The “Innovation” We All Saw Coming
Apple, the company that once pretended AI wasn’t a thing, has suddenly discovered generative art. Meet STARFlow—their “breakthrough” AI image generator that’s supposedly on par with DALL-E and Midjourney. How groundbreaking. How unexpected. How… 2018. The twist? It’s not just another diffusion model. Instead, Apple’s researchers slapped together normalizing flows and autoregressive transformers—because why settle for one overcomplicated math problem when you can have two?
The Real Question: Will It Ship?
Apple’s AI track record is… spotty. Siri still can’t set a timer without existential dread, and their “on-device AI” often feels like a euphemism for “we don’t trust the cloud.” But hey, at least they’re trying now. The paper (co-authored with academics, because Apple still needs training wheels) claims competitive performance—which, in corporate speak, means “not worse than the free version of Midjourney.” Will it actually make it into Photos, iMessage, or (god forbid) Final Cut Pro? Or will it languish in Research Hell like every other cool-but-never-shipped Apple project?
Why This Matters (If It Does)
If Apple actually integrates STARFlow into iOS, it could mean on-device, privacy-first AI art—a rare win in an era where every doodle gets uploaded to some startup’s dying server farm. But let’s be real: they’ll probably just use it to make Memoji even creepier. For now? Call me when it’s not just another research paper. 🍏