap home setup. I'd guess that's north of $50k.
Calling Muse 'very sticky' is a claim nobody has backed up. A few million downloads against billions of DAU doesn't look like stickiness to me.
The rent-on-intelligence argument doesn't hold up. OpenAI and Anthropic together bring in roughly $100B, and open weights have been near the frontier for over a year without moving that money.
Serving costs are the main reason I'm still paying for a subscription. Token prices for the more capable models are what keep me on one.
Backdoor risk in open-weight models is a real research topic. Having a US-built model helps some, but the US has its own record on backdoors in security tech, so I'd still want the papers before trusting it.