Meta Platforms (META) released Muse Spark Open on Thursday, October 15. It’s an open-weight AI model built for coding and AI agents. Developers can download the weights from Hugging Face, adapt them, and run the model locally on two Apple (AAPL) M5 Ultra Mac Studio computers.
That last part is the surprise. Meta and Apple have spent years at odds, and Zuckerberg wrote on X and credited the Mac support to “work with John Ternus and Apple.” META stock barely reacted, closing down 0.11% at $736.72.
What Meta Released
- Size: 816 billion total parameters, with 42 billion active at a time, and a context window of up to 1 million tokens.
- Access: free weights on Hugging Face, plus some API providers.
- The Apple piece: Meta optimized the model for Apple’s MLX framework, and two 512GB Mac Studios can hold the whole model in memory.
- What stays closed: Muse Wonder, the frontier model Meta launched on Monday.
Why Meta Can Give It Away
Zuckerberg has argued that advanced AI shouldn’t be concentrated among a few companies. Meta calls Muse Spark Open the most capable US open-weight model to date. That framing is aimed at Chinese open models such as Alibaba’s (BABA) Qwen.
The open strategy works for Meta because of where its money comes from.
Family of Apps brought in $198.76 billion of Meta’s $200.97 billion in 2025 revenue. Advertising alone was $196.18 billion, about 98% of the total, and it grew 22% last year.
Meta relies overwhelmingly on advertising, but it also sells AI API access and subscriptions, so free models could compete with some of its paid offerings. Alphabet (GOOGL) also sells model access through Google Cloud, although a free download does not necessarily replace a paid query.
For Meta, the payoff is developers building on its models. The ad business covers the bill, including the roughly $89 billion of capex over the last four quarters.
What Apple Gets
Apple’s payoff is harder to put a number on.m
Mac revenue was $33.71 billion in fiscal 2025, up 12%. A 256GB M5 Ultra Mac Studio starts at $10,799. Two of those 256GB machines cost about $21,600, but that is not the price of Meta’s described setup, which uses two 512GB machines. The revenue opportunity depends on the price and sales volume of those higher-memory configurations.
The prize is positioning. Apple gets a flagship model optimized to run locally on its hardware without having to develop that model itself.
What Meta’s October 21 Call Needs to Show
Meta reports third-quarter results after the close on Wednesday, October 21. Open models only pay off if developers use them and that work feeds back into Meta’s products and ads.
The number to watch is capex guidance. With advertising funding nearly all of Meta’s business, a free model is cheap to give away. The real cost sits in the data centers behind it, and that’s where investors will look first.
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