Calling them "the" company behind Stable Diffusion is pushing it. Just Stable Diffusion the model, but not the idea, maybe.
As far as I know they pretty much just paid for servers to train a big shiny model on that was based on research they had no hand in. Throwing money at researchers after they came up with something good, just to let them build a big shiny version of it, does not retroactively make their accomplishments yours.
Basically they hold no rights to anything relevant, no patents, no secret sauce, nothing. Them going under after exhausting their money will hardly have any effect.
Stable diffusion is just the "brand" of the diffusion generative model, just like Midjourney.
If you look at the stable-diffusion repo, it says that SD is based off a colab with StabilityAI and Runway.
Most of the value from these models is the training + dataset. The architecture is open source, and we've had flavours of it for several years. SD has some improvements on how it handles diffusions, but most architecture out there use about the same, but with wildly different results.
We’ve had, what, over two years of “basically free” image generation? (Dall-E 1 was Jan 21.) All the major players (OpenAI, Microsoft, Stability, Midjourney) offer free image generation and you only pay for large amounts.
There is a ton of momentum behind the general public’s belief and perception that image generation is free for small uses and cheap for large uses. Most of the other players can afford to keep those losing prices for a long time, too. I think it’s going to be an uphill battle to charge for image generation at amounts that turn a profit. I wouldn’t rule out a more creative way of monetizing it, but the obvious routes look unlikely.
Midjourney has stopped offering free generation. I made all of three or four images and now it is saying they don't have capacity for free trials anymore.
Just a question but is it ever profitable to base a company around an open source product the way SD is? Why would anyone pay money to use the company's model when some guys on Reddit is distributing a similar product, albeit with lower performance, for free, that can be run locally?
What would be the incentive for a person, not a company, to pay Stability AI company instead of downloading and doing a bit of setup to have their own uncensored model?
None of these companies are really directly concerned about profitability. Right now the leaders in ML models are going to be defined by those who have the most capital available to train newer and better models. And the quickest way to get that capital is largely getting investors on board. From that perspective it’s quite rational to release something publicly in a way that is likely to raise the profile of your company. Especially in a world where your main competitors will be training their own models anyways.
Research for the model was done by the CompVis at LMU Munich.
Curating the data set was supported by Laion, a German non profit and Eluther, also a non profit.
I do not know the details, but based on the fact that some of the orgs involved in the project literally exists to democratise ai, I believe that many of the stake holders in that project were adamant about open sourcing it.
I think there's a lot of "open core" stuff like Sentry, Tailscale (I think?), or Gitlab. Where "enough" of the house is given away in theory for you to do it yourself (but why would you do that?)
Metabase is another company I knew where they do this, but I don't know how successful they are (their hosting costs start at "way too high considering how easy the thing is to spin up", which was great for me at $PREV_JOB I suppose but)
We should outlaw government spending on closed source, non public domain software. That would create a huge market for open source companies to thrive. Would be a win win for everyone (except the current closed vendors who provide government with crap software and get sucker taxpayers to foot the bill).
without a stable source of revenue, cutting costs mean nothing. What are they selling, and why isn't there buyers?
A business cannot survive without revenue, and revenue only comes from people who want to buy something from you that they cannot otherwise get else where.
I applaud StabilityAI for releasing SD for free. They could've done what openAI did, and monetized it (which other diffusion model services are doing). By releasing it for free, stabilityAI contributed to the common good. Unfortunately, if there's nothing else that can be sold as a product, they cannot be sustainable.
An alternative, which i'm not too big a fan of, is collectivization of AI models, and make it a global commons for which taxpayers will fund.
It seems like mandating just a tiny bit of usage data back to the model would give SD a massive lead on training data, but I'm not an expert. Maybe that's happening already.
Like, example. I use SD in Blender sometimes as part of the compositor. I have maybe a 10% acceptance rate for SD output: sometimes the water isn't right, or the clouds look goofy, or something keeps getting rendered as an anime pillow for some godforsaken reason. If SD captured my prompt history and some of the final model tweaks between runs, they could ostensibly get really solid HITL test data. Then they could be the curator of that "super model" which they could upsell, maybe along with very high rez stuff, or a higher priority on jobs. Again, not an expert, so who knows. And also, having the model local, that gives you back some of the same benefits, but without the scale.
Not too surprised about funding issues from the casual answer.
I’m not saying it was bad to self fund a project, but having to choosing between your life and fun (and potentially very profitable) projects is not easy.
Note that stability have been funding freelance researcher by providing compute resource such as RWKV[1], Open Assistant, some works by LAION[2] and lucidrains[3]
In a gold rush, sell shovels. And Nvidia's stock price bump reflects that.
This time around though, the means of production are available to anybody with a credit card, and AWS/GCP/Azure throw credits at startups that apply, just to have them locked into their cloud. Break free of the chains of work, with generative pretrained transformers!
Stable Diffusion was obviously never intended to make money, but as a Napster-style maneuver to enclose all image data on the internet through AI picture generation. They release something to the public that would get sued into oblivion were it done by an established company, but oops, the genie is out of the bottle, what you gonna do, the only choice now is to restrict it to a few power players who can actually do the necessary rights management. Artists and photographers will get the same shit deal musicians did in the streaming era, i.e. an algorithmically determined pittance for use of their work. Don’t like it? Oh well, either settle for that or people will fine-tune a pirate model on your work in half an hour!
It’s going to be so much easier to push these models out to the edge if they are open source (see ggml, diffusion bee etc).
This won’t be possible without accelerator compute for training. Open source developers can’t afford this compute.
Apple benefits because they can deploy on iOS devices. Amazon benefits because they can tarball the models and sell it as a managed service.
I don’t think either wants to be in the business of figuring out which researchers is going to use the compute for deep fakes or for the next big model.
So something like Stability should exist, Amazon and Apple should figure out how to make that happen.
We're going to see a lot more of this. Companies using practically free debt to 'grow' fast with no actual real path to profitability, suddenly finding it hard to repay debt and attract new 'rounds.'
There's a heap of bad banks and terrible debt floating around, the golden goose has been cooked. Turns out risks aren't just things you can ignore for 'growth.'
Very unsurprising, as I said before on unprofitable AI companies doing it all themselves and running out of money quicker. [0] They will probably run back to VCs again to attempt to raise money at a lower valuation.
Focusing on hype and growth over profitability and burning hundreds of millions of VC cash on data scientists and AWS for training, fine-tuning AI models. This is even before mentioning the mounting lawsuits they are already facing.
The inefficient training of deep learning models is unsustainable for these pre-profit companies.
That’s why they need to push UBI harder. They’ll just do it in private as always have been and we will lose everything overnight. Next day you useless human beings in gulag or unit 731.
chmod775|2 years ago
As far as I know they pretty much just paid for servers to train a big shiny model on that was based on research they had no hand in. Throwing money at researchers after they came up with something good, just to let them build a big shiny version of it, does not retroactively make their accomplishments yours.
Basically they hold no rights to anything relevant, no patents, no secret sauce, nothing. Them going under after exhausting their money will hardly have any effect.
m00x|2 years ago
If you look at the stable-diffusion repo, it says that SD is based off a colab with StabilityAI and Runway.
Most of the value from these models is the training + dataset. The architecture is open source, and we've had flavours of it for several years. SD has some improvements on how it handles diffusions, but most architecture out there use about the same, but with wildly different results.
UncleEntity|2 years ago
Which is their business model.
Provide compute to people who can’t afford compute so the only people doing AI research aren’t doing so behind closed doors.
Now, it seems, giving away your product isn’t all that profitable and they need to “pivot” to find a way to keep the business running.
Judging from the interview posted elsewhere in the discussion they make no claim to be inventing anything but just wanted to democratize AI research.
ShamelessC|2 years ago
fwlr|2 years ago
There is a ton of momentum behind the general public’s belief and perception that image generation is free for small uses and cheap for large uses. Most of the other players can afford to keep those losing prices for a long time, too. I think it’s going to be an uphill battle to charge for image generation at amounts that turn a profit. I wouldn’t rule out a more creative way of monetizing it, but the obvious routes look unlikely.
revelio|2 years ago
tomohelix|2 years ago
What would be the incentive for a person, not a company, to pay Stability AI company instead of downloading and doing a bit of setup to have their own uncensored model?
dwallin|2 years ago
niemandhier|2 years ago
I do not know the details, but based on the fact that some of the orgs involved in the project literally exists to democratise ai, I believe that many of the stake holders in that project were adamant about open sourcing it.
rtpg|2 years ago
Metabase is another company I knew where they do this, but I don't know how successful they are (their hosting costs start at "way too high considering how easy the thing is to spin up", which was great for me at $PREV_JOB I suppose but)
breck|2 years ago
nonfamous|2 years ago
seanpquig|2 years ago
Ologn|2 years ago
orra|2 years ago
The Stable Diffusion models are proprietary freeware, not open source.
I wonder if, then, Stability AI wanted to sell license exceptions—namely, the ability to use the software for amoral and (mildly) immoral uses.
ilaksh|2 years ago
slashdev|2 years ago
[deleted]
stabilityfan1|2 years ago
Nobody benefits from their failure.
If Runway and Stability can cut costs they will become cherished institutions.
chii|2 years ago
without a stable source of revenue, cutting costs mean nothing. What are they selling, and why isn't there buyers?
A business cannot survive without revenue, and revenue only comes from people who want to buy something from you that they cannot otherwise get else where.
I applaud StabilityAI for releasing SD for free. They could've done what openAI did, and monetized it (which other diffusion model services are doing). By releasing it for free, stabilityAI contributed to the common good. Unfortunately, if there's nothing else that can be sold as a product, they cannot be sustainable.
An alternative, which i'm not too big a fan of, is collectivization of AI models, and make it a global commons for which taxpayers will fund.
qeternity|2 years ago
...
> cut costs
Unless they can cut costs to zero, something has to change.
MilStdJunkie|2 years ago
Like, example. I use SD in Blender sometimes as part of the compositor. I have maybe a 10% acceptance rate for SD output: sometimes the water isn't right, or the clouds look goofy, or something keeps getting rendered as an anime pillow for some godforsaken reason. If SD captured my prompt history and some of the final model tweaks between runs, they could ostensibly get really solid HITL test data. Then they could be the curator of that "super model" which they could upsell, maybe along with very high rez stuff, or a higher priority on jobs. Again, not an expert, so who knows. And also, having the model local, that gives you back some of the same benefits, but without the scale.
bfung|2 years ago
https://youtu.be/YQ2QtKcK2dA
Not too surprised about funding issues from the casual answer.
I’m not saying it was bad to self fund a project, but having to choosing between your life and fun (and potentially very profitable) projects is not easy.
blackcat201|2 years ago
[1] https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM
[2] https://huggingface.co/laion/CLIP-ViT-L-14-laion2B-s32B-b82K
[3] https://github.com/lucidrains/gigagan-pytorch#appreciation
AYBABTME|2 years ago
zamnos|2 years ago
This time around though, the means of production are available to anybody with a credit card, and AWS/GCP/Azure throw credits at startups that apply, just to have them locked into their cloud. Break free of the chains of work, with generative pretrained transformers!
bugglebeetle|2 years ago
personjerry|2 years ago
cavisne|2 years ago
This won’t be possible without accelerator compute for training. Open source developers can’t afford this compute.
Apple benefits because they can deploy on iOS devices. Amazon benefits because they can tarball the models and sell it as a managed service.
I don’t think either wants to be in the business of figuring out which researchers is going to use the compute for deep fakes or for the next big model.
So something like Stability should exist, Amazon and Apple should figure out how to make that happen.
agentgumshoe|2 years ago
There's a heap of bad banks and terrible debt floating around, the golden goose has been cooked. Turns out risks aren't just things you can ignore for 'growth.'
rvz|2 years ago
Focusing on hype and growth over profitability and burning hundreds of millions of VC cash on data scientists and AWS for training, fine-tuning AI models. This is even before mentioning the mounting lawsuits they are already facing.
The inefficient training of deep learning models is unsustainable for these pre-profit companies.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35465294
m3kw9|2 years ago
villgax|2 years ago
DueDilligence|2 years ago
[deleted]
f0ld|2 years ago