A photo of an MGIE demo on Hugging Face. Maria Diaz/ZDNET
Apple just introduced an open-source AI model that executes text-based image editing commands. This model, called MLLM-Guided Image Editing (MGIE), was developed in collaboration with the University of California at Santa Barbara.
MGIE can perform various image editing tasks, such as cropping, resizing and rotating, as well as brightness, color balance and contrast adjustments, all by following users’ textual instructions. The ins and outs of MGIE’s capabilities and performance were outlined in a document released this week.
The paper explains how MGIE significantly improves image editing performance across different metrics and maintains quite competitive inference efficiency. The technology has been used to perform Photoshop-like edits and photo optimization.
Will Apple catch up with Meta, Google or Microsoft?
The article explains that MGIE demonstrated superiority over existing techniques, suggesting a promising direction for future image editing tools that would be more accessible and intuitive to use. MGIE is not publicly available officially, but you can access it via GitHub for technical exploration or try its web demo on Hugging Face.
Screenshot from another MGIE demo on Hugging Face. Screenshot: Maria Diaz/ZDNET
MGIE’s development could catch up with what Microsoft, Google and Meta have done over the past two years. Although these other tech giants have brought sophisticated AI-powered chatbots and even image generators to market, Apple’s absence from the generative AI market is intriguing.
The company seems to want to catch up: In 2023 alone, Apple has acquired no less than 32 startups specializing in AI, much more than the 21 acquisitions of Google, the 18 of Meta and the 17 of Microsoft. Apple is keeping these acquisitions and advances in generative AI under wraps, allowing us only to speculate on when the company will make them public and in which devices and platforms they will be included.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said in 2021 that the company acquired a startup every three to four weeks, according to the BBC, but it apparently slowed its pace in 2022 and acquired only two companies that year.
Source: “ZDNet.com”