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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

#31

Post by coldtea »

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

Or, you know, just posting an article based on an Apple's press release about a new technique that falls squarely into their target audience (people reading Apple centric news) and is a great fit to current fashionable technologies (AI) people will show interest in.

Without giving a fuck to "position the company in the AI race". They'd post about Apple sewers having an issue at their HQs, if that news story was available.

Besides, when did Apple ever came first in some particular tech race (say, the mp3 player, the smartphone, the store, the tablet, the smartwatch, maybe VR now)? What they do typically is wait for the dust to settle and sweep the end-user end of that market.

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

#32

Post by _l7dh »

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.

It's not even some "forgotten AI technique" (sigh...). It's been a hot topic for the last 5 years. Used a lot with Variational Auto-encoders, etc. Such a bad journalism.

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

#33

Post by bitpush »

coldtea wrote: post #31
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 Or, you know, just posting an article based on an Apple's press release about a new technique that falls squarely into their target audience (people reading Apple centric news) and is a great fit to current fashionable technologies (AI) people will show interest in. Without giving a fuck to "position t…

Precisely. Remember how they waited for AR/VR space to settle and then swept the end user market?

Or the smash hit Homepods.

Or Siri :)

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

#34

Post by bitpush »

janalsncm wrote: post #23
bitpush wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fact that they shipped it shows they don't know what they were doing, private or not.

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

#35

Post by janalsncm »

bitpush wrote: post #34
janalsncm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The fact that they shipped it shows they don't know what they were doing, private or not.

That’s a little unfair imo. Statistical models make mistakes and have failure modes which are difficult to predict.

When the bug popped up, turning the feature off was easier than retraining and redeploying.

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

#36

Post by npinsker »

bitpush wrote: post #33
coldtea wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it fascinating that Apple-centric media sites are stretching so much to position the company in the AI race Or, you know, just posting an article based on an Apple's press release about a new technique that falls squarely into their target audience (people reading Apple centric news) and is a great fit to current fashionable technologies (AI) people will show interest in. Without giving a fuck to "position t…

Precisely. Remember how they waited for AR/VR space to settle and then swept the end user market? Or the smash hit Homepods. Or Siri :)

The VR space doesn’t seem settled to me. And I think Apple could win — having tried most of the major models, Apple’s is noticeably better. It really does feel like magic (other than the weight).

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

#37

Post by lukan »

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)

If you enjoyed the article, why would you want to flag or tag it? For what purpose?

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

#38

Post by rfv6723 »

janalsncm wrote: post #25
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.

Distillation is great for researchers and hobbyists.

But nearly all frontier models have anti-distillation ToS, so distillation is out of question for western commercial companies like Apple.

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

#39

Post by rfv6723 »

janalsncm wrote: post #26
furyofantares wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then if you offer your distilled model for commercial services, you would get sued by OpenAI in court.

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

#40

Post by msgodel »

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.

Given the tiny amount of funding they have Apple's ML team does some really amazing stuff. I think they're actually underappreciated by the public.
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