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Apple Research unearthed forgotten AI technique and using it to generate images

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Re: Apple Research unearthed forgotten AI technique and using it to generate images

#21

Post by 7speter »

echelon wrote: post #4
rfv6723 wrote: post #3

Apple AI team keeps going against the bitter lesson and focusing on small on-device models. Let's see how this would turn out in longterm.

Edge compute would be clutch, but Apple feels a decade too early.

Maybe for a big llm, but if they add some gpu cores and added a magnitude or 2 more unified memory to their i devices, or shoehorned m socs into high tier iDevices (especially as their lithography process advances), image generation becomes more viable, no? Also, I thought I read somewhere that apple wanted to infer simpler queries locally and switch to datacenter inference when the request was more complicated.

If they approach things this way, and transistor progress continues linearly (relative to the last few years) maybe they can make their first devices that can meet these goals in… 2-3 years?

Re: Apple Research unearthed forgotten AI technique and using it to generate images

#22

Post by bitpush »

danhau wrote: post #16
bitpush wrote: post #14

I find it fascinating that Apple-centric media sites are stretching so much to position the company in the AI race. The title is meant to say that Apple found something unique that other people missed, when the simplest explanation is they started working on this a while back (2021 paper, afterall) and just released it. A more accurate headline would be - Apple starting to create images using 4 year old techniques.

This „4 year old technique“ apparently could give Apple an edge for on-device workloads. > short: both Apple and OpenAI are moving beyond diffusion, but while OpenAI is building for its data centers, Apple is clearly building for our pockets.

The same edge Apple had summarizing notifications so poorly that they had to turn it off?

https://arstechnica.com/apple/2024/11/apple-intelligence-not...

Re: Apple Research unearthed forgotten AI technique and using it to generate images

#23

Post by janalsncm »

bitpush wrote: post #22
danhau wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This „4 year old technique“ apparently could give Apple an edge for on-device workloads. > short: both Apple and OpenAI are moving beyond diffusion, but while OpenAI is building for its data centers, Apple is clearly building for our pockets.

The same edge Apple had summarizing notifications so poorly that they had to turn it off? https://arstechnica.com/apple/2024/11/apple-intelligence-not...

That was a bad and unnecessary feature but the privacy benefits of running a model on device rather than in the cloud are undeniable.

Re: Apple Research unearthed forgotten AI technique and using it to generate images

#24

Post by janalsncm »

nextaccountic wrote: post #5

This subject is fascinating and the article is informative, but I wish that HN had a button like "flag", but specific for articles that seems written by AI (well at least the section "How STARFlow compares with OpenAI’s 4o image generator" sounds like it)

I had the opposite reaction, it definitely reads like a tech journalist who doesn’t have a great understanding of the tech. AI would’ve written a less clunky (and possibly incorrect) explanation.

Re: Apple Research unearthed forgotten AI technique and using it to generate images

#25

Post by janalsncm »

rfv6723 wrote: post #3

Apple AI team keeps going against the bitter lesson and focusing on small on-device models. Let's see how this would turn out in longterm.

The bitter-er lesson is that distillation from bigger models works pretty damn well. It’s great news for the GPU poor, not great for the guys training the models we distill from.

Re: Apple Research unearthed forgotten AI technique and using it to generate images

#26

Post by janalsncm »

furyofantares wrote: post #11
peepeepoopoo137 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""The bitter lesson""" is how you get the current swath of massively unprofitable AI companies that are competing with each other over who can lose money faster.

I can't tell if you're perpetuating the myth that these companies are losing money on their paid offerings, or just overestimating how much money they lose on their free offerings.

If it costs you a billion dollars to train a GPT5 and I can distill your model for a million dollars and get 90% of the performance, that’s a terrible deal for you. Or more realistically, whoever you borrowed from.

Re: Apple Research unearthed forgotten AI technique and using it to generate images

#27

Post by darkstar_16 »

bitpush wrote: post #14

I find it fascinating that Apple-centric media sites are stretching so much to position the company in the AI race. The title is meant to say that Apple found something unique that other people missed, when the simplest explanation is they started working on this a while back (2021 paper, afterall) and just released it. A more accurate headline would be - Apple starting to create images using 4 year old techniques.

I think its just Apple PR pushing these out now to get Apple's name out in the AI era.

Re: Apple Research unearthed forgotten AI technique and using it to generate images

#28

Post by yorwba »

rfv6723 wrote: post #3

Apple AI team keeps going against the bitter lesson and focusing on small on-device models. Let's see how this would turn out in longterm.

They took a simple technique (normalizing flows), instantiated its basic building blocks with the most general neural network architecture known to work well (transformer blocks), and trained models of different sizes on various datasets to see whether it scales. Looks very bitter-lesson-pilled to me.

That they didn't scale beyond AFHQ (high-quality animal faces: cats, dogs and big cats) at 256×256 is probably not due to an explicit preference for small models at the expense of output resolution, but because this is basic research to test the viability of the approach. If this ever makes it into a product, it'll be a much bigger model trained on more data.

EDIT: I missed the second paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06276 where they scale up to 1024×1024 with a 3.8-billion-parameter model. It seems to do about as well as diffusion models of similar size.

Re: Apple Research unearthed forgotten AI technique and using it to generate images

#29

Post by [deleted] »

bitpush wrote: post #14

I find it fascinating that Apple-centric media sites are stretching so much to position the company in the AI race. The title is meant to say that Apple found something unique that other people missed, when the simplest explanation is they started working on this a while back (2021 paper, afterall) and just released it. A more accurate headline would be - Apple starting to create images using 4 year old techniques.

[deleted]

Re: Apple Research unearthed forgotten AI technique and using it to generate images

#30

Post by amelius »

politelemon wrote: post #18
bitpush wrote: post #14

I find it fascinating that Apple-centric media sites are stretching so much to position the company in the AI race. The title is meant to say that Apple found something unique that other people missed, when the simplest explanation is they started working on this a while back (2021 paper, afterall) and just released it. A more accurate headline would be - Apple starting to create images using 4 year old techniques.

> I find it fascinating that Apple-centric media sites are stretching so much to position the company in the AI race. A glance through the comments also shows HNers doing their best too. The mind still boggles as to why this site is so willing to perform mental gymnastics for a corporate.

We seriously need an AI to dampen the reality distorion field and bring back common sense. Maybe it can be something that people install in their browsers.
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