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

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.

> 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.

That site's target market is what we know as "Apple fanboys". I'm not one to consider 9to5 serious journalism (nor even worthy to post in HN), but even those publications that I consider serious are businesses, too, and need to pander to their markets in order to make money.

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.

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

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.

>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.

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.

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 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.

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).

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.

They do have the only VR set that is user friendly enough and has enough ecosystem and apps for mass market. When they put out a future generation with lower prices, they'd get as much as possible.

Let's not forget that the iPod was a Mac only product, when the Mac just had like 3% of the market, with no Windows support and limited sales in the first versions. Or that the iPhone took a few years to dominate the market. Blackberry, Nokia and Microsoft even thought they had a chance for 3-4 years.

I wouldn't be surprised if their VR sales are already above all the other players (perhaps even combined).