From October 20 to 22, along the banks of Shanghai's Huangpu River, the 2026 Sustainable Global Leaders Conference returns once again. Nobel Prize and Turing Award winners will take the stage to discuss the future and trends of technology, and the internet-famous professors who "rescue" people from anxiety and the era of involution—Macfarlane and Xiang Biao—will hold a live dialogue!
Spots are limited, so act fast. Let us meet for a sustainable appointment! [Click to register] Apple and Meta Platforms, Inc. have jointly released a brand-new "open-weight" AI model specifically optimized to run on Mac computers, a rare collaboration between two fiercely competing giants. The two companies said on Thursday that Muse Spark Open is a downloadable version of Meta's latest AI model, which Meta calls its most capable open-source model to date, having been optimized to run locally on Apple's Mac Studio desktop computers. Apple has fallen behind in developing its own large models, so it continues to partner with companies that possess stronger model capabilities, hoping to rely on AI features to drive hardware demand, and this collaboration is the latest move in that strategy. Apple and Meta have had tense relations in the past, with the two sides once clashing fiercely over app management policies on Apple devices. Meta has also poached AI talent from Apple and launched VR glasses that compete directly with Apple's Vision Pro. Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said the breakthrough in this collaboration came from communication with Apple CEO John Ternus, who took office in September. Ternus responded: "Being able to run a large model of the scale and caliber of Muse Spark Open so efficiently on desktop devices is astonishing." Muse Spark Open targets code assistance and AI agent scenarios (intelligent robots that can independently perform complex tasks). Meta said the model is released under limited commercial terms, and a large number of developers can use it for free. Zuckerberg, along with AI industry leaders such as Nvidia's Jensen Huang, strongly advocate open-source models that can be downloaded, further customized, and run on local hardware. In contrast, mainstream closed-source models such as those from Anthropic and OpenAI are proprietary models and cannot be customized or modified in the same way. Meta has also positioned its own open-source models as America's main domestic models, used to benchmark against Chinese competitors such as DeepSeek; of course, this social media giant has also released some closed-source models. Meta Chief AI Officer Alexander Wang announced the collaboration with Apple on Thursday in a post on X, accompanied by an American flag emoji. Meta is betting on this new model series and the Muse personal AI assistant to support Zuckerberg's high-stakes strategy of spending hundreds of billions of dollars to turn this social media company into an AI industry leader. Apple, meanwhile, is highlighting the privacy advantages of running models locally on-device: relying on the high-performance chips of new hardware for on-device inference, with no need to upload personal data to the cloud. Apple says a cluster of 2 to 4 Mac Studios equipped with M5 Ultra chips is enough to run the most cutting-edge large models. Earlier this year, then-Apple CEO Tim Cook said demand had surged for the two desktop models, Mac Mini and Mac Studio, as a large number of users wanted to run AI models on local devices. Apple is working to make up for its rough start in the AI race. Its previous blockbuster collaboration with OpenAI ultimately turned into a fierce trade secrets lawsuit. Earlier this year, Apple also partnered with Google to integrate the Gemini model, providing capabilities for the new conversational Siri AI assistant launched last month.
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