Meta releases Muse Spark Open, an 816B-parameter open-weight model

Meta released Muse Spark Open, an open-weight model with 816 billion parameters that handles text, images, video and audio with up to one million tokens of context. Benchmarks put it roughly on par with the top Chinese open-weight models. Meta and Apple optimized it to run locally on two M5 Ultra Mac Studios using the MLX framework.

Why it matters: Meta is positioning a US model against Qwen, GLM and Kimi, which have led open-weight releases. Running a frontier-scale model on desktop hardware from a rival shows local inference is becoming a real deployment path, not only a hobbyist one. It also pairs with Meta's Muse assistant, which already topped the App Store.