It's really impressive, and better than anything I've seen, but is it really leagues better than whatever Photoshop is using?

Of course being on github and permissively license is huge.

My question exactly, didn't photoshop already solve this like 5+ years ago?

Have you used Photoshop's magic wand tool in the last 5 years? No, it's nowhere close to this good.

The Magic Wand tool mostly just selects similarly colored pixels based on a simple algorithm. The Object Selection, Select Subject and Sky Replacement tools use AI detection and can be configured to run locally or on Adobe's GPUs. Having played with this demo, they seem in a similar league to me.

I'm just happy that a tool that PropriAdobe has sat on and crowed about for years is soon to be a click away for the masses and the hackers.

They have a newer “object selection” tool that’s similar.

I think you haven’t played around enough with it, you can prompt it to segment literally anything in an image. Not just regions of similar texture, it understands humans, dogs, cats etc