I think they're sandbagging Qwen pretty heavily by benchmarking Meta's model at 4-bit, against Qwen only at native BF16 (and nothing else shown).
I get that this is cross-brand marketing for Apple's partner, Meta; but really Muse Spark isn't even in the top *ten* models I'd consider if I had a 512 GB M5 in my paws.
In this post, we show how to run the latest frontier-class model — Muse Spark Open, with nearly a trillion parameters — right from your desk, using the latest version of MLX, released today. On a cluster of four Mac Studios, Muse Spark Open generates over 36 tokens per second (see Figure 1), well above average human reading speed. Beginning on a single Mac Studio (up to 512GB of unified memory), then scaling out across multiple Macs with the RDMA over Thunderbolt driver, below we share an overview of the range of models you can now run on Mac Studio.
Yes, I'm very glad they're doing this, but as of 2026, it's a bit academic. Pricing for the 512GB Mac Studio hasn't even been announced yet, but the 256GB version starts at $9499. So when you start talking about four of those puppies, it's substantial.
Someone else will do the math on how many years it would take to spend $40k on Muse Spark Open via OpenRouter.
It seems Apple figured they could sell more Mac Studios on the basis of frontier local AI models, profit to be made while users haven't figured out the math yet.
I find it bizarre of Apple to do anything publicly in partnership with Meta. I always thought the reasons Apple snubbed Facebook were out of values and principles not business. That could be wrong. Now that Meta has a line of business that Apple can finally charge a platform tax on there is new reason to start sleeping with them.
I get that this is cross-brand marketing for Apple's partner, Meta; but really Muse Spark isn't even in the top *ten* models I'd consider if I had a 512 GB M5 in my paws.
Someone else will do the math on how many years it would take to spend $40k on Muse Spark Open via OpenRouter.