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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

#61

Post by Turing_Machine »

revelio wrote: post #51
fwlr wrote: post #49

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…

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.

Not having enough capacity is not the same thing as running out of money, though. If the number of users is increasing rapidly (and there's every reason to believe that it is) it could just be that they're not able to spin up new GPUs fast enough to keep up with the increasing demand.

I've noticed that they've recently rolled out some new features (e.g., "/describe") that were at first limited to the higher tiers, but after a short time of evaluating the increased GPU load, were enabled for the lower tiers as well.

To me, that seems to indicate "can't install GPUs fast enough" rather than "running out of money", but of course it's just an indication.

I believe their stated reason for getting rid of the free trial accounts (temporarily, they said) was that people were using bots to register hundreds of sockpuppet accounts to get the freebies. Perhaps they'll come back when and if they can deploy some effective anti-bot measures.

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

#62

Post by orra »

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…

> around an open source product the way SD is

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.

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

#63

Post by qeternity »

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.

> releasing the models for free

...

> cut costs

Unless they can cut costs to zero, something has to change.

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

#64

Post by MilStdJunkie »

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.

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

#65

Post by bick_nyers »

orra wrote: post #62
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…

> around an open source product the way SD is 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.

A closed source NSFW model that they sell API access to... PR and legal nightmare... could be very lucrative

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

#66

Post by laurex »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #40
peterlk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What makes you call out those 2 in particular?

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

#67

Post by eloff »

unethical_ban wrote: post #29
slashdev wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

That matters little.

The point is people on HN missed the potential of Dropbox because for them it was a problem they already had a half solution for. For regular people who don’t know what an rsync is, Dropbox seemed like magic.

The moral of the story is that if a solution is only available to a technicaly savvy minority, the market opportunity is still wide open.

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

#68

Post by fulafel »

jacooper wrote: post #46
niemandhier wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)!

Here are some interesting bits on deep learning vs crediting prior research from a prominent Swiss DL research pioneer: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/scientific-integrity-turing...

> As mentioned earlier,[MIR](Sec. 21) when only consulting surveys from the Anglosphere, it is not always clear[DLC] that Deep Learning was first conceived outside of it. It started in 1965 in the Ukraine (back then the USSR) with the first nets of arbitrary depth that really learned.[DEEP1-2][R8] Soon afterwards, multilayer perceptrons learned internal representations through stochastic gradient descent in Japan.[GD1-2a] A few years later, modern backpropagation was published in Finland (1970).[BP1] The basic deep convolutional NN architecture (now widely used) was invented in the 1970s in Japan[CNN1] where NNs with convolutions were later (1987) also combined with "weight sharing" and backpropagation.[CNN1a]

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