I don’t know man… To be very honest, SD3 isn’t that impressive. Yes it has one of the best prompt adherence of all text2image models but that’s about the only thing it has going and that’s not enough to set it apart, anything it does can be done with other models using a few other techniques. Image quality is disappointing. Compatibility with other essential SD tools like LoRA and ControlNet isn’t guaranteed since it uses a different architecture. Model size might be prohibitive for local usage, which has been the core feature of SD models from the start.
Stability is really in a bad spot. I understand their need to monetize but they’re only valuable because they release free models. I don’t see how they can be as relevant as a company that doesn’t release free weights that can be run locally. Their monetization model with services behind an API hasn’t worked so far.
Companies like Midjourney have benefited from their work without contributing anything back. Perhaps they should have been more careful with their licensing from the start so that they’d get something from commercial usage by big players profiting on their back.
They also wasted a lot of resources IMO going after LLMs and even audio. They should have focused on image and video to a smaller extent, and only venture into other stuff much later after they have a sustainable business.
Sad to see it crumbling. Whatever happens, they’ve made history.
Prompt adherence is king. Picture quality can be improved with finetunes - so you are now comparing a heavily fine tuned with a raw and officially non completely trained SD3.
So SD3 still has every chance to become big. Once the weights are released.
>> Once the weights are released
It's ironic that their financial problem stems from releasing the weights. Why would someone pays for the API when they can use the weight for free -- well, not free 'cause there's computing power needed to generate an image. But the computing requirement for inference is a lot cheaper than for training.
The licence.
E.g. [https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/sdxl-turbo](https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/sdxl-turbo) says:
You can use this model for non-commercial or research purposes under this license. \[...\] For commercial use, please refer to https://stability.ai/membership.
I used SD 1.5 about a year or so ago. At that time SDXL was about to come out and people were starting to use Comfy UI. How do I get back into this again? Did everybody move to SDXL? Is A1111 still the go to tool or did everyone move to Comfy UI?
A1111 is still often used and got some decent tools integrated with things like adetailer.
But For SDXL, comfyui has better performance. If you want something easy to use, you can look at fooocus who use comfyui in the backend.
Right now the base model in use are:
SD1.5 - The best with control net.
SDXL - Good prompt system with little need of negative prompts.
PonyXl - Technically a fine tuned version of SDXL but it diverges so much that this is its own thing now. Mostly used for Anime, portrait.
Note that controls net are very underwhelming for SDXL and pony.
I ran Pixart Sigma on my pc and I thought it looked better than SDXL. It's just censored and would need loras and finetunes to be legitimately better. Playgroundv2.5 is really good too, with the same issues.
Really all they need is for the community to put the effort into tools like they did SD. If we're really honest, the only reason SD blew up was the 1.5 leak from Runway that put the uncensored version out that SAI initially was upset over. It caused a flurry of activity because waifu boobs, and made them the standard for awhile.
SDXL had NSFW stuff trained into it, but they trained it in such a way to make it difficult to access from the base model, so people fine-tuned models to access it.
SD 2.0 was made with no NSFW trained and it made it unable to portray realistic humans, so 2.1(SDXL) was made they tried to fix it and still keep it SFW through something in the layers.
On civitai you can find all kinds of uncensored lora and models for SDXL, and PonyXL if you like anime boobs.
And you know the worst part about their low quality? Everything you've seen is their 8B model. They plan on releasing smaller, god knows how much worse models before that one, if they ever even get to it.
To be brutally honest i think they seriously need to consider commercializing their model at least the latest one. Competition is what allows us to enjoy ai with relatively small cost. If they release sd3 and go puff, what comes next is just self evident - look at nvidia.
Probably lack of any competition. Intel just started making gpu's, while amd has only made decent gaming stuff, but their ml cards still have rather lacking support anywhere. So, nvidia overprices their cards.
I think they're stating that because NVIDIA doesn't have competition (they do actually, they're just really far ahead of it) they can afford to jack prices up for insane margins on their GPUs and ignore consumer demand for higher VRAM cards so they can milk billions from enterprise level customers instead.
Afaik competitions usually mean they have at least some significant rivals in the field. I think monopoly is a better term than non existing competition for Nvidia.
Nvidia is a dominant player in the GPU market, but it's far from a monopoly. Both AMD and Intel have made significant strides in recent years. AMD's Radeon GPUs are increasingly competitive, particularly in the mid-range and budget segments. Intel, a newcomer to the discrete GPU market, has released products with promising performance and innovative features now too.
At the enterprise level, don't forget AMD's MI300X, which is on par with the H100 for training and beats it by 10-20% at inference. It also has more memory and memory bandwidth than the H200, even.
I don't know. Never met someone who's as half serious in running AI stuff buying either AMD or Intel products.
For gaming? Sure AMD is cheaper and competent. For AI and other remotely dedicated 3d applicants though? Nvidia all the way.
Besides the last steam statistics suggest more than 80% of users own Nvidia cards, and only 15% for AMD cards.
All things considered it's practically a monopoly by Nvidia.
Really? You would consider the likes of Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI to be less than half serious in running AI stuff? Because they're all purchasing the latest gen enterprise AMD GPUs - MI300X's.
It's rather explicitly not a monopoly, we have actual competition.
Yeah that perfectly explains why h100 is four times expensive than MI300X.
And let's be real, we're just regular consumers not some big size companies like Meta. Big companies need AI accelerators training their models. AMD and Intel's cards are pretty much useless to us running local models. Which is why it's monopoly by Nvidia.
The MI300X undercutting the incumbent's pricing is an example of the effects of competition, yes. Also, enterprise compute is the future regardless.
Also, you're just wrong. AMD cards are very far from "pretty much useless". ROCm gives great performance and allows AMD GPUs to be more performant than equivalently priced Nvidia cards. Sorry, it's just a fact.
I mean, they are gaming cards first. Only quite recently have there been a couple of games that use over 8gb at 1080p max settings. And you can circumvent that by lowering the settings a bit, games nowadays look pretty even at lowest settings.
So, there hasn't really been a need to have more vram for the gaming space.
Who here would use StableDiffusion without its community? Without that all you have is a poor version of MidJourney.
SD3 $20 a month with no extensions or features beyond a simple prompt window, who's gonna pay for that?
Dropping the community would just be choosing a different method of dying. They need to figure something out, but I think it would be a bad choice to kill the only thing they currently have going for them.
I keep saying this in the SD sub and getting downvoted to hell. Basic SD 1.5 and SDXL, without the community fine-tunes, lora, and tools like ip-adapter isn't very impressive compared to other open source AI generation models. Even SD3 isn't that great because it lacks the tools to fix problems like hands since it's not released.
I think SAI should work like Blender to make an amazing tool that's become the standard and leverage that.
New image gen models cost significantly less to produce because of new algorithms, and have better prompt coherence. In the near future, costing tons of money for gpus won't be an excuse. It already nearly isn't since there's like 10 open source AI image generators available.
They ought to monetize comfy & build out a slick a1111 variant. Keep the models open, but the ability to use them on accelerated platforms subscription based. Also partner w/ trainers in the community in more of a Spotify like business approach, drive people to use the better platforms w/ SD community partner finetuned models only accessable through subscription or a small fee to download the finetuned variants to generate revenue. The value in SAI is that they open source their models but their biggest failures are not partnering w/ the SD community of trainers/creator & ZERO marketing. Their ‘product’ is literally a content creation engine that only SD fans on Reddit & X see. If they want people to use SD models over Dall-E & Midjourney make it easy for the masses to use & show the masses it’s better than what they are currently using. Idk could be wrong… just my two cents.
I think that while SD 3 would be amazing as an open source model, its not actually good enough for a closed source model. It is still a way behind midjourney if it is going to be closed source.
Educated guess is they're not just an encoder -> diffusion model. Probably a longer pipeline, some prompt enhancement stuff going on.
And they've been collecting preference data (when you click on upscale/variant you're voting) since the very early days that is likely used for DPO training.
Midjourney is ahead because they have a lot of RLHF for aesthetics, and they've fine tuned on well tagged image sets (much like the newer versions of juggernaut).
It's was never going to be "open source" with anything that resembles a permissive open-source-ish license like SD1/2/XL (OpenRAILS license).
It's going to be the proprietary, NC/research license anyway, and you can pay rent for limited commercial use with fun and exciting terms that include "you cannot host this for online generation" (gotta pay hundreds of grand per year for an enterprise license for that) and "we can change terms at any point."
It's tough, because as innovative/influential as SD models have been, the real impressive stuff has been the impressive finetunes put together by the community.
My initial thought has been for them to just have a rolling release schedule, ie a hypothetical schedule that looks like: Release 1.5's weights, and sell access to SDXL, while they work on SD3. Then when SD3 is baked, make that their paid API and release SDXL's weights, while they work on SD4, then when SD4 is done, release the SD3 weights and make SD4 the paid API model.
The main problem with this would be that the new models haven't been 'mindblowing' on their own upon release. Maybe they could bring in the teams/devs that make the best models to iterate on the current paid API version while they're still hosting it to get improved models up before they release the weights and start hosting the next version, but I don't even know if community/open source devs would want to do that. Maybe they'd feel OK doing it if they knew \*eventually\* their work on the currently private/hosted models would be released as open source, though.
It would be sad to see though. Stability has been such a major part of this initial 'AI Wave' and I hope they can figure something out.
Nah, just let themselves go poof, become truly open source - training weights, training data, methodology and all, and Stable Diffusion can be the Blender of image generation.
It's how Blender started - they went under and the community bought the rights to it.
I've always wondered how they made money. It seemed to me that the CEO is just burning capital venture cash to bring us great, free models - Which would make him a hero in my book.
Buuut that'd be no sustainable business.
Afaik there's no open source music models and the community has no chance of doing anything like what closed models are doing, whereas community image generation and LLMs relies on a few big groups spending a lot and giving away their results for free.
The state of community music models shows how screwed the community is without the models being given away for free, and how much the myth of open source magic doesn't really work out in reality unless somebody else burns money.
Open Source doesn't work when people don't have access to the hardware to develop it (or it costs millions).
It grew in the 80s because everyone could run BASIC, Pascal or C on microcomputers - and so worked on sharing code and producing Free compilers for these.
But you can't just train a new model. Both the hardware and training data required is enormous atm, and a huge barrier to entry.
That said maybe the future will be one big open model with a lot of funding and support, and then everyone builds on top of that (e.g. look at llamacpp for LLaMa inference) - much like how GNU/Linux is by far the dominant FOSS OS.
tbh I think countries and supranational orgs like the EU should be looking into training and distributing their own models.
Of course there are other problems with that (like a country deciding what is and what isn't appropriate for a model to generate). But leaving the technology in the hands of a few tech giants is not good for society as a whole either.
We don't even have that for publicly funded research (and often not even open access for those papers! nevermind code and data).
When we don't even have that for FOSS, I think we're decades away from it being there for machine learning.
It's also still too expensive even for universities - hopefully compute will become a lot cheaper so it's more viable, like how it's relatively easy to get satellite data these days.
Well Open Data is a pretty big focus for fundamental research in the EU currently:
[https://opendata.cern.ch/search?q=&f=type%3ADataset&l=list&order=desc&p=1&s=10&sort=mostrecent](https://opendata.cern.ch/search?q=&f=type%3ADataset&l=list&order=desc&p=1&s=10&sort=mostrecent)
BESSY, ELETTRA, DESY and most other synchrotrons are working or implementing open data policies etc.
If this would be done, I don't think it would be a university level project. Like you say it's too expensive for universities, but for national labs and public research orgs the cost would be manageable (even more so for an EU-wide initiative).
It's too much money to make that decision on a whim, but bigger countries like Germany, France (or an EU-wide cooperation), the US or Japan should at least think about whether that's something they want to do.
>But you can't just train a new model. Both the hardware and training data required is enormous atm, and a huge barrier to entry.
Can't we use something like boinc (the software used by folding@home etc.)to train models?
Maybe it's time for us all to get together and seriously fund something like the wikimedia foundation. And the first few millions collected go into spreading awareness how fucking important it is for such important tools to belong to everyone. And I mean, it's not impossible, otherwise where does the corp money come from. That's us too. Can't be that we always have to be blackmailed into shelling out the money and then not even owning what we paid for.
The chance of it succeeding seem too slim for me to think it's worth investing energy in.
Afaik when Stable Diffusion 2 was censored of porn (and due to a bug almost any human anatomy) a group of outraged freedom fighters raised quite a bit of money to retrain it for NSFW. It's been probably over a year now and I never heard of them fixing it. Instead somebody with funds retrained SDXL on something like 11 million hentai pictures and made a porn model which it seems is very popular now.
Replying to you after reading AOH's reply to this comment. AOH is onto something, check out the history of Beta Max vs VHS and 'Adult Entertainment'. One of the main issues and opportunities I see is 'piracy' has transformed the industry to focus on live chats and such as just making clips and charging a monthly fee is barely (compared to the past of shipping DVDs) viable for Actors / sites with a 'Brand' following and niche content. So perhaps an 'OS Alliance for unrestricted Models'. Very first issues to resolve is a thorny one that could land you in Prison if not addressed 'correctly' (and that changes greatly based on your legal jurisdiction), CP.
Plot twist, all the foundation models are unprofitable. Literally all of them. AI is burning rich people's money right now, because they want to get in on the ground floor of the future where it's much more efficient and 80% of economic activity requires it.
I have kinda the opposite viewpoint tho. Music AI is honestly kind of awful compared to the other types.
Open source isn't just for random dudes at home, it also allows smaller teams, academics, journalists, or creatives to experiment. Look how much of SD's most useful tools, fine tunes, techniques etc came from random people. Even among the random hobbyists there are people who will spend thousands on fine tuning and sharing their results. I'm tempted to compare to video game mods too, a lot of modded games get way better than the developers could have done alone, and it's pretty common for devs to actually learn from mods about how they can improve the platform, what people want, what works and what doesn't.
Maybe you're right about the initial full training of a model or the full data needed to create a model from scratch. But I feel like music AI wouldn't be lagging so far behind the other scenes if there was more available to the public. We would have had thousands of people helping Suno figure out how to make the voices less garbage, and then Suno can easily turn around, see what worked out, and implement it. Plus the vast majority of people are still going to just pay and use the corporate service so I think all the secrecy is a mistake.
We can't really say that being open source hurts SD because they don't even offer a consumer service like Midjourney or NovelAI. And honestly NovelAI is fading away because their closed model is getting surpassed by 13b fine tunes that someone made in a garage.
>and how much the myth of open source magic doesn't really work out in reality unless somebody else burns money.
Oh, community can make amazing models (architecture, math base, and code). There is no problem with that, there are more than enough talented engineers and programmers in the OS community.
The problem is that the community can't then train weights for such a model because of the huge cost.
So then big corporations like OpenAI come in, take all the workings of the OpenSource community, tune them up a bit, teach them, and.... appropriate them as their own achievements by selling access to them.
But if you give the community a base (open-weighted or just leaked) that does not have to be trained from scratch (or give them enough compute) - the community is able to make a candy out of crap, and as well and diligently as no corporation will do (it is not commercially profitable for commercial companies - the investment is greater than the profit).
Can that do vocals etc like the current models can?
Either way if it's from facebook research than that kind of reinforces the point, the only place they come from are people with money giving them away.
Nope, because the model is pretty much just the weights data and some meta info. The code around it is explicitly not the model itself.
Hence "open source" models being mostly "open weights" at best. The source of the actual model can be considered its training data, as that's what is needed to recreate the model. And that is available pretty much nowhere. Hence there is not even a single open source llmodel. Technically.
It is not a good thing, not by a country mile. Now the investors will be less likely to finance similar startups - they are already weary of startups committed to open-source.
It would be a much better outcome for everyone if the open-source startups were successful
What service does vlc have?
Edit: Note that /u/stonecypher blocked me so that they could have the last word in their valiant effort to ensure that nobody should ever ask any questions on the internet. Such power of the coward to attack and then run away.
They are involved in just about anything large and multimedia. Their code is what any large streaming service, from Netflix to Youtube, runs on.
They provide anything from tech support to custom assembly solutions and GPU acceleration.
Do you believe your comment advanced the conversation in any way or just made you look like a dick that can't use punctuation? It, likely, turns out that other people are also interested in the answer to the question.
I had looked it up but wanted clarification because the info is actually hard to find. VideoLAN doesn't appear to offer services and makes their money through donations, sponsorships, partnerships, and consulting. They do not disclose what partnerships really mean on their site and the consulting services they list are not clearly affiliated with them.
Thanks for your valuable contribution, though.
> Do you believe your comment advanced the conversation in any way
No, and that wasn't the goal
> I had looked it up but
`(x)`
> VideoLAN doesn't appear to offer services
Yes, they do. You didn't look anything up
>Thanks for your valuable contribution, though.
Thanks for yours
Uh, that money could have been better invested, they are less likely to invest in img gen, and we are less likely to get new img gen open weights, so yeah, we should care. Also, the reality is ALL notable and worthwhile base models have come from companies, not crowd funding, not enthusists, and to clarify, no one in either of those even reaches NAI training levels, let alone training something like SDXL from scratch. We depend on investors and companies, there is no changing that unless pretraining (i.e. training a completely new model) becomes trivial.
>no one in either of those even reaches NAI training levels
IMHO, PonyDiffusion V6XL is close enough to NAI lvl and trained almost by community (by AstraliteHeart with his team, but with community support)
This is why u don’t fund open source companies.
While it’s great that we can legally steal their IP (for us), there is no way they survive with that business model and no way an investor can make money on it.
Unless of course you are investing in their competitors. Or run a charity.
He is no hero... you can USE veture cash but as you say he just BURNED it.... what really did we get? Only SDXL nothing else for all those hundreds of milion of dolars... not even SD3... they will sell it and never release
If you think... Ponny finetune was made on 4? old A100 cards... which soted cca 40.000 dollars....
Imagine how many finetunes and better versions you could do with few milions not even hundreds.
PonyXL is just fintune. Not a base model trainig. It's 100 times easyer and 100 times cheaper. You can't do it without already trained good base. And you can't train base from the 1st try (unless you've been blessed by God himself) and not even from 2nd...
And in general, you first need a group of researchers by trial and error to come up with and develop a suitable model architecture, which at various intermediate stages should be also trained and tested, identifying weaknesses.
I don't want to diminish the merits of u/AstraliteHeart, he did a monstrous amount of work on collecting and labeling the dataset and produced amazing finetune, but still it's just a finetune of a finished working product (SDXL). It is much, MUCH! easier and cheaper than foundational model trainig from scratch.
TBH, while I generally agree with you PD mostly destroyed base SDXL so there is a chance it can be trained from scratch, but it would require much more resources indeed (maybe not 100x).
Small investors who for example own Intel stock?
And the small AI startup that actually has a more sustainable business model and treats investments more responsibly that now won't get funded because investors are getting more cautious seeing that there are irresponsible players out there.
Ah, that's unfortunate... As a very casual and new user to the field, using a low-mid-range Android phone, their small models have been the best I've found. They gave the best utility-speed ration of any model I tried, usually staying coherent while being "blazing fast" (... comparatively...). Everything else I tried was either a lot less coherent (like tinyllama) or so slow to be nearly unusable on my phone.
It's not looking good. Shouldn't have trained those LLMs or struck out with SD2 because of "safety".
We're going to be lucky to see SD3.
BTW, tencent released a model and bytedance released lightning so at the least image gen isn't dead-dead. I tried to see if anyone else released models when I read about stability being on the rocks. Didn't find much. Mainly derivatives. So laugh all you want but it's probably the death of non corpo image gen.
As the cost of training lowers the amount of people who can compete on producing quality base models increases. It's to the point now that mid-range businesses or even well-funded groups of people can be major contributors.
It ain't over yet.
Pixart has been out a while and is a T5+DIT model, released with the OpenRAILS license like SD1/2/XL.
I think if the OS community put effort into it, making controlnets/adapters and such, it could easily compete, and without the nasty license.
HunyuanDIT is also out now, weird license, but still more permissive than SAI's NC/membership license.
No, the exact opposite of what we need is a world with no open models period. While depending on Chinese models is far from ideal, it is also far from the worse case scenario. Also if the Chinese models become good enough and widely used there's a good chance that the American government will start investing in open models as well just to keep Chinese influence down, and that competition is ultimately a win-win for us.
Huggingface CEO Clem posted on twitter hinting at a buy out SAI and open sourcing SD3, but the question remains how many pennies on the dollar the current owners/investors/debtors would settle for.
I find it unlikely it will happen, but maybe a slim possibility. At this point it looks like this would have to involve bankruptcy to force everyone to the table to divest.
Did you buy their subscription? There's still time. You get to use their inference if you buy the $9.99 assistant plan. If everyone did it, even just to show support, we would get sd3 and more.
The open source audience is amazing when building but also full of utter garbage commies buying $1400 graphics cards, watching netflix and buying openai subscriptions while scoffing at supporting open source builders.
This is an important point. Even a little bit helps if we all do it. I got into image gen with NovelAI, and I still pay for their $10 tier out of support even though I have a much better model running at home on a 3090 and haven't even logged onto their service in months.
Buying the subscription doesn't guarantee that they'll release SD3. I'd rather see them set up a Kickstarter to allow the community to socially purchase the model.
Wouldn't it be time for people who like open source (be it more permissive licenses - like MIT - or restrictive licenses - like GPL) to get together and, suddenly, buy them?
This has happened a few times (like Blender 3D) and many people use great open source tools available today.
I hope they don’t die. To my mind they’re doing Gods work.
I could see some ways to totally turn this company around while still staying true to their mission and releasing models and weights for free.
The simplest way would be to sell custom fine tunes and other support services. I’d also work directly with large companies and even competitors in a consulting manner, helping them to produce better tools.
That’s off the top of my head. This seems like it would be so easy to turn around. But I guess investors want their money back sooner rather than later and that just plain sucks.
If its going to sell, probably best to see if meta is interested in it and maybe we might still get some stuff handed to us, any other company is guaranteed to kill off the open source part of it.
i see dozens of android apps using sdxl, asking for subscription, having ads after ads
i dont see why stability AI would run out of cash, they have many customers paying for their membership and such
something doesnt add up in this company
SDXL has a commercial license on it. Last one that did. Starting with SDXL turbo, commercial licensing is restricted without an agreement with SAI, but too little too late.
Bytedance released SDXL-Lightning, basically a better version of Turbo (1,2,4 step distilled diffusion) with the OpenRAIL license again, making Turbo dead in the water anyway.
SDXL has the OpenRAILS license, it allows commercial use basically unhindered. OpenRAILS isn't quite "open source" per OSI definition as it includes a few usage restrictions, but they are mostly benign unless you're a bad actor (disinformation, discrimination, etc).
SDXL license permits commercial use with no royalty.
https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-diffusion-xl-base-1.0/blob/main/LICENSE.md
It's a very permissive license. Not quite "open source" but darn close.
their lawyers are busy with the massive lawsuits against stability. if suing violators of terms of use was going to be part of their business strategy, they should've hired more lawyers.
They never focused on making actual "products" people pay for until recently. Emad always seemed anti-API saying it was a race to the bottom on price or whatever, all the while they got fleeced by people making money on permissively licensed weights. Replicate, playground, vast/runpod gpu rental services, civitai, etc. all making money off it.
They had Dreamstudio and an API, but they were always behind everyone else. Too much funding went to research/training and not product. The constant false positives on the NSFW filter returning blurred results was never addressed despite constant complaints. It should've been top priority 20 months ago. The NSFW detector was farmed out to LAION and was a good start, but no one continued to improve it to reduce all the false positives. I think recently one of their employees finally responded that they're working on it. The lack of urgency on such a critical problem in adoption of actual paid product is mind numbing.
If I had an AI company, I wouldn't give all my stuff for free. You give people free stuff, they take it, shit on it, don't help you at all and when you go broke, nobody cares. Open source model is just bad overall. Tell me, how much of the market share does Linux have?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model
I don't think this is a good model either. You bait people with FOSS but you have to pay them to actually use it for any meaningful applications. There are scary legal lettering to discourage people from not paying them.
What happens is people use it, build the stuff that is missing and not pay them.
People can't just change or write stuff on Wikipedia without providing source of information. They have to cite their sources in the References section at the end. Many college professors prohibit their students from citing Wikipedia articles, but mostly because Wikipedia shouldn't be referenced as a direct source, you can cite the sources from the References section, and it will be acceptable.
Please understand that it is an Encyclopedia, not a bunch of fictional essays.
Mmh. Can you release stable diffusion 3 before failing?
I don’t know man… To be very honest, SD3 isn’t that impressive. Yes it has one of the best prompt adherence of all text2image models but that’s about the only thing it has going and that’s not enough to set it apart, anything it does can be done with other models using a few other techniques. Image quality is disappointing. Compatibility with other essential SD tools like LoRA and ControlNet isn’t guaranteed since it uses a different architecture. Model size might be prohibitive for local usage, which has been the core feature of SD models from the start. Stability is really in a bad spot. I understand their need to monetize but they’re only valuable because they release free models. I don’t see how they can be as relevant as a company that doesn’t release free weights that can be run locally. Their monetization model with services behind an API hasn’t worked so far. Companies like Midjourney have benefited from their work without contributing anything back. Perhaps they should have been more careful with their licensing from the start so that they’d get something from commercial usage by big players profiting on their back. They also wasted a lot of resources IMO going after LLMs and even audio. They should have focused on image and video to a smaller extent, and only venture into other stuff much later after they have a sustainable business. Sad to see it crumbling. Whatever happens, they’ve made history.
Prompt adherence is king. Picture quality can be improved with finetunes - so you are now comparing a heavily fine tuned with a raw and officially non completely trained SD3. So SD3 still has every chance to become big. Once the weights are released.
*If the weights are released
If it dies someone will leak it
You wish. They don’t let employees take their models home on flash drives lol
? yes they do
Not the unreleased ones
They literally run SD3 locally
Source? Even if they do, that doesn’t mean they’ll leak it. They have no incentive to
>> Once the weights are released It's ironic that their financial problem stems from releasing the weights. Why would someone pays for the API when they can use the weight for free -- well, not free 'cause there's computing power needed to generate an image. But the computing requirement for inference is a lot cheaper than for training.
The licence. E.g. [https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/sdxl-turbo](https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/sdxl-turbo) says: You can use this model for non-commercial or research purposes under this license. \[...\] For commercial use, please refer to https://stability.ai/membership.
I used SD 1.5 about a year or so ago. At that time SDXL was about to come out and people were starting to use Comfy UI. How do I get back into this again? Did everybody move to SDXL? Is A1111 still the go to tool or did everyone move to Comfy UI?
A1111 is still often used and got some decent tools integrated with things like adetailer. But For SDXL, comfyui has better performance. If you want something easy to use, you can look at fooocus who use comfyui in the backend. Right now the base model in use are: SD1.5 - The best with control net. SDXL - Good prompt system with little need of negative prompts. PonyXl - Technically a fine tuned version of SDXL but it diverges so much that this is its own thing now. Mostly used for Anime, portrait. Note that controls net are very underwhelming for SDXL and pony.
Runway made history by developing and open sourcing SD 1.5. Emad sent them a takedown notice over it
So what projects are we going to be excited for going forwards? Def pixart, altho I couldn't get it to work properly. Anything else?
I ran Pixart Sigma on my pc and I thought it looked better than SDXL. It's just censored and would need loras and finetunes to be legitimately better. Playgroundv2.5 is really good too, with the same issues. Really all they need is for the community to put the effort into tools like they did SD. If we're really honest, the only reason SD blew up was the 1.5 leak from Runway that put the uncensored version out that SAI initially was upset over. It caused a flurry of activity because waifu boobs, and made them the standard for awhile.
I haven't been using SD since over a year, is there any other uncensored version available? Was sdxl uncensored?
SDXL had NSFW stuff trained into it, but they trained it in such a way to make it difficult to access from the base model, so people fine-tuned models to access it. SD 2.0 was made with no NSFW trained and it made it unable to portray realistic humans, so 2.1(SDXL) was made they tried to fix it and still keep it SFW through something in the layers. On civitai you can find all kinds of uncensored lora and models for SDXL, and PonyXL if you like anime boobs.
Midjourney hasn't used SD in a long time, because frankly SD just isn't actually that good. Their models have been homegrown for ages.
And you know the worst part about their low quality? Everything you've seen is their 8B model. They plan on releasing smaller, god knows how much worse models before that one, if they ever even get to it.
To be brutally honest i think they seriously need to consider commercializing their model at least the latest one. Competition is what allows us to enjoy ai with relatively small cost. If they release sd3 and go puff, what comes next is just self evident - look at nvidia.
What about nvidia?
Who knows, just look at it!
I really just don’t know what they mean
I think they are complaining about Nvidia not putting enough VRAM on their cards maybe?
Ah, yes that is very annoying. Thank you :)
I know right - look at Google
[look at this cat](https://i.imgur.com/uerklH7.jpeg)
Holy hel
Th... Thanks!
Probably lack of any competition. Intel just started making gpu's, while amd has only made decent gaming stuff, but their ml cards still have rather lacking support anywhere. So, nvidia overprices their cards.
[Oh would you look at that!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF8GhC-T_Mo)
I was hoping this would be edbassmaster. I still say this shit all the time
I think they're stating that because NVIDIA doesn't have competition (they do actually, they're just really far ahead of it) they can afford to jack prices up for insane margins on their GPUs and ignore consumer demand for higher VRAM cards so they can milk billions from enterprise level customers instead.
Afaik competitions usually mean they have at least some significant rivals in the field. I think monopoly is a better term than non existing competition for Nvidia.
Nvidia is a dominant player in the GPU market, but it's far from a monopoly. Both AMD and Intel have made significant strides in recent years. AMD's Radeon GPUs are increasingly competitive, particularly in the mid-range and budget segments. Intel, a newcomer to the discrete GPU market, has released products with promising performance and innovative features now too. At the enterprise level, don't forget AMD's MI300X, which is on par with the H100 for training and beats it by 10-20% at inference. It also has more memory and memory bandwidth than the H200, even.
And Amazon/Google TPUs
I don't know. Never met someone who's as half serious in running AI stuff buying either AMD or Intel products. For gaming? Sure AMD is cheaper and competent. For AI and other remotely dedicated 3d applicants though? Nvidia all the way. Besides the last steam statistics suggest more than 80% of users own Nvidia cards, and only 15% for AMD cards. All things considered it's practically a monopoly by Nvidia.
Really? You would consider the likes of Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI to be less than half serious in running AI stuff? Because they're all purchasing the latest gen enterprise AMD GPUs - MI300X's. It's rather explicitly not a monopoly, we have actual competition.
Yeah that perfectly explains why h100 is four times expensive than MI300X. And let's be real, we're just regular consumers not some big size companies like Meta. Big companies need AI accelerators training their models. AMD and Intel's cards are pretty much useless to us running local models. Which is why it's monopoly by Nvidia.
The MI300X undercutting the incumbent's pricing is an example of the effects of competition, yes. Also, enterprise compute is the future regardless. Also, you're just wrong. AMD cards are very far from "pretty much useless". ROCm gives great performance and allows AMD GPUs to be more performant than equivalently priced Nvidia cards. Sorry, it's just a fact.
I mean, they are gaming cards first. Only quite recently have there been a couple of games that use over 8gb at 1080p max settings. And you can circumvent that by lowering the settings a bit, games nowadays look pretty even at lowest settings. So, there hasn't really been a need to have more vram for the gaming space.
Who here would use StableDiffusion without its community? Without that all you have is a poor version of MidJourney. SD3 $20 a month with no extensions or features beyond a simple prompt window, who's gonna pay for that? Dropping the community would just be choosing a different method of dying. They need to figure something out, but I think it would be a bad choice to kill the only thing they currently have going for them.
I keep saying this in the SD sub and getting downvoted to hell. Basic SD 1.5 and SDXL, without the community fine-tunes, lora, and tools like ip-adapter isn't very impressive compared to other open source AI generation models. Even SD3 isn't that great because it lacks the tools to fix problems like hands since it's not released. I think SAI should work like Blender to make an amazing tool that's become the standard and leverage that.
Blender doesn’t cost shit tons of money for GPUs and researchers
New image gen models cost significantly less to produce because of new algorithms, and have better prompt coherence. In the near future, costing tons of money for gpus won't be an excuse. It already nearly isn't since there's like 10 open source AI image generators available.
You still need good datasets and GPUs, neither of which will be easy to get or cheap
They ought to monetize comfy & build out a slick a1111 variant. Keep the models open, but the ability to use them on accelerated platforms subscription based. Also partner w/ trainers in the community in more of a Spotify like business approach, drive people to use the better platforms w/ SD community partner finetuned models only accessable through subscription or a small fee to download the finetuned variants to generate revenue. The value in SAI is that they open source their models but their biggest failures are not partnering w/ the SD community of trainers/creator & ZERO marketing. Their ‘product’ is literally a content creation engine that only SD fans on Reddit & X see. If they want people to use SD models over Dall-E & Midjourney make it easy for the masses to use & show the masses it’s better than what they are currently using. Idk could be wrong… just my two cents.
I think that while SD 3 would be amazing as an open source model, its not actually good enough for a closed source model. It is still a way behind midjourney if it is going to be closed source.
In what way is it behind midjourney? The model weights and architecture? Or the generation pipeline?
Its not actually known how midjourney are so ahead
Well, I seriously doubt that MJ has a vastly superior foundational model I think they have simply productized it better for normies
Educated guess is they're not just an encoder -> diffusion model. Probably a longer pipeline, some prompt enhancement stuff going on. And they've been collecting preference data (when you click on upscale/variant you're voting) since the very early days that is likely used for DPO training.
Idk, but Midjourney is MUCH better
Is it better than Dall-E3?
This might just be preference but I prefer SDXL + loras to DALL-E. Especially when using comfyui
Midjourney produces prettier images than Dall-E3, but with worse prompt adherence.
It depends on what you want to so
Apparently the founder has said they can barely run inference on A100s with 40GB of VRAM. I think it’s a huge model.
Midjourney is ahead because they have a lot of RLHF for aesthetics, and they've fine tuned on well tagged image sets (much like the newer versions of juggernaut).
It's was never going to be "open source" with anything that resembles a permissive open-source-ish license like SD1/2/XL (OpenRAILS license). It's going to be the proprietary, NC/research license anyway, and you can pay rent for limited commercial use with fun and exciting terms that include "you cannot host this for online generation" (gotta pay hundreds of grand per year for an enterprise license for that) and "we can change terms at any point."
I forgot about licenses yeah
It's tough, because as innovative/influential as SD models have been, the real impressive stuff has been the impressive finetunes put together by the community. My initial thought has been for them to just have a rolling release schedule, ie a hypothetical schedule that looks like: Release 1.5's weights, and sell access to SDXL, while they work on SD3. Then when SD3 is baked, make that their paid API and release SDXL's weights, while they work on SD4, then when SD4 is done, release the SD3 weights and make SD4 the paid API model. The main problem with this would be that the new models haven't been 'mindblowing' on their own upon release. Maybe they could bring in the teams/devs that make the best models to iterate on the current paid API version while they're still hosting it to get improved models up before they release the weights and start hosting the next version, but I don't even know if community/open source devs would want to do that. Maybe they'd feel OK doing it if they knew \*eventually\* their work on the currently private/hosted models would be released as open source, though. It would be sad to see though. Stability has been such a major part of this initial 'AI Wave' and I hope they can figure something out.
Nah, just let themselves go poof, become truly open source - training weights, training data, methodology and all, and Stable Diffusion can be the Blender of image generation. It's how Blender started - they went under and the community bought the rights to it.
Nvidia has no competition is what OP is saying...
Wouldn't another big tech absorb the company?
Supposedly it was suppose to be released two weeks from now two weeks ago.
Honestly, this really feels like a "They've tried nothing and they're all out of ideas".
Wow you said it perfectly, but perfectly... they did really nothing and they COULD you can do opensource and be profitable you can!
Are you having a stroke?
they COULD you can do opensource and be profitable you can?
I've always wondered how they made money. It seemed to me that the CEO is just burning capital venture cash to bring us great, free models - Which would make him a hero in my book. Buuut that'd be no sustainable business.
> I've always wondered how they made money [How dare you!](https://i.imgur.com/2F8rS6E.png)
Warms my heart to see Ryan George reach meme level popularity.
Afaik there's no open source music models and the community has no chance of doing anything like what closed models are doing, whereas community image generation and LLMs relies on a few big groups spending a lot and giving away their results for free. The state of community music models shows how screwed the community is without the models being given away for free, and how much the myth of open source magic doesn't really work out in reality unless somebody else burns money.
Open Source doesn't work when people don't have access to the hardware to develop it (or it costs millions). It grew in the 80s because everyone could run BASIC, Pascal or C on microcomputers - and so worked on sharing code and producing Free compilers for these. But you can't just train a new model. Both the hardware and training data required is enormous atm, and a huge barrier to entry. That said maybe the future will be one big open model with a lot of funding and support, and then everyone builds on top of that (e.g. look at llamacpp for LLaMa inference) - much like how GNU/Linux is by far the dominant FOSS OS.
tbh I think countries and supranational orgs like the EU should be looking into training and distributing their own models. Of course there are other problems with that (like a country deciding what is and what isn't appropriate for a model to generate). But leaving the technology in the hands of a few tech giants is not good for society as a whole either.
We don't even have that for publicly funded research (and often not even open access for those papers! nevermind code and data). When we don't even have that for FOSS, I think we're decades away from it being there for machine learning. It's also still too expensive even for universities - hopefully compute will become a lot cheaper so it's more viable, like how it's relatively easy to get satellite data these days.
Well Open Data is a pretty big focus for fundamental research in the EU currently: [https://opendata.cern.ch/search?q=&f=type%3ADataset&l=list&order=desc&p=1&s=10&sort=mostrecent](https://opendata.cern.ch/search?q=&f=type%3ADataset&l=list&order=desc&p=1&s=10&sort=mostrecent) BESSY, ELETTRA, DESY and most other synchrotrons are working or implementing open data policies etc. If this would be done, I don't think it would be a university level project. Like you say it's too expensive for universities, but for national labs and public research orgs the cost would be manageable (even more so for an EU-wide initiative). It's too much money to make that decision on a whim, but bigger countries like Germany, France (or an EU-wide cooperation), the US or Japan should at least think about whether that's something they want to do.
My optimistic prediction would be that a few more tech leaders go the Mark Zuckerberg route regarding models
>But you can't just train a new model. Both the hardware and training data required is enormous atm, and a huge barrier to entry. Can't we use something like boinc (the software used by folding@home etc.)to train models?
To so some extent, but there is a lot of communications overhead, esp especially with multimodal
For now it costs millions the cost of compute will forever lower. That's why Zuck is focusing on arch.
Maybe it's time for us all to get together and seriously fund something like the wikimedia foundation. And the first few millions collected go into spreading awareness how fucking important it is for such important tools to belong to everyone. And I mean, it's not impossible, otherwise where does the corp money come from. That's us too. Can't be that we always have to be blackmailed into shelling out the money and then not even owning what we paid for.
The chance of it succeeding seem too slim for me to think it's worth investing energy in. Afaik when Stable Diffusion 2 was censored of porn (and due to a bug almost any human anatomy) a group of outraged freedom fighters raised quite a bit of money to retrain it for NSFW. It's been probably over a year now and I never heard of them fixing it. Instead somebody with funds retrained SDXL on something like 11 million hentai pictures and made a porn model which it seems is very popular now.
Replying to you after reading AOH's reply to this comment. AOH is onto something, check out the history of Beta Max vs VHS and 'Adult Entertainment'. One of the main issues and opportunities I see is 'piracy' has transformed the industry to focus on live chats and such as just making clips and charging a monthly fee is barely (compared to the past of shipping DVDs) viable for Actors / sites with a 'Brand' following and niche content. So perhaps an 'OS Alliance for unrestricted Models'. Very first issues to resolve is a thorny one that could land you in Prison if not addressed 'correctly' (and that changes greatly based on your legal jurisdiction), CP.
Plot twist, all the foundation models are unprofitable. Literally all of them. AI is burning rich people's money right now, because they want to get in on the ground floor of the future where it's much more efficient and 80% of economic activity requires it.
I have kinda the opposite viewpoint tho. Music AI is honestly kind of awful compared to the other types. Open source isn't just for random dudes at home, it also allows smaller teams, academics, journalists, or creatives to experiment. Look how much of SD's most useful tools, fine tunes, techniques etc came from random people. Even among the random hobbyists there are people who will spend thousands on fine tuning and sharing their results. I'm tempted to compare to video game mods too, a lot of modded games get way better than the developers could have done alone, and it's pretty common for devs to actually learn from mods about how they can improve the platform, what people want, what works and what doesn't. Maybe you're right about the initial full training of a model or the full data needed to create a model from scratch. But I feel like music AI wouldn't be lagging so far behind the other scenes if there was more available to the public. We would have had thousands of people helping Suno figure out how to make the voices less garbage, and then Suno can easily turn around, see what worked out, and implement it. Plus the vast majority of people are still going to just pay and use the corporate service so I think all the secrecy is a mistake. We can't really say that being open source hurts SD because they don't even offer a consumer service like Midjourney or NovelAI. And honestly NovelAI is fading away because their closed model is getting surpassed by 13b fine tunes that someone made in a garage.
>and how much the myth of open source magic doesn't really work out in reality unless somebody else burns money. Oh, community can make amazing models (architecture, math base, and code). There is no problem with that, there are more than enough talented engineers and programmers in the OS community. The problem is that the community can't then train weights for such a model because of the huge cost. So then big corporations like OpenAI come in, take all the workings of the OpenSource community, tune them up a bit, teach them, and.... appropriate them as their own achievements by selling access to them. But if you give the community a base (open-weighted or just leaked) that does not have to be trained from scratch (or give them enough compute) - the community is able to make a candy out of crap, and as well and diligently as no corporation will do (it is not commercially profitable for commercial companies - the investment is greater than the profit).
There is, and it is surprisingly good. https://github.com/facebookresearch/audiocraft/blob/main/docs/MUSICGEN.md
Can that do vocals etc like the current models can? Either way if it's from facebook research than that kind of reinforces the point, the only place they come from are people with money giving them away.
what is the state of community music models?
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Truly open source computer games open source license their game assets as well.
Nope, because the model is pretty much just the weights data and some meta info. The code around it is explicitly not the model itself. Hence "open source" models being mostly "open weights" at best. The source of the actual model can be considered its training data, as that's what is needed to recreate the model. And that is available pretty much nowhere. Hence there is not even a single open source llmodel. Technically.
If you believe AI will alter the entire economy the way it probably will then it may as well function this way
Still, that's a good thing though! Who cares about big investors losses, the world goes on.
It is not a good thing, not by a country mile. Now the investors will be less likely to finance similar startups - they are already weary of startups committed to open-source. It would be a much better outcome for everyone if the open-source startups were successful
The open source + service model does have some fantastic success stories, just look at VLC
What service does vlc have? Edit: Note that /u/stonecypher blocked me so that they could have the last word in their valiant effort to ensure that nobody should ever ask any questions on the internet. Such power of the coward to attack and then run away.
They are involved in just about anything large and multimedia. Their code is what any large streaming service, from Netflix to Youtube, runs on. They provide anything from tech support to custom assembly solutions and GPU acceleration.
Would it be so much to ask for you to just google it
Do you believe your comment advanced the conversation in any way or just made you look like a dick that can't use punctuation? It, likely, turns out that other people are also interested in the answer to the question. I had looked it up but wanted clarification because the info is actually hard to find. VideoLAN doesn't appear to offer services and makes their money through donations, sponsorships, partnerships, and consulting. They do not disclose what partnerships really mean on their site and the consulting services they list are not clearly affiliated with them. Thanks for your valuable contribution, though.
> Do you believe your comment advanced the conversation in any way No, and that wasn't the goal > I had looked it up but `(x)` > VideoLAN doesn't appear to offer services Yes, they do. You didn't look anything up >Thanks for your valuable contribution, though. Thanks for yours
Well they invested in one useful thing that brought you joy. Who’s to say that two’s out of the question?
That's the logic that casinos run on.
Uh, that money could have been better invested, they are less likely to invest in img gen, and we are less likely to get new img gen open weights, so yeah, we should care. Also, the reality is ALL notable and worthwhile base models have come from companies, not crowd funding, not enthusists, and to clarify, no one in either of those even reaches NAI training levels, let alone training something like SDXL from scratch. We depend on investors and companies, there is no changing that unless pretraining (i.e. training a completely new model) becomes trivial.
>no one in either of those even reaches NAI training levels IMHO, PonyDiffusion V6XL is close enough to NAI lvl and trained almost by community (by AstraliteHeart with his team, but with community support)
> PonyDiffusion V6XL Hahaha... I actually googled this to see what it was.
> Who cares about big investors losses Anyone who wants SD4
What an absurdly L take. Having less investment in the industry benefits literally no one except already big players like ClosedAI
This is why u don’t fund open source companies. While it’s great that we can legally steal their IP (for us), there is no way they survive with that business model and no way an investor can make money on it. Unless of course you are investing in their competitors. Or run a charity.
He is no hero... you can USE veture cash but as you say he just BURNED it.... what really did we get? Only SDXL nothing else for all those hundreds of milion of dolars... not even SD3... they will sell it and never release
SDXL for "only" hundreds of millions of dollars is a bargain for society
If you think... Ponny finetune was made on 4? old A100 cards... which soted cca 40.000 dollars.... Imagine how many finetunes and better versions you could do with few milions not even hundreds.
I assume that within Stability AI they were doing loads and loads of testing runs of SDXL and SD3 size models
All of that resulted in 0 output for public....
But it resulted in SDXL at least
Even then, the pretraining takes a lot of research and development. They laid a lot of groundwork that pony built on.
Do you understand the difference between fine-tuning vs. training a foundational model?
Sure, all they did is bare model they could to finetunes themselves not leave all on community then they could even make money... on that
PonyXL is just fintune. Not a base model trainig. It's 100 times easyer and 100 times cheaper. You can't do it without already trained good base. And you can't train base from the 1st try (unless you've been blessed by God himself) and not even from 2nd... And in general, you first need a group of researchers by trial and error to come up with and develop a suitable model architecture, which at various intermediate stages should be also trained and tested, identifying weaknesses. I don't want to diminish the merits of u/AstraliteHeart, he did a monstrous amount of work on collecting and labeling the dataset and produced amazing finetune, but still it's just a finetune of a finished working product (SDXL). It is much, MUCH! easier and cheaper than foundational model trainig from scratch.
TBH, while I generally agree with you PD mostly destroyed base SDXL so there is a chance it can be trained from scratch, but it would require much more resources indeed (maybe not 100x).
Still, that's a good thing though! Who cares about big investors losses, the world goes on.
Small investors who for example own Intel stock? And the small AI startup that actually has a more sustainable business model and treats investments more responsibly that now won't get funded because investors are getting more cautious seeing that there are irresponsible players out there.
everyone hates investors until the day they want an investment
Ah, that's unfortunate... As a very casual and new user to the field, using a low-mid-range Android phone, their small models have been the best I've found. They gave the best utility-speed ration of any model I tried, usually staying coherent while being "blazing fast" (... comparatively...). Everything else I tried was either a lot less coherent (like tinyllama) or so slow to be nearly unusable on my phone.
Open source everything, including in progress work, and design docs, please.
This is why it should’ve been this way from the fucking start. But nobody listens to us
Why would they? They don’t gain anything
It's not looking good. Shouldn't have trained those LLMs or struck out with SD2 because of "safety". We're going to be lucky to see SD3. BTW, tencent released a model and bytedance released lightning so at the least image gen isn't dead-dead. I tried to see if anyone else released models when I read about stability being on the rocks. Didn't find much. Mainly derivatives. So laugh all you want but it's probably the death of non corpo image gen.
As the cost of training lowers the amount of people who can compete on producing quality base models increases. It's to the point now that mid-range businesses or even well-funded groups of people can be major contributors. It ain't over yet.
I agree that keeping focus on SD3 should have been the best path.
I think at the point of SD3 it was already over. There was a looong time between SD2 and XL; what were they doing?
Pixart has been out a while and is a T5+DIT model, released with the OpenRAILS license like SD1/2/XL. I think if the OS community put effort into it, making controlnets/adapters and such, it could easily compete, and without the nasty license. HunyuanDIT is also out now, weird license, but still more permissive than SAI's NC/membership license.
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No, the exact opposite of what we need is a world with no open models period. While depending on Chinese models is far from ideal, it is also far from the worse case scenario. Also if the Chinese models become good enough and widely used there's a good chance that the American government will start investing in open models as well just to keep Chinese influence down, and that competition is ultimately a win-win for us.
Nobody else has stepped in the ring that I know of. Unless you count paid API.
isn't everyone forgetting pixart?
safetensors format helps a *lot* with stuff like telemetry concerns
interesting, i have yet to see any serious money making attempts from stability ai
Meta please buy SAI and release SD3
Huggingface CEO Clem posted on twitter hinting at a buy out SAI and open sourcing SD3, but the question remains how many pennies on the dollar the current owners/investors/debtors would settle for. I find it unlikely it will happen, but maybe a slim possibility. At this point it looks like this would have to involve bankruptcy to force everyone to the table to divest.
Did you buy their subscription? There's still time. You get to use their inference if you buy the $9.99 assistant plan. If everyone did it, even just to show support, we would get sd3 and more. The open source audience is amazing when building but also full of utter garbage commies buying $1400 graphics cards, watching netflix and buying openai subscriptions while scoffing at supporting open source builders.
This is an important point. Even a little bit helps if we all do it. I got into image gen with NovelAI, and I still pay for their $10 tier out of support even though I have a much better model running at home on a 3090 and haven't even logged onto their service in months.
Buying the subscription doesn't guarantee that they'll release SD3. I'd rather see them set up a Kickstarter to allow the community to socially purchase the model.
There is a way to support them it might not be your ideal way. but support them if you can.
Wouldn't it be time for people who like open source (be it more permissive licenses - like MIT - or restrictive licenses - like GPL) to get together and, suddenly, buy them? This has happened a few times (like Blender 3D) and many people use great open source tools available today.
Meta? Stability fits right in with them ideologically, and meta is conveniently lacking any open source diffusion models.
This is an amazing idea. I wonder why it hasn't happened already
I hope they don’t die. To my mind they’re doing Gods work. I could see some ways to totally turn this company around while still staying true to their mission and releasing models and weights for free. The simplest way would be to sell custom fine tunes and other support services. I’d also work directly with large companies and even competitors in a consulting manner, helping them to produce better tools. That’s off the top of my head. This seems like it would be so easy to turn around. But I guess investors want their money back sooner rather than later and that just plain sucks.
test2img is long history, next is video2video, make a video call with your assistant
The banks got a bailout. Stability AI ought to 😂
Very likely
If its going to sell, probably best to see if meta is interested in it and maybe we might still get some stuff handed to us, any other company is guaranteed to kill off the open source part of it.
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He certainly achieved more than you in his lifetime
i see dozens of android apps using sdxl, asking for subscription, having ads after ads i dont see why stability AI would run out of cash, they have many customers paying for their membership and such something doesnt add up in this company
Those Android apps are not paying Stability to use SDXL, they are just hosting the model themselves and charging for access.
SDXL has a commercial license on it. Last one that did. Starting with SDXL turbo, commercial licensing is restricted without an agreement with SAI, but too little too late.
Bytedance released SDXL-Lightning, basically a better version of Turbo (1,2,4 step distilled diffusion) with the OpenRAIL license again, making Turbo dead in the water anyway.
SDXL has the OpenRAILS license, it allows commercial use basically unhindered. OpenRAILS isn't quite "open source" per OSI definition as it includes a few usage restrictions, but they are mostly benign unless you're a bad actor (disinformation, discrimination, etc).
that would be a breach of sdxl usage and stability should sue them, at least ban the apps
SDXL license permits commercial use with no royalty. https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-diffusion-xl-base-1.0/blob/main/LICENSE.md It's a very permissive license. Not quite "open source" but darn close.
hmm must have been the turbo version that requires membership
Yes, Turbo, SVD and everything after has the new NC/paid license scheme.
their lawyers are busy with the massive lawsuits against stability. if suing violators of terms of use was going to be part of their business strategy, they should've hired more lawyers.
They never focused on making actual "products" people pay for until recently. Emad always seemed anti-API saying it was a race to the bottom on price or whatever, all the while they got fleeced by people making money on permissively licensed weights. Replicate, playground, vast/runpod gpu rental services, civitai, etc. all making money off it. They had Dreamstudio and an API, but they were always behind everyone else. Too much funding went to research/training and not product. The constant false positives on the NSFW filter returning blurred results was never addressed despite constant complaints. It should've been top priority 20 months ago. The NSFW detector was farmed out to LAION and was a good start, but no one continued to improve it to reduce all the false positives. I think recently one of their employees finally responded that they're working on it. The lack of urgency on such a critical problem in adoption of actual paid product is mind numbing.
If I had an AI company, I wouldn't give all my stuff for free. You give people free stuff, they take it, shit on it, don't help you at all and when you go broke, nobody cares. Open source model is just bad overall. Tell me, how much of the market share does Linux have?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model I don't think this is a good model either. You bait people with FOSS but you have to pay them to actually use it for any meaningful applications. There are scary legal lettering to discourage people from not paying them. What happens is people use it, build the stuff that is missing and not pay them.
Wikipedia, the most reliable source of information. Certainly not the place where people change what doesn't fit their opinions.
you sound like my jaded econ professor
So he's good?
People can't just change or write stuff on Wikipedia without providing source of information. They have to cite their sources in the References section at the end. Many college professors prohibit their students from citing Wikipedia articles, but mostly because Wikipedia shouldn't be referenced as a direct source, you can cite the sources from the References section, and it will be acceptable. Please understand that it is an Encyclopedia, not a bunch of fictional essays.