It's not even some "forgotten AI technique" (sigh...). It's been a hot topic for the last 5 years. Used a lot with Variational Auto-encoders, etc. Such a bad journalism.

I think its just Apple PR pushing these out now to get Apple's name out in the AI era.

>I find it fascinating that Apple-centric media sites are stretching so much to position the company in the AI race

Or, you know, just posting an article based on an Apple's press release about a new technique that falls squarely into their target audience (people reading Apple centric news) and is a great fit to current fashionable technologies (AI) people will show interest in.

Without giving a fuck to "position the company in the AI race". They'd post about Apple sewers having an issue at their HQs, if that news story was available.

Besides, when did Apple ever came first in some particular tech race (say, the mp3 player, the smartphone, the store, the tablet, the smartwatch, maybe VR now)? What they do typically is wait for the dust to settle and sweep the end-user end of that market.

This „4 year old technique“ apparently could give Apple an edge for on-device workloads.

> short: both Apple and OpenAI are moving beyond diffusion, but while OpenAI is building for its data centers, Apple is clearly building for our pockets.

Given the tiny amount of funding they have Apple's ML team does some really amazing stuff. I think they're actually underappreciated by the public.

That site's target market is what we know as "Apple fanboys". I'm not one to consider 9to5 serious journalism (nor even worthy to post in HN), but even those publications that I consider serious are businesses, too, and need to pander to their markets in order to make money.

> I find it fascinating that Apple-centric media sites are stretching so much to position the company in the AI race.

A glance through the comments also shows HNers doing their best too. The mind still boggles as to why this site is so willing to perform mental gymnastics for a corporate.