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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

#31

Post by UncleEntity »

chmod775 wrote: post #10

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 accompl…

> 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.

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.

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

#32

Post by peterlk »

dwallin wrote: post #4
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…

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 co…

Investors make for spectacular customers for a few years. You can sell them dreams! Many companies struggle when they need to pivot away from this model

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

#33

Post by nonfamous »

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…

RedHat is the exception that proves the rule: no. And even in RedHat’s case, the profits came from services, not software.

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

#34

Post by gumby »

Ologn wrote: post #3
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…

Was it profitable for Cygnus? Red Hat? Android? MySQL?

> Was it profitable for Cygnus?

We were a bootstrap so were immediately profitable.

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

#35

Post by rtpg »

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…

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)

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

#36

Post by beckingz »

rtpg wrote: post #35
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…

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…

I'm concerned about Metabase because of this. Amazing project, but the cloud offering doesn't seem to be enough.

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

#37

Post by vineyardmike »

breck wrote: post #8
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…

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).

I agree, but realistically that’s tough. Sometimes the government just needs a tool like everyone else. And something that works and is available today off the shelf is the best you’ll get.

Sure it’d be great for government acquisitions to subsidize open source, but at what cost?

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

#38

Post by seanpquig »

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…

Databricks is a pretty good example of a huge company built around and open source project (Spark).

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

#39

Post by brigandish »

vineyardmike wrote: post #37
breck wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I agree, but realistically that’s tough. Sometimes the government just needs a tool like everyone else. And something that works and is available today off the shelf is the best you’ll get. Sure it’d be great for government acquisitions to subsidize open source, but at what cost?

Perhaps a "you can pay for closed source but must prove you looked into using open source first" kind of thing? Much like the restraints on employment immigration so that companies must try and employ locally first.

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

#40

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

peterlk wrote: post #32
dwallin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Investors make for spectacular customers for a few years. You can sell them dreams! Many companies struggle when they need to pivot away from this model

Patreon and Reddit have figured out the investor grift. First to series-Z is the winner.
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