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The company behind Stable Diffusion appears to be at risk of going under

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Re: The company behind Stable Diffusion appears to be at risk of going under

#21

Post by swyx »

personjerry wrote: post #9
bugglebeetle wrote: post #5

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 t…

To put it politely, your comment is bullshit. Stability AI is a billion dollar company with hundreds of millions in funding.

100 million, actually. and Semafor seems to be asserting that most of it has been spent in the last 6 months since they raised it.

Re: The company behind Stable Diffusion appears to be at risk of going under

#22

Post by blackcat201 »

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]

[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

Re: The company behind Stable Diffusion appears to be at risk of going under

#23

Post by obmelvin »

personjerry wrote: post #9
bugglebeetle wrote: post #5

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 t…

To put it politely, your comment is bullshit. Stability AI is a billion dollar company with hundreds of millions in funding.

Not saying I agree with the GP, but I don't understand how your comment refutes anything? Their valuation and funding doesn't necessarily mean anything.

In fact, I think one could argue that many companies raising that much money early on are indeed trying to become a first mover and don't care about making money (yet).

Re: The company behind Stable Diffusion appears to be at risk of going under

#24

Post by slashdev »

tomohelix wrote: post #2

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…

[flagged]

Re: The company behind Stable Diffusion appears to be at risk of going under

#25

Post by rvz »

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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35465294

Re: The company behind Stable Diffusion appears to be at risk of going under

#28

Post by lambic2 »

slashdev wrote: post #24
tomohelix wrote: post #2

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…

[flagged]

DropBox had a paid tier from the beginning, Stability AI doesn't.

Re: The company behind Stable Diffusion appears to be at risk of going under

#29

Post by unethical_ban »

slashdev wrote: post #24
tomohelix wrote: post #2

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…

[flagged]

Comparing a provider of storage to a transfer tool, classic incorrect pedantry

Re: The company behind Stable Diffusion appears to be at risk of going under

#30

Post by chii »

stabilityfan1 wrote: post #13

It would be a huge disaster to lose out on the folks releasing the models for free. Nobody benefits from their failure. If Runway and Stability can cut costs they will become cherished institutions.

> cut costs

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.

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