Two companies, Apple and Meta, whose executives had for years clashed over privacy and the future of computing, are now collaborating to bring one of the most powerful open-source AI models in the United States to Mac computers.
According to ITNA, this cooperation is a sign of the cooling of the long-standing rivalry between the two Silicon Valley giants and shows how competition in the field of artificial intelligence has reshaped relationships among major tech companies.
The two companies remain competitors in devices and next-generation computing, but both see an opportunity in bringing powerful AI capabilities to personal computers.
Alexander Wang, Meta’s head of AI, told Axios with a humorous tone that relations between the two companies have improved, likening it to parents reconciling.
According to the report, Meta is releasing a new model called Muse Spark Open, which the company says is the most powerful open-source AI model developed in the United States. This model is similar to the Muse Spark 1.3 version, and with this move Meta joins a group of Western AI companies that, by releasing powerful open-source systems, reduce AI costs and provide an alternative to China’s AI ecosystem.
In the same vein, Nvidia on Tuesday released updated versions of its Nemotron model family, and U.S. company Reflection AI and French company Mistral also released new open-source models last week.
As an example of Muse Spark Open’s capabilities, Meta, in collaboration with Apple, ran the model locally on two or four Mac Studio machines equipped with Apple’s M5 Ultra chip using Apple’s MLX framework. With 816 billion parameters, this model presents the prospect of companies building proprietary AI systems that could replace Nvidia processors and the proprietary models of leading AI companies and change the economics of the field.
The Meta model will be available for free with a license allowing commercial use and will also be offered through cloud providers and developer tools.
Wang said the two companies have been collaborating for months, and Daniel Gross, a former Apple executive now at Meta, played an important role in bringing the two sides closer.
A look back
Tim Cook, Apple’s chairman, and Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, have repeatedly clashed over privacy and each other’s business models. In 2018 during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when asked what he would do if he were Zuckerberg, Cook said he would not have found himself in that position; Zuckerberg called that remark superficial. The disagreement intensified in 2021 when Apple introduced new privacy protections that hurt Facebook’s advertising business.
The bigger picture
AI competition has led to unexpected collaborations among long-time Silicon Valley rivals and even political competitors.
Anthropic has rented significant compute capacity from Elon Musk’s SpaceX while competing with his AI company. Microsoft, long a partner of OpenAI, has invested billions in its rival Anthropic and uses cloud models in its products.
Why the Apple–Meta collaboration matters
The Apple–Meta collaboration does not mean the two companies’ disputes are over, but it shows those disagreements no longer prevent cooperation where they have shared interests. Because the model runs locally, Meta does not gain access to users’ requests or information; a factor that largely addresses privacy concerns between the two companies.
However, the free availability of powerful AI models also raises concerns that bad actors could bypass safety measures and misuse the technology for cyberattacks or biological threats.
The outlook
It is still unclear whether this collaboration will be the start of a broader relationship between Apple and Meta. For now, Apple is only demonstrating the ability to run Meta’s models locally on its machines; a more significant step could be integrating Meta’s models into Apple Intelligence, giving Meta a role in enhancing Apple’s intelligent features.
Wang emphasized at the end that Apple and Meta will continue to compete in some areas, but that will not prevent the two companies from collaborating where it makes sense.