Users can now try out Meta’s new AI-powered promptable ‚Segment Anything Model‘ that’s based on a 1-billion-strong mask dataset.
Meta has some big AI ambitions, even as it seems like it’s long been playing catch up to OpenAI, Microsoft, and even Google. To make a bit of a splash, on Wednesday the company showed off its new AI-based Segment Anything Model that’s surprisingly capable of identifying and separating specific objects in images and video. Here’s the kicker, Meta is releasing it to anybody by making its new software open source.
There’s quite a few good apps for erasing unwanted objects from images, and all of them already employ AI models to find and replace objects in photos. In my own tests of the Segment Anything demo, Meta has gone a step further with its own offering. The demo system offers a kind of Photoshop’s ‘Magic Wand’ tool on steroids. I tried it out using a few crowded images, such as a photo of Lego’s massive Rivendell set. Not only did it collectively guess that I was trying to select specific minifigs out of the background, but when it picked up a few wayward pixels I was quickly able to tell it to delete anything that wasn’t a Lord of the Rings character with just a single click.
After computing a new image, the system does a solid job highlighting different objects in a photo. In an image of myself sitting in a extremely confining massage chair, it was able to identify both me, the chair, and even my beard individually. Of course, Meta isn’t alone creating machine learning algorithms to identify aspects of images.
