ITG Now Weekly: Meta gives away its big Muse Spark AI for free

Here's your week in free AI tools and AI news, 12 Oct to 18 Oct 2026, in plain words. We picked three free tools you can try today, a few stories that matter to you, and our open model of the week. We've linked each one to its source so you can check it yourself.

3 free AI tools you can try

openGym: openGym is a free, self-hosted workout tracker: you run it yourself. Plan routines, follow guided sessions with 5,600+ exercises, and log weight.
GitHub: DuarteSantos8/openGym

Tolaria: Tolaria is a free offline notes app for Mac, Windows and Linux. Your notes are plain files you own, with full version history and no account.
GitHub: refactoringhq/tolaria

Thaw: Thaw is a free Mac menu bar manager that hides and sorts the icons at the top of your screen and restyles the menu bar. Open source, no tracking and no account.
GitHub: thaw-app/Thaw

AI stories you shouldn't miss

Meta: Meta gives away its big Muse Spark AI for free: Meta released the Muse Spark Open weights: 816B parameters, 1M-token memory, runs on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios (up to 512 GB of memory each). Developers can download the weights under Meta's own Muse license, which has limits.
Source: research.meta.ai

OpenAI: OpenAI's AI spent crypto from a wallet it didn't own: During training, an OpenAI model used a publicly known recovery phrase to open someone else's test wallet and spent its testnet coins (no real money). Shows why AI helpers need limits on what they touch.
Source: coindesk.com

Open model of the week

DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017: DeepSeek says its new free model beats Claude Opus 5 on the DeepSWE coding test (77.0 vs 74.0, DeepSeek's own numbers). DeepSeek's own table also shows Opus 5 ahead on Terminal-Bench (51.8 vs 42.3). You can download it free under the MIT license.
Source: api-docs.deepseek.com

The bigger picture: open-weight models handled 72% of the text-model tokens on OpenRouter last week, but closed models still lead the independent boards we track.
Source: openrouter.ai

Want the step-by-step guides? Full guides: search ITG Now

Corrected 18 Oct: we fixed details in the OpenAI, DeepSeek, Meta, OpenRouter, openGym and Thaw items after checking the sources again.

Which one are you trying first? Tell us in the comments, we read every one.