On Thursday Meta announced a new open-weight artificial intelligence model, Muse Spark Open. The company claims it rivals, and in some cases surpasses, similar products from leading Chinese developers. The head of Meta's AI division, Alexander Wang, reported this on social network X, calling the new release "the most powerful American open-weight model to date."
Unlike so-called closed models such as Claude from Anthropic or ChatGPT from OpenAI, open models allow developers to download the parameters (weights) and tune them for their own tasks. Over the past couple of years Chinese developers have come to dominate the open AI model market: Qwen from Alibaba, Kimi K3 from Moonshot AI and GLM from Z.ai were considered the world leaders in this category. Now Meta claims its new open model reaches a comparable level.
According to the company, Muse Spark Open is "built for coding and agentic tasks" and "excels at long-running projects, complex software development and multi-step reasoning." Meta's blog post also states that "robust safeguards" are integrated into the model.
In addition, Muse Spark Open is "optimized" to run on advanced Apple M5 Ultra chips, signaling an unusual partnership between the two tech giants. Meta head Mark Zuckerberg wrote on X that the new model "works great on the new Mac Studio thanks to joint work" with Apple and its new CEO John Turnus. Turnus, who took over as Apple's head in September, replied that it is "amazing to run a model of this level and scale so efficiently right from your desktop. Mac Studio keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI!"
Nevertheless, running Muse Spark Open still requires significant computing power. Users can run the model on two Mac Studio machines with M5 Ultra chips, creating a "supercomputer" on their desktop, according to Meta.
The launch came just days after Meta presented its latest closed model. On Monday the company announced two "frontier" models, Wonder and Wonder Full, which it claims rival the most advanced versions of ChatGPT and Claude. Meta's AI efforts were initially focused on open models, but recently Zuckerberg has aimed the company at competing with OpenAI and Anthropic. The Spark model was released in April, marking a departure from the open Llama model, which lagged behind the rest of the industry.