‘Archrivals’ Meta Platforms and Apple Join Forces on AI, Co-Developing an Open-Source AI Model for Mac

[Financial News] Meta Platforms and Apple, fierce rivals since the early days of the iPhone, have embarked on an unusual partnership centered on artificial intelligence (AI).
Despite leaked indications that Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg once said he would “make Apple suffer” in response to criticism from then-Apple CEO Tim Cook, the two tech giants have begun to join forces amid the rapidly shifting battle for AI dominance and competition from Chinese AI.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on the 15th (local time) that Meta Platforms was launching a new open-weight AI model, ‘Muse Spark Open,’ and had agreed to work with Apple to make it run on Apple’s high-performance Mac computers. The partnership is expected to give developers an American-made AI option for research projects, app development, video production and more.
Meta Platforms’ chief AI officer, Alexander Wang, said in an interview, “This is a very exciting moment for both companies, which have found ways to work together productively.” He emphasized, “Many services around the world will run on open models, and those models should be made in the United States.” As part of the collaboration, Apple updated its MLX software toolkit to help Meta Platforms’ new model run smoothly on Mac computers.
Open-weight models are AI models whose core components are publicly available for anyone to download. Recently, inexpensive and high-performing Chinese open-weight models, including DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen and Moonshot’s Kimi K3, have been rapidly gaining market share.
Meta Platforms said its newly unveiled ‘Muse Spark Open’ is specialized for coding and autonomous-agent tasks. However, it acknowledged that Chinese open models still have an edge in some areas, including software development. The company said that because the model has high memory requirements, it is “not suitable for ordinary hardware, but is ideal for running on Mac computers.”
Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio have a high-performance shared-memory architecture, making them popular among developers who want to run sophisticated AI models directly in their home or personal office. Running the latest models requires a Mac setup with at least 1 terabyte (TB) of memory, but the cost is considered quite reasonable for developers when cloud server rental fees are taken into account.
The collaboration is seen as a dramatic move given the two companies’ long-running antagonism.
Because Meta Platforms’ core apps run on the iPhone platform, Apple has long wielded considerable influence over how Meta Platforms operates. In particular, after Apple restricted app tracking for targeted advertising in 2021, citing the need to strengthen privacy protections, Meta Platforms publicly protested, saying the measure cost it at least $10 billion in revenue in 2022 alone (about 13 trillion won).

[email protected] Yoon Jae-jun Reporter