A photograph of an MGIE demo on Hugging Face. Maria Diaz/ZDNET
Apple simply launched an open-source AI mannequin that executes text-based picture modifying instructions. The mannequin, named MLLM-Guided Picture Enhancing (MGIE) was developed in collaboration with the College of California, Santa Barbara.
MGIE can carry out numerous picture modifying duties, like cropping, resizing, and rotating; in addition to changes to brightness, coloration stability, and distinction — all by following textual content prompts from customers. The ins and outs of MGIE’s capabilities and efficiency have been outlined in a conference paper revealed this week.
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The report discusses how MGIE reveals important enhancements in picture modifying efficiency throughout totally different metrics and maintains aggressive inference effectivity. The expertise was used to carry out Photoshop-style modifications, picture optimization, and native modifying.
The paper defined MGIE demonstrated superiority over present methods, suggesting a promising path for future picture modifying instruments that may be extra accessible and intuitive to make use of. MGIE is not extensively out there to the general public as an official growth from Apple, however customers can entry it by GitHub for technical exploration or attempt its net demo on Hugging Face.
A screenshot of one other MGIE demo on Hugging Face. Screenshot: Maria Diaz/ZDNET
The event of MGIE might be an effort to catch as much as what Microsoft, Google, and Meta have finished up to now two years. Although these different tech giants have launched refined AI-powered chatbots and even some image generators, Apple’s absence within the generative AI market has been intriguing.
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The corporate seems to be engaged on catching up: In 2023 alone, Apple acquired as many as 32 AI startups, many greater than Google’s 21 acquisitions, Meta’s 18, and Microsoft’s 17. Apple retains these acquisitions and generative AI developments beneath wraps, leaving us to solely have the ability to speculate as to when the corporate will launch them publicly and wherein units and platforms they are going to be included.
Apple is understood for buying smaller corporations to take over their expertise and expertise, and Tim Cook dinner, Apple CEO, mentioned in 2021 that the corporate acquires a startup each three to 4 weeks, in keeping with the BBC, however it reportedly slowed its tempo in 2022 and solely acquired two corporations that 12 months.