Muse Spark Open: one model across two desktops

Transcript

The original narration, preserved as published. Relative dates refer to the episode’s coverage window.

Two desktops, one enormous model. Meta released Muse Spark Open yesterday, October fifteenth. Apple showed how linked Mac Studios can run it locally. The key is sharing memory and computation across machines.

Meta lists eight hundred sixteen billion parameters, with forty two billion active per token. It accepts images and text, with a million token context window. Weights and hosted services are available under the Muse Model License.

Apple says the four bit model takes about four hundred ninety three gigabytes before working memory. Its setup starts with two M five Ultra Mac Studios. Fewer active parameters reduce computation, but the model still needs storage.

Pipeline parallelism puts earlier layers on one Mac and later layers on another. Tensor parallelism splits each layer across machines. The second approach needs much more frequent communication. Apple connects the computers through Thunderbolt R D M A.

This makes local inference an option with a specific equipment list. Check memory, connections and your actual workload before buying hardware. Apple reports its own measurements; we have not reproduced them. Downloadable weights do not make deployment effortless.