Yet another Hacker News

Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio

53 points antipaul 2 hours ago 17 comments

tony_cannistra 44 minutes ago | parent

Not exactly your average "desk", but still neat.

  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.

bensyverson 34 minutes ago | parent

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.

LoganDark 30 minutes ago | parent

There was the M3 Ultra 512GB Mac Studio, though.

mft_ 19 minutes ago | parent

…which is in the region of €20k on eBay, so the calculus doesn’t really shift…

hirako2000 18 minutes ago | parent

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.

janderson215 44 minutes ago | parent

Hilarious how they managed to put out an entire press release about Meta’s technology without mention Meta other than what is in the code references.

browningstreet 23 minutes ago | parent

Still weird, and against brand, for them to lead with this particular model from that particular company. The groans are still earned.

enos_feedler 18 minutes ago | parent

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.

Someone 8 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

Someone 9 minutes ago | parent

It’s not a press release and not about Meta’s technology.

The title (“Local and Distributed Large LLM Inference with MLX and RDMA on Mac Studio”) doesn’t even mention Muse.

It’s more like an advertorial for their tech.

peri-cl 10 minutes ago | parent

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. Or a cluster of them.

butterlesstoast 8 minutes ago | parent

I -- love -- an article -- full of -- em -- dashes.

isodev 7 minutes ago | parent

Preparing to upsell those very expensive Macs coming later this month, are we.