Apple and Meta Just Teamed Up on AI, and Zuckerberg Thanked Apple’s CEO by Name Omor Ibne Ehsan Fri, October 16, 2026 at 7:36 AM EDT 5 min read AAPL -0.28% META -0.11% Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Zuckerberg publicly thanked Apple CEO John Ternus after Meta released Muse Spark Open, marking the two companies' first public collaboration since 2017.
Meta missed Q2 EPS by over $1 against estimates and spent $30 billion in capex, yet its lower valuation gives it more room to grow than Apple.
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Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg rarely thanks Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) publicly, but on October 15, 2026, he did by name. He posted on X that Muse Spark Open, with weights released that day, "runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple."
Meta released the model as open weights, meaning anyone can download the trained files and run them. Meta said it worked with Apple so developers can run it on two to four linked Mac Studios with the M5 Ultra chip. It is the first public partnership between the two since around 2017, after years of friction that included Apple's 2021 privacy changes, which hurt Meta's ad business.
Both stocks moved little. Apple fell 0.28% to $342.00, leaving its market value at $4.99 trillion, just under the $5 trillion mark it first closed above a day earlier, while Meta slipped 0.11% to $736.72.
Apple CEO John Ternus replied: "Congrats to the team! Amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open's caliber and scale this efficiently, right from your desk. Mac Studio keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI!"
Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang said the companies worked together for months. He said former Apple executive Daniel Gross, now at Meta, played a key role, and Apple is tuning the model through MLX, its framework for running AI on Apple chips.
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The companies disclosed no financial terms, exclusivity, or duration. Both declined to say whether the work points to a broader relationship.
Meta describes Muse Spark Open as a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 816 billion total parameters, activating roughly 42 billion per token. Only a piece of the model works on each word, and that is why it fits on desktop hardware.
The work supports Apple's on-device AI pitch, but the market for it is small. Apple prices a Mac Studio with M5 Ultra and 256GB of memory from $10,799, and multi-machine setups cost more, which makes this a niche for developers and professionals set against fiscal 2025 revenue of $416.16 billion.
Open weights are how Meta releases its models. Every developer who builds on Muse Spark Open broadens the ecosystem around them, and Meta pays none of the computing bill.
Running agents locally also helps with security and cost, because sensitive data stays on the machine and nobody rents a cloud server by the hour. If more agent work moves to desktops, demand for cloud data centers could soften slightly.
Wang said this is not Meta's most capable model. Open weights also run on other hardware, and with no exclusivity disclosed, competing machines can host the same files.
The warming in relations matters more. Months of joint work and the Gross connection point to a working relationship, although whether it reaches Siri, ads, or glasses is still an open question.
Valuation separates the two companies. Meta trades at a lower multiple of earnings than Apple, so Apple's price already assumes a lot of AI success that a $10,799 workstation will not deliver.
Meta carries real risks. Second-quarter diluted EPS of $6.18 missed the $7.22 estimate, and free cash flow fell to $784 million as capital spending reached $30.12 billion.
Meta still has more to gain from reaching developers, though, because its model ecosystem is young and its $1.88 trillion market value leaves more room to grow than Apple's.
Meta's third-quarter report will test this. If revenue lands inside the $61 billion to $64 billion guidance and management describes more work on Apple silicon, the case holds, but if Apple adds no further open models to MLX by then, the collaboration likely remains a one-off.
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