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.
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.
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, [..]
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
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).
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Thank you! Shame all these big corps that do this forever. Meta #1, Apple # 2, psuedo fake journalists # 3
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
I’m going to research if I can make a profitable product from it. I’ll publish the results of course.
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.
When AI and open source is used together you can be sure it's not open source.
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.
Should the title be corrected to source-available?
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, [..]
And you would be wrong as a simple question of fact.
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
The only popular one I know is CC-NC but that is not open source
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.
"Sharp Monocular View Synthesis in Less Than a Second"
"Less than a second" is not "instantly".
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).
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
HN discussion 11 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284658
Hugging Face model: https://huggingface.co/apple/Sharp and demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/ronedgecomb/ml-sharp
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 absolute Never believed in open source in the past so yes. They are not the same
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284658
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.
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 aren't being irrational.
You can simply use a `uv` env instead?
would love a multi-image version of this.
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
I am thinking the same thing, and I do love the effect in iOS26
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.
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
Gaussian splats
No
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.
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.
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.
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”