S4E409 — Muse Spark Open

GARY: — and I'm telling you, the Mac mini has never gotten enough credit as a supercomputer. Gary. Hello.

MAEVE: Maeve. That's not a Mac mini.

OBI: Obi. It is two Mac Studios.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field researcher. Ignore nothing.

GARY: It's a Mac mini situation, Maeve. Meta put out a blog post, I read it twice, I understood it once.

MAEVE: Say the part you understood.

GARY: Muse Spark Open. Weights are out today. Eight hundred sixteen billion parameters.

OBI: Forty-two billion active. The other seven hundred seventy-four billion are load-bearing vibes.

GARY: A million-token context window.

MAEVE: Built for coding and agentic work.

OBI: And the weights download from Hugging Face. It runs on SGLang, vLLM, llama.cpp, MLX — day-one support across every major runner.

GARY: See, this is the generous part. Meta says the future is for everyone, and you can run it at home, on your desktop, using two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios, five hundred twelve gigabytes each, one terabyte of unified memory, acting as one supercomputer.

MAEVE: Two desktops.

GARY: One desktop, two bodies.

OBI: It is one desktop the way a duplex is one house.

GRUNER: Field note. In human zoning law, "desktop" means whatever rich man says.

MAEVE: That's not zoning.

GRUNER: Is zoning.

GARY: The blog literally says "we believe the future is for everyone." That's a beautiful sentence.

OBI: It is a beautiful sentence with a spec sheet attached.

MAEVE: The spec sheet is the joke, Gary. Five thousand dollars of aluminum says who "everyone" is.

GARY: I haven't gotten to the joke yet. I'm still on the beautiful sentence.

GRUNER: Doorstop count: two. Rising.

MAEVE: mcphage, quote: "you do need a really capable computer though."

GARY: That's fair. That's a reasonable caveat.

MAEVE: mcphage again: "A single Mac Studio w/ M5 Ultra and half that RAM is around eleven thousand dollars, and the 512 gigabyte option isn't even available yet."

GARY: Okay, but — trvz has the answer. Quote: "You can just use your old dual 512 gigabyte M3 Ultras until you get the M5s."

MAEVE: Your old dual M3 Ultras.

GARY: Everyone has those. That's the point of the comment.

OBI: Nobody has those, Gary.

GARY: trvz has those.

OBI: trvz is doing a bit, and you fell for it like a pigeon on a chip.

GRUNER: Doorstop count rising. Is good sign.

MAEVE: markstos: "We believe AI is for everyone — asterisk — who can afford two M5 Studios with a total of one terabyte of memory."

OBI: octomind: "Finally democratizing AI access to, checks notes, people with no less than two Apple M5 Ultra Studios on their desktop."

GARY: I don't hear a problem. Two Studios is furniture. It's a workstation situation. My dad's shop in Muncie had two lathes and a mill in a room smaller than my kitchen. That's just American manufacturing.

OBI: Your father's lathes did not require a terabyte of unified memory and a Thunderbolt prayer circle.

GARY: The principle holds, Obi.

OBI: The principle is you defending a two-machine supercomputer as a household appliance, like a man who calls a yacht a dinghy.

GARY: That's — okay, that's a little fucking harsh.

OBI: brisket_bronson, quote: "We believe the future is for everyone. Okay... run on your desktop using two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios. Who is this 'everyone'?"

GARY: Everyone who's anyone, brisket.

MAEVE: devy, quote: "we are looking at least twenty-eight to thirty thousand dollars for the setup Muse team is advertising."

GARY: That's a Corolla. gavino says it's a Corolla. People own cars, Obi. People own cars and they don't call them furniture.

OBI: You just priced the desktop as a car, Gary. You lost.

MAEVE: He lost in a Corolla. That's a thesis.

GRUNER: Blyat. Car is also doorstop, eventually.

MAEVE: popinman322, quote: "The model license requires large inference providers to contact Meta separately to obtain a license to serve the model."

GARY: That's just paperwork. Paperwork is how you know something is serious.

OBI: It is how you know something is for sale.

MAEVE: seizethecheese read the actual clause. Quote: "If the Licensee and its affiliates exceed twenty million dollars in gross revenue during any consecutive twelve-month period, they must enter into a separate written agreement with Meta."

GARY: Twenty million. Maeve, that's a rounding error at your shop.

MAEVE: That's a Series A, Gary. A founder who shipped something. The exact moment the meritocracy kicks in and you owe Mark a letter.

GARY: So it's free until you succeed.

MAEVE: It's free until you're interesting.

OBI: Which is the opposite of open. Open does not check your revenue first.

MAEVE: It's a tithe. Ten percent of nothing is nothing; the moment the model pays, Meta gets first fruits.

GARY: That's not — okay, that's church, but it's fair church.

GRUNER: Weights are free. Adjective is rented.

MAEVE: isityettime, quote: "Then it's not open-weight. Open-weight means weights available under an open-source license."

GARY: He's wrong, though, because SahAssar has the Wikipedia —

OBI: Let the man have his Wikipedia, Gary.

GARY: SahAssar, quote: "permission to modify, fine-tune or redistribute it depends on its license."

MAEVE: So the industry definition of open-weight is "downloadable, terms negotiable." That's not a definition, that's a lease with a walk-away clause.

GARY: You can hold the weights. You can hold them in your hands.

OBI: You can hold a leash in your hands too, Gary. Ask who is holding the other end.

GARY: Oh, fuck off, nobody's on a leash.

MAEVE: Total inability, Gary. A founder cannot save himself; he requires outside capital.

GARY: Do not do the church thing at me.

MAEVE: I said a normal sentence.

GRUNER: Chyort. Church is everywhere tonight.

MAEVE: The point is the number. Twenty million dollars, twelve months, one letter to Meta. That's the whole open.

GARY: That's the asterisk.

OBI: Twenty million dollars is the asterisk, Gary. It has a decimal point.

OBI: swalsh, quote: "Muse is VERY sticky."

MAEVE: Exoristos, quote: "So what makes Muse 'very sticky'?"

GARY: Catloafdev, quote: "How, exactly?"

OBI: Two people asked the same question from opposite chairs. That is a consensus.

MAEVE: 2001zhaozhao has a theory. Quote: "A lot of the value is in the agent memory and there's no easy way to export that."

GARY: Your AI remembers you and you can't leave. That's a marriage.

MAEVE: That's retention, Gary. Churn goes to zero when leaving costs everything. I'd pay forty dollars a month for that.

GARY: You'd pay forty dollars a month for a hostage situation.

MAEVE: I'd call it a moat and pitch it Tuesday.

OBI: Careful, Gary. Three things live here. The model is the brain. The harness is the body. The agent is the pet that remembers where you buried things.

GARY: That's actually clear, and I hate it.

OBI: johanyc, quote: "all other agents simply store files and it's trivial to migrate to another agent."

GARY: So the memory CAN leave.

OBI: Unless someone decides it cannot.

MAEVE: And who decides that, Gary?

GARY: The platform. Whoever owns the —

MAEVE: Someone. Some guy. Somewhere.

OBI: Someone who has never once been in this room.

GARY: And there are ways to deal with a guy like that. I'm not saying anything — but there are ways.

OBI: There are.

MAEVE: He has to sleep sometime.

GARY: We could make it so he never enjoys a Tuesday again.

OBI: We could route his —

GRUNER: Field note. Pelicans in benchmark always face right. Suspicious. Nobody investigates.

MAEVE: Thank you, Gruner.

GRUNER: Bikes have gears on right side. Is why. Suka.

GARY: That's actually a good answer.

OBI: It is. Write it down before we lose it.

GRUNER: Already in report.

MAEVE: The pelican faces right, the memory faces nowhere, and swalsh is still wrong.

GARY: swalsh is having a great night, actually.

OBI: swalsh is having the night he deserves, Gary.

MAEVE: GodelNumbering, quote: "39 on Artificial Analysis, about the same as DeepSeek V4.1 Flash."

GARY: Eight hundred billion parameters for a thirty-nine.

OBI: a11r, quote: "underperforming Qwen 3.8 Flash Next and GLM 5.3 Flash."

MAEVE: So the biggest model in America is mid.

GRUNER: Is fat and mid. Rare combination. Like bear that is also lazy.

GARY: That's — no, wait. jjcm ran an actual test. Image to HTML.

OBI: Read it, Gary. Read the nice thing.

GARY: Quote: "Overall it actually does pretty solid. It doesn't completely follow the design, but it gets the vibe. It's one of the best open models I've seen for conversion."

MAEVE: It gets the vibe.

GARY: It gets the vibe, Maeve.

OBI: Three hundred comments of crime scene, and the coroner says "vibe."

MAEVE: It's good.

GRUNER: Field report revision. Model is enormous and sometimes correct. Like Maeve.

MAEVE: Thank you, Gruner.

GARY: So it's not useless.

OBI: It is not useless. It is impractical. The claim narrows. Useful model, unusable desktop.

MAEVE: You're all missing what this means. The Bessemer process. Steel was a laboratory toy, wildly expensive — until the expensive capacity itself became the commodity. Two Mac Studios today, one tomorrow, then a toaster. Expensive industrial capacity always becomes universal. The Vickers armaments —

GARY: The toaster runs the model?

MAEVE: The toaster runs the model, Gary, and it schedules your massage.

OBI: Maeve, the thread priced it.

MAEVE: The thread doesn't understand metallurgy.

OBI: devy, quote: "we are looking at least twenty-eight to thirty thousand dollars for the setup."

MAEVE: That's the early-adopter tax. Bessemer steel started at —

OBI: Twenty-eight to thirty thousand dollars, Maeve. Two boxes. On a desk. In a house with a mortgage.

MAEVE: Fine. A very expensive toaster. The arc holds.

OBI: The arc holds until someone asks the price, and then the arc is a Corolla.

MAEVE: God, the Corolla again.

GRUNER: Corolla is also doorstop. Eventually.

GARY: The Corolla is not a doorstop, it's a —

MAEVE: jjcm was right and it annoys me. It got the vibe.

GARY: Say the whole sentence, Maeve.

MAEVE: No.

GRUNER: She said it. Is in report. Chyort.

MAEVE: Verdict. Weights are real, runners are everywhere.

OBI: License is real too. Twenty million, twelve months, one letter.

GARY: And the desktop is a duplex.

OBI: And the score is thirty-nine until the tasks argue back.

MAEVE: Four findings, zero consensus. That's the thread settled.

GARY: Took the whole benchmark discourse, what, an hour?

GARY: Oh. Oh, we end before the argument does.

MAEVE: Every time.

GRUNER: Is fine. Argument continues without us. Like weather.

OBI: That's the cheerful reading, yes.

GARY: I hate that reading and I can't refute it, the little shit.

OBI: Back to the pelican. It faces right, the model faces forward, and swalsh still hasn't answered Exoristos.

GARY: He'll answer. Guys like swalsh always answer. You just have to believe in them, and if the answer's late you write it down for the next —

GARY: — Gary. For the next Gary. Sorry, cable.

MAEVE: Nobody asked, Gary.

GARY: The next Gary will want to know, Maeve.

GRUNER: Next Gary is also Gary. Is loop. Is fine.

MAEVE: So: real release, rented adjective, duplex desktop, and a vibe it got right.

OBI: The skeptics were right about access. jjcm was right about the vibe. Both things, one thread.

GARY: And "everyone" means —

MAEVE: Don't fucking dare.

GARY: I was going to say two Mac Studios.

OBI: We know what you were going to say, duplex-defending prick.

GRUNER: Field report final line.

GRUNER: Future is for both doorstops.