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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

#41

Post by shagie »

brigandish wrote: post #39
vineyardmike wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hypothetically, say an organization is looking for bug tracking and project management software that is cloud hosted.

This is for 200 users and it needs 24/7 support. The budget is $30k/y.

Ahh, you could spin up Redmine on AWS for much less...

Maybe, but I'm going to need to hire a Redmine consultant to help configure it for our needs, add maintaining and updates for that instance to the sysadmin and add it to the helpdesk support - and if we really want 24/7 support, our helpdesk is only 7-5 business hours (the support is for the 'it crashed' which means that the sysadmin gets it on pager duty... but if there's an issue that's application support, so wake up an application team person who isn't on pager duty...). And there's a bug in Redmine, so either get a developer to learn Ruby (this is a Java shop) or beg the core team to fix it...

You know, Jira is looking more attractive as these likely costs start adding up - and it's a fixed price... not going to have an AWSh.. surprise if a bitcoin miner exploits an issue on the base image that didn't get updated.

Local and state governments do look at open source first. The "no cost to start" is very attractive until they get to a "this is a hard problem, you're on your own" and the costs go way past what a commercial application costs.

For government, a predictable budget so that you can ask for next year is valuable. Unknown budgetary costs are were overruns happen. A budget line item of $26,500 per year is much better than a budget line of "$0 to $50,000."

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

#42

Post by 7speter »

tomohelix wrote: post #7
Ologn wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I only see something like SD to be attractive for personal uses, not corporate. That is why I mentioned a person, not a company, as a customer. If your product is tested and guaranteed to certain standards, like MySQL and RedHat, then that is something a company may pay for. But a user doesn't really have that high standard so they can be satisfied with just the off brand, derived stuff floating around.

There was that post maybe two weeks ago about the blender artist who was afraid they were out of a job because apparently some ai can do his sort of work based on prompts. Stable diffusion most definitely has use in creative industries, at the very least, being able to render a representative first draft that actual creative humans can work off of.

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

#43

Post by marcosdumay »

shagie wrote: post #17
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).

The issue is not "Microsoft Office vs Libre office" but rather "how much does it cost to necessary up to the support necessary for the government office in order to support Libre office?" Things like "ok, we can't use one drive - need a different tool," "can't use Sharepoint, need to use a different tool," and so on. The market is there. RHEL and similar are well established. In order to make this a "we should do thi…

> Cerner or Epic? SAP? ArcGIS?

Of those only ArcGIS isn't a basic CRUD, and yes, there are plenty of open source replacements for it. It's in fact way behind the open source tools.

There aren't for the others, because they are about paying a company so you can use its other customers data, or paying it to get overpriced consultants. None of them are about software.

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

#44

Post by cavisne »

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.

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

#45

Post by niemandhier »

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…

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.

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

#46

Post by jacooper »

niemandhier wrote: post #45
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…

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.

So the model is mostly a German product? Where are the HN comments about how the EU is behind and that they can't innovate or compete?

In this case they were actually the first to the punch(along with openAI)!

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

#47

Post by hakfoo »

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…

Perhaps the business case is for "we want the Open Source product, but we're in a compliance-oriented business and need to have someone selling us a support and maintenance contract behind it."

I'd suspect the moment you touch anything with external auditing, it looks better to say "we've got a fully paid up support contract from the vendor" than "we're running v1.23.456-ubuntu-patch-357-with-chives-and-salsa that we downloaded last week."

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

#48

Post by agentgumshoe »

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.'

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

#49

Post by fwlr »

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.

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

#50

Post by ralph84 »

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…

> Sentry, Tailscale, or Gitlab

None of which are profitable

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