# SAM 1: selecting an object with a point or a box

The original 2023 Segment Anything release, now commonly called SAM 1, turns a click, box, or rough mask into an object segmentation, giving annotators and analysts an editable first pass across varied images.

Canonical: https://brightaifuture.com/discoveries/segment-anything-annotation
Format: discovery
Source publication: 2023-04-05
Bright publication: 2026-09-19
Substantive update: None recorded
Evidence and review: Demonstrated; confidence: unassessed; source-checked; ai-assisted. AI-assisted comparison with the cited sources. Source-checked means the record was checked against those sources; it does not claim independent reproduction, expert review, or validation of the publisher’s results.

## The human problem

Drawing precise boundaries around objects is slow, repetitive work in image annotation and analysis.

## The prior constraint

Segmentation systems usually needed category-specific labels and training before they could help on a new collection.

## AI’s actual role

A promptable vision model produces candidate masks for objects without training a new model for each object category.

## The documented result

Meta released SAM 1 inference code, Apache-2.0 model checkpoints, notebooks, and separate access to the SA-1B dataset in April 2023.

## Why it may matter

Promptable masks can move human effort from drawing every boundary to checking and correcting proposals.

## Limitations

A plausible mask may still be wrong, especially in unfamiliar imagery. Apache-2.0 model artifacts do not settle the rights attached to input images, dataset access, or downstream uses.

This is the historical SAM 1 release, not a claim about later Segment Anything generations. The official repository establishes Apache-2.0 model artifacts and intended workflows; SA-1B data access and downstream image rights remain separate.

## Unresolved questions



## Provenance and history

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## Original sources

- [Segment Anything](https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything)
- [Segment Anything](https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02643)

## Continue exploring

- [Open Models](https://brightaifuture.com/open-models)
- [Open intelligence](https://brightaifuture.com/worlds/open)
- [What changes when powerful models become open-weight?](https://brightaifuture.com/threads/open)
- [Someone builds on it](https://brightaifuture.com/open-intelligence)