The code is licensed [1] under the "Apple MIT" license [2], which is considered open-source. The weights are under a difference license. This is mentioned at the bottom of the README.
Meta’s campaign to corrupt the meaning of Open Source was unfortunately very successful and now most people associate releasing the weights with open source.
It's gratifying. I used to tilt at windmills on HN about this and people would be telling me with absolute condescension how the ship had sailed regarding the definition of Open Source, relegating my own life's work to anachronism.
People slowly waking up to how daft and hypecycle misusing a term was all along has been amazing.
The wildest one is how people say just because you produce open source software you should be happy that multibillion dollar corporations are leeching value from your work while not giving anything back but are in fact making your life harder. That’s the biggest piss on my back and tell me it’s raining bullshit I ever heard and makes me not want to open source a damn thing without feeling like a fool.
I think exactly like this. If I created a tool and it were used for free by billion dollar corporations to enrich themselves, I would consider it a personal loss.
so it wasn't a new campaign, it is at best re-appropriating the term open source in the software community in a way communities outside of software have always been using it, in a way that predates software at all, exists in parallel to the software community, and continues to exist now
In 30 years in tech, I have never once heard anyone use the term "Open Source" to refer to anything other than FOSS.
I have also never once heard anyone use the term FOSS outside of the written form.
So the opposite of what you said, I guess.
You also seem to be saying that the term "open source" existed before software did, so I feel compelled to ask: what do you think "source" stands for in "open source"?
The OSI definition and "open source purity" is designed by big tech to erode any value layer open source companies could use to threaten them.
New movements like "fair source", which is a form of source available + free use + expiring copyright is the ideal license. It's effectively unlimited use for customers and users, but has a baked in "non-compete" preventing low effort third parties from coming in and eating the market established by the authors.
We need to kill open source purity. Especially if we want to erode the hyperscalers that aren't even giving away the magic parts or valuable parts of their kingdoms.
Open source purity is a socialist dream while we're still living under the Empire. And it prevents the formation of a salient that can punch through.
I don't see any reason why you would want fair source authors to go "OSI" open other than taking their revenue stream as your own.
And by doing so you make the business unsustainable and impossible to scale into something formidable that could chip away at entirely closed hyperscalers.
There's no reason to believe that weights are copyrightable. The only reason to pay attention to this "license" is because it's enforced by Apple, in that sense they can write whatever they want in it, "this model requires giving ownership of your first born son to Apple", etc. The content is irrelevant.
> The only reason to pay attention to this "license" is because it's enforced by Apple
Yes, but the most important reason to pay attention to ANY license for most people is because it is a signal for under what conditions the licensor is likely to sue you (especially in the US, which does not have a general “loser pays” rule for lawsuits), not because of the actual legality, because a lawsuit is a cost most people don’t want to bear while it is ongoing or cover the unrecoverable costs of once it is done, irrespective of winning and losing, and, on the other hand, few people care about being technically legal with their use of copyright protected material if there is no perceived risk of enforcement.
But even if that wasn’t true, and being sued was of no financial or other costs until the case is finally resolved, and only then if you lose, I wouldn't bet much, in the US, in the court system ultimately applying precedent in the most obvious way instead of twisting things in a way which serves the interest of the particular powerful corporate interests involved here.
That is simply not true. The details might vary by jurisdiction and the protection might not be under the exact name of “copyright” but there most certainly are comparable legal protections for the contents of databases (“tables of numbers”). See for example: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/running-business/intel...
> This. Tables of numbers are explicitly not subject to copyright; that’s a copyright 101 fact.
Ok, but there's clearly more nuance there. Otherwise I could claim that any mp3 file I wanted to distribute is just a table of 8-bit integers and therefore not subject to copyright.
I wanted to reply in this direction. Ultimately, literally everything and anything in SW is a sequence of numbers, that anybody could easily put in some kind of table form.
I don’t know where the catch is, but that sentence can not be true in general.
Disney would like you have a word with you. Why would their pile of numbers that represent Avatar3.m4a be any more subject to copyright than Apple_2D_3D.bin. Or GPT52.mlx or Opus45.gguf?
Not sure I've met one of those people in... a decade or so? Loving apple products has been an uphill road for a long time (and increasingly more so post-Jobs)
Pretty sure this is a joke, but the actual license is written by lawyers who know what they are doing:
> “Research Purposes” means non-commercial scientific research and
academic development activities, such as experimentation, analysis, testing
conducted by You with the sole intent to advance scientific knowledge and
research. “Research Purposes” does not include any commercial exploitation,
product development or use in any commercial product or service.
It kind of is, though. You use some input material to produce the weights via some process, even if the weights might not become exactly the same every time you reproduce the process; the production of the weights isn't done by working with the weight, but with the training material and the process to convert them into weights. The analogy to source code and the resulting binaries there.
If all these AI models were trained on copyrighted materials for which the trainers had no right to, is it wrong to steal their models and use them however we want? Morally I'd say absolutely not, but I"m sure these AI bros would vigorously defend their own IP, even if it was built on stolen IP created by humans.
> If all these AI models were trained on copyrighted materials for which the trainers had no right to, is it wrong to steal their models and use them however we want?
If (which the courts seem to be pretty consistently finding) training models on copyright-protected works generally is fair use, though using models to produce works which would violate copyright if made by other means with reference to the source material is still a copyright violation, then training has no bearing on the legality of copying the models. (Even if it wasn't, then copying and using the models at all would violate the copyright of the original owners of the training material again and be illegal irrespective of the “license” offered by the model trainer.)
Morally? Well, pretty much the same dichotomy applies; if training the model isn't a violation of the source material's creators' rights, then the fact it was trained without permission has no bearing on the morality of using the model without the trainers permission, if it is a violation of the source material's creators' rights, then so is using the model irrespective of the trainer's “license”, as the trainer has no right to permit further use of the material they had no right to create.
The idea that the model is an intrusion on the rights of the creators of the materials used in training and that this makes use of the model more rather than less permissibly, legally or morally, takes some bizarre mental gymnastics.
Your daily reminder that neural network weights aren't creative work and as such aren't subject to copyright protection in the first place. The “license” is purely cosmetic (or rather, it's being put there by the ML scientists who want to share their work and have to deal with the corporate reluctance to do so).
Making 3D worlds like that is impressive. I used to build some VR worlds (hobby) and content generation is a huge time sink. I wonder if this tech will become accessible for that soon.
This is all going to become super accessible to everyone. And it'll become fast and eventually free.
Everyone will be able to flex their muscles as a creative. Everyone will be able to become an artist (expressing themselves though their unique lens) without putting points into a mechanical skill that is dimensionally orthogonal to idea expression and communication.
This is the "bicycle of the mind" that Steve Jobs talked about 40 some years ago. We've all had keyboards with which to express ourselves and communicate, but soon everyone will be able to visually articulate themselves and their thoughts. It's going to be so uplifting for society.
In fifty years we'll even be able to render our direct thoughts and mold them like clay. Share them directly with one another. Co-think.
I don’t agree with this idea that for a model to be open source you have to be able to make a profit off of it. Plenty of open source code licenses doesn’t require that constraint
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, [..]
While most people follow the OSD criteria, there is nothing that says open source software must follow it. Nor is the OSD the only set of criteria or the only definition.
Open source means the source is available. Anything else is just political.
> Open source means the source is available. Anything else is just political.
Where was that defined so? And most of all, given the domain of information technology, who understand open source to cover cases where the source is available ie. only for reviewing?
The purpose of words and terms is so that people can exchange ideas effectively and precisely, without needing to explain the terms every time from the grounds up. Having different groups having divergent definitions on the same words is counterproductive towards that goal. In my view, labeling a release "open source" with very big limitations on how the source is used is just not about marketing, it's miscommunication.
If "open source" and "source available" (and "open weights") mean the same thing, the how come people have come up with the two terms to begin with? The difference is recognized in official contexts as well, i.e. https://web.archive.org/web/20180724032116/https://dodcio.de... (search for "source available"; unfortunately linking directly doesn't seem to work with archive.org pages).
It doesn't seem there is any benefit in using less precise terms when better-defined ones are available.
That's source-available: you get to see the code and learn from it, but if you're not allowed to use it however you want (with as only common restrictions that you must then credit the creator(s) and also allow others the same freedom on derivative works) then it's not the traditional definition of open source
I feel like being in a time loop. Every time a big company releases a model, we debate the definition of open source instead of asking what actually matters. Apple clearly wants the upside of academic credibility without giving away commercial optionality, which isn't unsurprising.
Additionally, we might need better categories. With software, flow is clear (source, build and binary) but with AI/ML, the actual source is an unshippable mix of data, infra and time, and weights can be both product and artifacts.
Just curious for those who are informed on this matter... are most research done by foreign born people? What happened to the big STEM push?
I don't mean to stir up political debate... just curious what the reality is, especially given the decline in foreign students coming over in recent year.
I'm not trying to be too pc, but you can't really tell based on someone's name where they were born.
That said, the US only has some 5% of the worlds population (albeit probably a larger proportion of the literate population), so you'd only expect some fraction of the world's researchers to be US born. Not to mention that US born is an even smaller fraction of births (2.5-3%, by Google), so you'd expect an even smaller fraction of US born researchers. So even if we assume that we're on par with peer countries, you'd only expect US born researchers to be a fraction of the overall research population. We'd have to be vastly better at educating people to do otherwise, which is a longshot.
Obviously this makes turning away international students incredibly stupid, but what are we to do against stupidity?
Apple is also a global company and has offices and research labs world wide. At least a couple of the authors seem to work for Apple but at their German lab.
FWIW, many of the researchers on the paper did not study in the U.S. but immigrated after their PhD studies.
I checked the first, middle, and last author: Lars Mescheder got his PhD in Germany, Bruno Lecouat got his PhD in France, Vladlen Koltun got his PhD in Israel.
(Edit: or maybe they did not actually immigrate but work remote and/or in Europe)
Why don't we produce enough experts in the US to saturate our tech companies?
It's because American education culture is trash. American parents are fine with their kids getting Bs and Cs. Mediocrity is rewarded and excellence is discouraged in our schools, both socially and institutionally.
Meanwhile you have hundreds of millions of foreign born children pulling out all the stops to do the best they possibly can at school precisely so they can get into the US and work at one of our top companies.
It was never even a competition. Immigrants and children of theirs will continue to outperform because it is literally baked into their culture - and it is baked out of ours.
The output is not automatically metrically scaled (though you can use postprocessing to fix this, it's not part of this model). And you can't really move around much without getting glitches, because it only inferences in one axis. It's also hard capped at 768 pixels + 2 layers.
Besides depth/splatting models have been around for quite a while before this. The main thing this model innovates on is inference speed, but VR porn isn't a use case that really benefits from faster image/video processing, especially since it's still not realtime.
This year has seen a lot of innovation in this space, but it's coming from other image editing and video models.
You could use pixi instead, as a much nicer/saner alternative to conda: https://pixi.sh
Though in this particular case, you don't even need conda. You just need python 3.13 and a virtual environment. If you have uv installed, then it's even easier:
git clone https://github.com/apple/ml-sharp.git
cd ml-sharp
uv sync
uv run sharp
Perhaps they lived outside of the kingdom, with an evil Stepmother who moved very slow, struggled with complex dependency collisions, and took up a bunch of unnecessary space? Such an experience could leave one very traumatized towards Conda, even though their real problems are the unresolved issues with their stepmother…
I don’t know when Apple turned evil but hard for me to support them further after nearly four decades. Everything they do now is directly opposite of what they stood for in the past.
Apple trying to “open-source” something is pretty relevant. I don’t trust them at all. People constantly go at Microsoft but what Apple has done in the last 15 years is far worse. Their monopolies have had far worse impact than whatever Microsoft ever did with Windows and IE.
I decidedly disagree with about everything you said regarding Microsoft. The Microsoft monopoly is the most life sucking cancer the corporate world has ever experienced. Compared to that the entire existence of Apple is merely a footnote. Don't mistake your stupid phone for the world.
I sunk my twenties involving the sh*tshow that was Microsoft antitrust. No, Microsoft shipping IE by default is pretty benign compared to what Apple has been doing for far longer than whatever Microsoft ever did. In fact, one can make an argument that Windows was really an open platform for developers based on Today’s standards.
I'm not talking about laughable little stunts like IE. I'm talking about the ongoing cancer that is eating up billions from little companies all the way to big corporations. All of that is ongoing, and they squeeze their prey for everything they have. They are the most disgusting and damaging disease you can imagine.
Once you start using even a small fraction of their tech it instantly metastasises throughout the entire organisation because of lock in and "open standards" that weirdly only work with their own tech. If the MS tech creates a problem the solution is to pour more MS tech onto the festering wound.
You apparently have been so insulated from how actual companies have to deal with tech that you think your little forays using computers are what everything should be measured by. All you have is a developer and hobbyist point of view.
Swift language is open source but the entire ecosystem is as closed as they get. The fact that no one is building anything outside of the ecosystem says everything about Swift and Apple’s intent. The fact that they still won’t support Linux on M chips also says they don’t care.
I’ve been using some time off to explore the space and related projects StereoCrafter and GeometryCrafter are fascinating. Applying this to video adds a temporal consistency angle that makes it way harder and compute intensive, but I’ve “spatialized” some old home videos from the Korean War and it works surprisingly well.
Weird how “hugging face” is a heartwarming little smiley face, while “face hugger” is a terrifying alien xenomorph. Seems like there’s an analogy to be made there…
It seems like it, although the shipped feature doesn’t allow for as much freedom of movement as the demos linked here (which makes sense as a product decision because I assume the farther you stretch it the more likely it is to do something that breaks the illusion)
The “scenes” from that feature are especially good for use as lock screen backgrounds
What would your definition of "instantly" be? I would argue that, compared to taking minutes or hours, taking less than a second is fast enough to be considered "instant" in the colloquial definition. I'll concede that it's not "instant" in the literal definition, but nothing is (because of the principle of locality).
> (...) Now, if I tell someone: "You should come to dinner more punctually; you know it begins at one o'clock exactly"—is there really no question of exactness here? because it is possible to say: "Think of the determination of time in the laboratory or the observatory; there you see what 'exactness' means"? "Inexact" is really a reproach, and "exact" is praise. (...)
Apple is not a serious company if they can't even spin up a simple frontend for their AI innovations. I should not have to install anything to test this.
Literally what this model does- create seemingly 3d scenes from 2d images, in the iOS photos app. It works even better when you take a real spatial image, which uses dual lenses.
Ah great. Easier for real estate agents to show slow panning around a room, with lame music.
I guess there are other uses?? But this is just more abstracted reality. It will be innacurate just as summaried text is, and future peoples will again have no idea as to reality.
For panning you don't need a 3D view/reconstruction. This also allows translational camera movements, but only for nearby views. Maybe I am overly pedantic here, but for HN I guess thats appropriate :D
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apple/ml-sharp/refs/heads/...
"Exclusively for research purposes" so not actually open source.
The readme doesn't claim its open source either from what I can tell. Seems to be just a misguided title by the person who submitted it to HN
The only reference seems to be in the acknowledgement, saying that this builds ontop of open source software
The code is licensed [1] under the "Apple MIT" license [2], which is considered open-source. The weights are under a difference license. This is mentioned at the bottom of the README.
[1] https://github.com/apple/ml-sharp/blob/main/LICENSE
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/Apple_MIT_License
Link to the actual project license, since it hasn't been referenced yet:
https://github.com/apple/ml-sharp/blob/main/LICENSE
Between this and the model's license, it seems like one is stuck with using this for personal use?
Meta’s campaign to corrupt the meaning of Open Source was unfortunately very successful and now most people associate releasing the weights with open source.
Releasing weights is fine but you also need to be allowed to... Use the model :P
You’re perfectly free to use it for private use, model output have been deemed public domain
Or you're free to use the output for commercial use if you can get someone else to use the tool to make the (uncopyrighted) output you want.
Isn't that what groq did basically?
Though I'm sure they will shut their shop asap now that Nvidia basically bought them.
Nvidia didn’t buy Groq.
They did (unless you're one of the drafters of the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, in which case, weirdly, they didn't)
"basically"
It's deliciously ironic how a campaign to dilute the meaning of free software ended up getting diluted itself.
It's gratifying. I used to tilt at windmills on HN about this and people would be telling me with absolute condescension how the ship had sailed regarding the definition of Open Source, relegating my own life's work to anachronism.
People slowly waking up to how daft and hypecycle misusing a term was all along has been amazing.
We must all choose which hill to die on, and I am glad to have met someone else on that same hill, comrade.
https://www.downloadableisnotopensource.org/
The wildest one is how people say just because you produce open source software you should be happy that multibillion dollar corporations are leeching value from your work while not giving anything back but are in fact making your life harder. That’s the biggest piss on my back and tell me it’s raining bullshit I ever heard and makes me not want to open source a damn thing without feeling like a fool.
I think exactly like this. If I created a tool and it were used for free by billion dollar corporations to enrich themselves, I would consider it a personal loss.
FOSS = free and open-source software
Open Source =/= free or software, just readable
so it wasn't a new campaign, it is at best re-appropriating the term open source in the software community in a way communities outside of software have always been using it, in a way that predates software at all, exists in parallel to the software community, and continues to exist now
In 30 years in tech, I have never once heard anyone use the term "Open Source" to refer to anything other than FOSS.
I have also never once heard anyone use the term FOSS outside of the written form.
So the opposite of what you said, I guess.
You also seem to be saying that the term "open source" existed before software did, so I feel compelled to ask: what do you think "source" stands for in "open source"?
"Source" can mean any source of information. The term "open source intelligence", referring to public records, goes back to the 60s.
The OSI definition and "open source purity" is designed by big tech to erode any value layer open source companies could use to threaten them.
New movements like "fair source", which is a form of source available + free use + expiring copyright is the ideal license. It's effectively unlimited use for customers and users, but has a baked in "non-compete" preventing low effort third parties from coming in and eating the market established by the authors.
We need to kill open source purity. Especially if we want to erode the hyperscalers that aren't even giving away the magic parts or valuable parts of their kingdoms.
Open source purity is a socialist dream while we're still living under the Empire. And it prevents the formation of a salient that can punch through.
I don't see any reason why you would want fair source authors to go "OSI" open other than taking their revenue stream as your own.
And by doing so you make the business unsustainable and impossible to scale into something formidable that could chip away at entirely closed hyperscalers.
Thank you! Shame all these big corps that do this forever. Meta #1, Apple # 2, psuedo fake journalists # 3
And the training data. A truly open source model also includes the training data.
There's no reason to believe that weights are copyrightable. The only reason to pay attention to this "license" is because it's enforced by Apple, in that sense they can write whatever they want in it, "this model requires giving ownership of your first born son to Apple", etc. The content is irrelevant.
> The only reason to pay attention to this "license" is because it's enforced by Apple
Yes, but the most important reason to pay attention to ANY license for most people is because it is a signal for under what conditions the licensor is likely to sue you (especially in the US, which does not have a general “loser pays” rule for lawsuits), not because of the actual legality, because a lawsuit is a cost most people don’t want to bear while it is ongoing or cover the unrecoverable costs of once it is done, irrespective of winning and losing, and, on the other hand, few people care about being technically legal with their use of copyright protected material if there is no perceived risk of enforcement.
But even if that wasn’t true, and being sued was of no financial or other costs until the case is finally resolved, and only then if you lose, I wouldn't bet much, in the US, in the court system ultimately applying precedent in the most obvious way instead of twisting things in a way which serves the interest of the particular powerful corporate interests involved here.
This. Tables of numbers are explicitly not subject to copyright; that’s a copyright 101 fact.
Any of the code that wraps the model or makes it useful is subject to copyright. But the weights themselves are as unrestricted as it gets.
That is simply not true. The details might vary by jurisdiction and the protection might not be under the exact name of “copyright” but there most certainly are comparable legal protections for the contents of databases (“tables of numbers”). See for example: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/running-business/intel...
> This. Tables of numbers are explicitly not subject to copyright; that’s a copyright 101 fact.
Ok, but there's clearly more nuance there. Otherwise I could claim that any mp3 file I wanted to distribute is just a table of 8-bit integers and therefore not subject to copyright.
I wanted to reply in this direction. Ultimately, literally everything and anything in SW is a sequence of numbers, that anybody could easily put in some kind of table form.
I don’t know where the catch is, but that sentence can not be true in general.
Disney would like you have a word with you. Why would their pile of numbers that represent Avatar3.m4a be any more subject to copyright than Apple_2D_3D.bin. Or GPT52.mlx or Opus45.gguf?
"ItS ApPle S0 1T MuSt bE BaD!"
I'm going to match this energy whenever I see it.
You could make the same mocking argument towards people who find anything good that Apple produces.
Not sure I've met one of those people in... a decade or so? Loving apple products has been an uphill road for a long time (and increasingly more so post-Jobs)
Interesting, the main license doesn't mention the limit, maybe that's why the op got confused
https://github.com/apple/ml-sharp/blob/main/LICENSE
I’m going to research if I can make a profitable product from it. I’ll publish the results of course.
Pretty sure this is a joke, but the actual license is written by lawyers who know what they are doing:
> “Research Purposes” means non-commercial scientific research and academic development activities, such as experimentation, analysis, testing conducted by You with the sole intent to advance scientific knowledge and research. “Research Purposes” does not include any commercial exploitation, product development or use in any commercial product or service.
Is there any model that is actually free as in freedom (not necessarily gratis)?
Yes, many models recently have been released under Apache 2.0, both Free and gratis.
Should the title be corrected to source-available?
"weights-available" is probably the correct term, since it doesn't look like the training data is available.
Training data is not source code so that's irrelevant
It kind of is, though. You use some input material to produce the weights via some process, even if the weights might not become exactly the same every time you reproduce the process; the production of the weights isn't done by working with the weight, but with the training material and the process to convert them into weights. The analogy to source code and the resulting binaries there.
If all these AI models were trained on copyrighted materials for which the trainers had no right to, is it wrong to steal their models and use them however we want? Morally I'd say absolutely not, but I"m sure these AI bros would vigorously defend their own IP, even if it was built on stolen IP created by humans.
> If all these AI models were trained on copyrighted materials for which the trainers had no right to, is it wrong to steal their models and use them however we want?
If (which the courts seem to be pretty consistently finding) training models on copyright-protected works generally is fair use, though using models to produce works which would violate copyright if made by other means with reference to the source material is still a copyright violation, then training has no bearing on the legality of copying the models. (Even if it wasn't, then copying and using the models at all would violate the copyright of the original owners of the training material again and be illegal irrespective of the “license” offered by the model trainer.)
Morally? Well, pretty much the same dichotomy applies; if training the model isn't a violation of the source material's creators' rights, then the fact it was trained without permission has no bearing on the morality of using the model without the trainers permission, if it is a violation of the source material's creators' rights, then so is using the model irrespective of the trainer's “license”, as the trainer has no right to permit further use of the material they had no right to create.
The idea that the model is an intrusion on the rights of the creators of the materials used in training and that this makes use of the model more rather than less permissibly, legally or morally, takes some bizarre mental gymnastics.
It’s open source, just not open domain.
If it's open source, where are the sources? And how do I make my own from those sources?
When AI and open source is used together you can be sure it's not open source.
Your daily reminder that neural network weights aren't creative work and as such aren't subject to copyright protection in the first place. The “license” is purely cosmetic (or rather, it's being put there by the ML scientists who want to share their work and have to deal with the corporate reluctance to do so).
That sucks.
I'm writing open desktop software that uses WorldLabs splats for consistent location filmmaking, and it's an awesome tool:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iD999naQq9A
This next year is going to be about controlling a priori what your images and videos will look like before you generate them.
3D splats are going to be incredibly useful for film and graphics design. You can rotate the camera around and get predictable, consistent details.
We need more Gaussian models. I hope the Chinese AI companies start building them.
Making 3D worlds like that is impressive. I used to build some VR worlds (hobby) and content generation is a huge time sink. I wonder if this tech will become accessible for that soon.
This is all going to become super accessible to everyone. And it'll become fast and eventually free.
Everyone will be able to flex their muscles as a creative. Everyone will be able to become an artist (expressing themselves though their unique lens) without putting points into a mechanical skill that is dimensionally orthogonal to idea expression and communication.
This is the "bicycle of the mind" that Steve Jobs talked about 40 some years ago. We've all had keyboards with which to express ourselves and communicate, but soon everyone will be able to visually articulate themselves and their thoughts. It's going to be so uplifting for society.
In fifty years we'll even be able to render our direct thoughts and mold them like clay. Share them directly with one another. Co-think.
I don’t agree with this idea that for a model to be open source you have to be able to make a profit off of it. Plenty of open source code licenses doesn’t require that constraint
https://opensource.org/osd#fields-of-endeavor
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, [..]
While most people follow the OSD criteria, there is nothing that says open source software must follow it. Nor is the OSD the only set of criteria or the only definition.
Open source means the source is available. Anything else is just political.
> Open source means the source is available. Anything else is just political.
Where was that defined so? And most of all, given the domain of information technology, who understand open source to cover cases where the source is available ie. only for reviewing?
The purpose of words and terms is so that people can exchange ideas effectively and precisely, without needing to explain the terms every time from the grounds up. Having different groups having divergent definitions on the same words is counterproductive towards that goal. In my view, labeling a release "open source" with very big limitations on how the source is used is just not about marketing, it's miscommunication.
If "open source" and "source available" (and "open weights") mean the same thing, the how come people have come up with the two terms to begin with? The difference is recognized in official contexts as well, i.e. https://web.archive.org/web/20180724032116/https://dodcio.de... (search for "source available"; unfortunately linking directly doesn't seem to work with archive.org pages).
It doesn't seem there is any benefit in using less precise terms when better-defined ones are available.
Now you get to graduate into the pedantry of defining the word “source”.
That's source-available: you get to see the code and learn from it, but if you're not allowed to use it however you want (with as only common restrictions that you must then credit the creator(s) and also allow others the same freedom on derivative works) then it's not the traditional definition of open source
And you would be wrong as a simple question of fact.
Do you think the OSD is law or something?
The only popular one I know is CC-NC but that is not open source
I feel like being in a time loop. Every time a big company releases a model, we debate the definition of open source instead of asking what actually matters. Apple clearly wants the upside of academic credibility without giving away commercial optionality, which isn't unsurprising.
Additionally, we might need better categories. With software, flow is clear (source, build and binary) but with AI/ML, the actual source is an unshippable mix of data, infra and time, and weights can be both product and artifacts.
Examples: https://apple.github.io/ml-sharp/
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10685
imo https://x.com/SadlyItsBradley/status/2001227141300494550 is a better demo than their own project page
The authors appear to be all foreign-born.
Just curious for those who are informed on this matter... are most research done by foreign born people? What happened to the big STEM push?
I don't mean to stir up political debate... just curious what the reality is, especially given the decline in foreign students coming over in recent year.
I'm not trying to be too pc, but you can't really tell based on someone's name where they were born.
That said, the US only has some 5% of the worlds population (albeit probably a larger proportion of the literate population), so you'd only expect some fraction of the world's researchers to be US born. Not to mention that US born is an even smaller fraction of births (2.5-3%, by Google), so you'd expect an even smaller fraction of US born researchers. So even if we assume that we're on par with peer countries, you'd only expect US born researchers to be a fraction of the overall research population. We'd have to be vastly better at educating people to do otherwise, which is a longshot.
Obviously this makes turning away international students incredibly stupid, but what are we to do against stupidity?
are most research done by foreign born people
Approximately 96% of the world's population is not American, so you should expect that really.
1. People with foreign sounding names may have been born in the United States.
2. People who were born outside the United States but moved here to do research a while back don’t suddenly stop doing research here.
Apple is also a global company and has offices and research labs world wide. At least a couple of the authors seem to work for Apple but at their German lab.
FWIW, many of the researchers on the paper did not study in the U.S. but immigrated after their PhD studies.
I checked the first, middle, and last author: Lars Mescheder got his PhD in Germany, Bruno Lecouat got his PhD in France, Vladlen Koltun got his PhD in Israel.
(Edit: or maybe they did not actually immigrate but work remote and/or in Europe)
How do you know where the authors were born?
Why don't we produce enough experts in the US to saturate our tech companies?
It's because American education culture is trash. American parents are fine with their kids getting Bs and Cs. Mediocrity is rewarded and excellence is discouraged in our schools, both socially and institutionally.
Meanwhile you have hundreds of millions of foreign born children pulling out all the stops to do the best they possibly can at school precisely so they can get into the US and work at one of our top companies.
It was never even a competition. Immigrants and children of theirs will continue to outperform because it is literally baked into their culture - and it is baked out of ours.
foreign to... where?
Big day for VR pornography!
I'm not kidding. That's going to be >80% of the images/videos synthesized with this.
Unfortunately not as significant as you'd think.
The output is not automatically metrically scaled (though you can use postprocessing to fix this, it's not part of this model). And you can't really move around much without getting glitches, because it only inferences in one axis. It's also hard capped at 768 pixels + 2 layers.
Besides depth/splatting models have been around for quite a while before this. The main thing this model innovates on is inference speed, but VR porn isn't a use case that really benefits from faster image/video processing, especially since it's still not realtime.
This year has seen a lot of innovation in this space, but it's coming from other image editing and video models.
Gives the term "Gaussian splat" an entirely different meaning...
Now I know what Gaussian scattering is.
HN discussion 11 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284658
This is a dupe. A couple of weeks ago I forked it and got the rendering to work in MPS: https://github.com/rcarmo/ml-sharp
I wonder if it helps that a lot of people take more than one picture of the same thing, thus providing them with effectively stereoscopic images.
Also, frames from live photos
I was thinking of testing it, but I have an irrational hatred for Conda.
You could use pixi instead, as a much nicer/saner alternative to conda: https://pixi.sh
Though in this particular case, you don't even need conda. You just need python 3.13 and a virtual environment. If you have uv installed, then it's even easier:
You can simply use a `uv` env instead?
You aren't being irrational.
Perhaps they lived outside of the kingdom, with an evil Stepmother who moved very slow, struggled with complex dependency collisions, and took up a bunch of unnecessary space? Such an experience could leave one very traumatized towards Conda, even though their real problems are the unresolved issues with their stepmother…
I don’t know when Apple turned evil but hard for me to support them further after nearly four decades. Everything they do now is directly opposite of what they stood for in the past.
Curious what this has to do with the post?
Apple trying to “open-source” something is pretty relevant. I don’t trust them at all. People constantly go at Microsoft but what Apple has done in the last 15 years is far worse. Their monopolies have had far worse impact than whatever Microsoft ever did with Windows and IE.
What would you suggest they have done here?
Yeah Apple was on a good track for a while with things like OpenCL. But completely reversed course :(
I decidedly disagree with about everything you said regarding Microsoft. The Microsoft monopoly is the most life sucking cancer the corporate world has ever experienced. Compared to that the entire existence of Apple is merely a footnote. Don't mistake your stupid phone for the world.
I sunk my twenties involving the sh*tshow that was Microsoft antitrust. No, Microsoft shipping IE by default is pretty benign compared to what Apple has been doing for far longer than whatever Microsoft ever did. In fact, one can make an argument that Windows was really an open platform for developers based on Today’s standards.
I'm not talking about laughable little stunts like IE. I'm talking about the ongoing cancer that is eating up billions from little companies all the way to big corporations. All of that is ongoing, and they squeeze their prey for everything they have. They are the most disgusting and damaging disease you can imagine.
Once you start using even a small fraction of their tech it instantly metastasises throughout the entire organisation because of lock in and "open standards" that weirdly only work with their own tech. If the MS tech creates a problem the solution is to pour more MS tech onto the festering wound.
You apparently have been so insulated from how actual companies have to deal with tech that you think your little forays using computers are what everything should be measured by. All you have is a developer and hobbyist point of view.
Apple has not been nice and open since the 1970s. The only open and nice person in any important role is Wozniak.
Apple absolute Never believed in open source in the past so yes. They are not the same
Where does Swift fit into this? I haven’t followed along but believe it’s open source and a search appears to confirm this?
Swift language is open source but the entire ecosystem is as closed as they get. The fact that no one is building anything outside of the ecosystem says everything about Swift and Apple’s intent. The fact that they still won’t support Linux on M chips also says they don’t care.
Not never. Woz championed some of that in the 1970s. It's before my time, but the Apple II was pretty open as I understand it.
I’ve been using some time off to explore the space and related projects StereoCrafter and GeometryCrafter are fascinating. Applying this to video adds a temporal consistency angle that makes it way harder and compute intensive, but I’ve “spatialized” some old home videos from the Korean War and it works surprisingly well.
https://github.com/TencentARC/StereoCrafter https://github.com/TencentARC/GeometryCrafter
I would love to see your examples.
OP probably can’t tell if you're being upvoted on this.
I’d be keen too.
Hugging Face model: https://huggingface.co/apple/Sharp and demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/ronedgecomb/ml-sharp
Weird how “hugging face” is a heartwarming little smiley face, while “face hugger” is a terrifying alien xenomorph. Seems like there’s an analogy to be made there…
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284658
Is this the same model as the “Spatial Scenes” feature in iOS 26? If so, it’s been wildly impressive.
It seems like it, although the shipped feature doesn’t allow for as much freedom of movement as the demos linked here (which makes sense as a product decision because I assume the farther you stretch it the more likely it is to do something that breaks the illusion)
The “scenes” from that feature are especially good for use as lock screen backgrounds
Ya, I like when it’s automatically done on my featured photo, gives the phone a very 3D look and feel.
I am thinking the same thing, and I do love the effect in iOS26
does it make a mesh?
doesn't seem very accurate, no idea of the result with a photo of large scene, that could be useful for level designers
No
Gaussian splats
"Sharp Monocular View Synthesis in Less Than a Second"
"Less than a second" is not "instantly".
If you're concerned by that, I have some bad news about instant noodles.
Folgers on line one.
What would your definition of "instantly" be? I would argue that, compared to taking minutes or hours, taking less than a second is fast enough to be considered "instant" in the colloquial definition. I'll concede that it's not "instant" in the literal definition, but nothing is (because of the principle of locality).
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §88:
> (...) Now, if I tell someone: "You should come to dinner more punctually; you know it begins at one o'clock exactly"—is there really no question of exactness here? because it is possible to say: "Think of the determination of time in the laboratory or the observatory; there you see what 'exactness' means"? "Inexact" is really a reproach, and "exact" is praise. (...)
would love a multi-image version of this.
Damn. I recall UC Davis was working on this sort of problem for CCTV footage 20 years ago, but this is really freakin' progress now.
Apple is not a serious company if they can't even spin up a simple frontend for their AI innovations. I should not have to install anything to test this.
It's included in the ios photo gallery. I think this is a separate release of the tech underneath.
What user feature does it power?
Literally what this model does- create seemingly 3d scenes from 2d images, in the iOS photos app. It works even better when you take a real spatial image, which uses dual lenses.
Ah great. Easier for real estate agents to show slow panning around a room, with lame music.
I guess there are other uses?? But this is just more abstracted reality. It will be innacurate just as summaried text is, and future peoples will again have no idea as to reality.
For panning you don't need a 3D view/reconstruction. This also allows translational camera movements, but only for nearby views. Maybe I am overly pedantic here, but for HN I guess thats appropriate :D
For a good slow pan, you don’t need 3d reconstruction but you DO need “Ashokan Farewell”
It will be used for spatial content, for viewing in Apple Vision Pro headset.
In fact you can already turn any photo into spatial content. I’m not sure if it’s using this algorithm or something else.
It’s nice to view holiday photos with spatial view … it feels like you’re there again. Same with looking at photos of deceased friends and family.