Mark Zuckerberg had the stronger week, and his business model is a big part of why.
On Monday, Meta released Muse Wonder, its first frontier model. It ranks second on Artificial Analysis, behind Opus 5.5 and ahead of GPT-6 Astra, Gemini 4 Argon and Claude Fable 5.1. On Thursday, Meta released the weights for Muse Spark Open, an 816B-parameter MoE with 42B active parameters, and Zuckerberg posted that it “runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple.” Two M5 Ultra Mac Studios give you 1,024GB of unified memory. At 8-bit precision, the weights are 816GB. It fits.
Why can Meta give a model like that away? Ads.
Meta makes its money on advertising. When a developer runs Spark Open on a Mac, Meta pays nothing for the inference, loses no revenue, and gets a developer building on Muse. API access to Wonder and Muse subscriptions at $20 and $100 a month are upside on top of the ad business.
On-device AI fits Meta’s business model, and it fits Apple’s. Apple sells hardware. A frontier-class model that needs two top-configuration Mac Studios sells Mac Studios. That’s why Apple CEO John Ternus got a thank-you in the launch post, the first public Apple-Meta collaboration since 2017.
OpenAI is on the other side of that coin. It makes its money serving inference from data centers, through ChatGPT subscriptions and the API. A token generated on a Mac is a token OpenAI didn’t serve. OpenAI’s answer to the edge is its own device, and that device is in federal court.
This week Judge Davila gave Apple early access to OpenAI’s interview materials for ex-Apple candidates in OpenAI’s hardware and robotics groups. Then he said he was “highly likely” to grant Apple’s injunction, and OpenAI agreed not to use the trade secrets Apple says it took. OpenAI’s countermove was a filing, hours before the hearing, alleging a former employee took more than 100 files about its unreleased device to Apple. Apple’s lawyers say they’ve found no OpenAI files on Apple’s servers so far.
Then there’s September, when Altman pushed OpenAI’s IPO out of 2026 and talked up a pact between labs to slow development. Meta is shipping on three fronts. OpenAI is defending its hardware program and its timeline.
Both Apple and Meta declined to say whether the Mac Studio work will lead to anything deeper. If Muse shows up on iOS, Meta gets on-device distribution across the iPhone base, and ChatGPT’s spot in Apple Intelligence has company.
Is that next? Hmmm. Maybe!