Apple and Meta bury the hatchet — for AI

Apple and Meta, whose leaders have spent years trading barbs over privacy and the future of computing, are joining forces to bring one of America's most powerful open-weight AI models to Apple's high-end Macs.

Why it matters: The collaboration marks a striking détente between two longtime Silicon Valley rivals, underscoring how the AI race is reshaping relationships across the technology industry.

• The companies still compete over devices and the next generation of computing, but both see an opportunity in bringing powerful AI capabilities to personal computers.

"We're excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again," Meta's AI chief Alexandr Wang told Axios.

Driving the news: Meta is releasing Muse Spark Open, a model similar to Muse Spark 1.3, that it says is the most powerful U.S.-developed open-weight AI model available.

• Meta joins a host of Western AI companies that have released powerful open-weight systems that promise to slash AI costs, provide companies with more control and offer an alternative to the Chinese AI ecosystem.
• Nvidia on Tuesday released updated versions of its Nemotron family of models, and U.S.-based Reflection AI and France's Mistral both released new open source models last week.

• As proof of Muse Spark Open's capabilities, Meta worked with Apple to make the model run locally across two or four connected Mac Studios powered by Apple's M5 Ultra chips, using Apple's MLX framework.

Zoom in: The prospect of a powerful model — it has 816 billion parameters — running on Apple hardware offers a proof of concept about just how much companies will be able to build their own AI systems.

• That could give companies more alternatives to Nvidia GPUs and proprietary models from leading AI labs, potentially shifting some of the economics of AI.
• Meta's model will be free to download, with a license allowing commercial use, and will also be available through cloud providers and developer tools.

What they're saying: Wang said the companies have been working together for several months, with Daniel Gross, a former Apple executive now at Meta, playing a key role in bringing the two sides together.

• "I think he played a really big role in kind of getting the two companies to work nicely together," Wang said in a telephone interview.

Flashback: Apple executive chairman Tim Cook and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have repeatedly clashed over privacy and their competing business models.

• In 2018, amid Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, Cook was asked what he would do if he were Zuckerberg. "I wouldn't be in this situation," Cook replied. Zuckerberg called Cook's comments "extremely glib."
• The rivalry intensified in 2021, when Apple introduced new privacy protections that struck at the heart of Facebook's ad business. Zuckerberg reportedly told employees that Facebook needed to "inflict pain" on Apple over the dispute, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The big picture: The AI race is making for some strange bedfellows, scrambling longstanding Silicon Valley rivalries and even bringing together political adversaries.

• Anthropic is leasing up to $15 billion per year of computing capacity from Elon Musk's SpaceX, even as it competes with his AI company.
• Microsoft, OpenAI's longtime partner, is investing billions in rival Anthropic and incorporating its Claude models into its own products.
• And in Washington, progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders and MAGA strategist Steve Bannon have found common ground in calling for tougher AI safeguards and challenging the power of Big Tech.

Between the lines: The Apple-Meta collaboration doesn't mean the companies have resolved their differences, but it suggests those disagreements no longer prevent them from working together when their interests align.

• Meta benefits from making its AI models widely available, while Apple can showcase the capabilities of its most powerful computers.
• And because the model runs locally, Meta doesn't receive users' prompts or other information — sidestepping the privacy concerns that have long divided the companies.

"Meta has no control or visibility to any of that," Wang said of how developers use the model.

Yes, but: Making powerful AI models openly available raises concerns that bad actors could remove safeguards and use the technology for cyberattacks or biological threats.

What we're watching: Whether the collaboration marks the beginning of a broader relationship between Apple and Meta.

• For now, Apple is helping demonstrate that Meta's AI models can run locally on its computers. A more significant step would be Apple incorporating Meta's models into Apple Intelligence, giving the Facebook parent a role in powering Apple's own AI features.

The bottom line: Wang acknowledged that Apple and Meta will continue to compete in some areas, but said that doesn't have to prevent them from working together.

• "Where it makes sense to collaborate and partner, we want to be able to do so," he said.