[lt]

It's a little confusing, but as far as a understand it, Stable Diffusion was created by a collaboration between RunwayML and Compvis (aka Machine Vision and Learning research group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) with Stability.AI funding the computing power for training and LAION.AI (also funded by Stability.AI) providing the dataset.

The first few releases of model and code have been done by Compvis, and this one by RunwayML. More than permitted by the license, this seems to have been released by the actual developers.

I've seen speculation that it has been released this way to provide distance between Stability.AI from eventual future litigations, but it feels more like an internal ultimatum deadline.

[gpderetta]

> I've seen speculation that it has been released this way to provide distance between Stability.AI from eventual future litigations, but it feels more like an internal ultimatum deadline.

It could be both. A company it is not necessarily a monolithic entity.