Meta launches Muse Spark Open, an open-weight model that runs directly on a Mac

My take: Meta just launched Muse Spark Open, an open-weight model that can run directly on a Mac, no cloud required. The company calls it the most capable open model built in the US, though that comparison comes from Meta's own benchmarks, so it's worth waiting for independent testing before treating it as settled.

What's interesting here isn't just the size (816 billion parameters and a million-token memory), it's the direction: a model that lives on your own machine instead of someone else's server. That gives whoever uses it more control over their data and, over time, less dependence on a monthly subscription. The catch is that, for now, it needs a Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra chip and at least a terabyte of memory, well out of reach for most people. But the path is set: more and more AI tools will be able to live locally.

If you're a freelancer, creator or business owner, it's worth keeping an eye on this trend even if you don't have the hardware for it today. How much are you considering investing in your own AI hardware in the coming years, instead of relying only on cloud services?