Recently, a new artificial intelligence model has been published by Meta, the parent company of Mark Zuckerberg’s social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. This advanced model called the SAM, or Segment Anything Model, has the ability to identify individual objects within images and videos, even if it hasn't encountered them during its training phase.
Using the SAM model, users can easily select objects within images or use text prompts such as "dog" or "table" to have the model accurately respond to their written prompts. The model has been designed and trained to be promotable so that it can transfer zero-shot to new image distributions and tasks. Meta claims that the model's zero-shot performance is impressive, often competitive with or even superior to prior fully supervised results.
The company believes that the SAM model could have a variety of applications for content creators, including the ability to extract images for use in collages or video editing. It could also be used by scientists to locate and track animals or objects of interest within video footage of natural occurrences in space or on earth.
Meta has already used other AI tools to categorize and identify data, including tools that generate brand new content such as surrealist videos from text prompts and children's book illustrations from prose. The company plans to incorporate more generative AI "creative aids" into their apps in the future.
As AI continues to rapidly advance, there are ethical and societal concerns about the technology's ability to generate content that is comparable to human creativity. The SAM model and its dataset will be available to access and download under a non-commercial license, with users agreeing to restrict use to research.
