Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only truly successful commercial use of SDXL I know of is by NovelAI. Said company appears to have used an 256xH100 cluster to finetune it to produce anime art. Open source efforts to produce a similar model seem to have failed due to the extreme compute requirements for finetuning. For example, Waifu Diffusion using 8XA40[0] have not managed to bend SDXL to their will after potentially months of training. If you…
Is that the correct link? I've never heard of A40s, the link is to release notes from a year and two months ago, and SD XL just came out a month or two ago. Hard for me to get to "SD XL cannot [be finetuned effectively]" from there.
I have not heard about the team upgrading or downgrading from the hardware mentioned there, so I assumed it's still the same hardware they use.
>SD XL just came out a month or two ago
About 4.5 months actually.
For the SDXL cannot be finetuned efficiently claim, an attempt at a finetune was released here: https://huggingface.co/hakurei/waifu-diffusion-xl
The team was given early access by StabilityAI to SDXL0.9 for this. You'll have to test it out for yourself, if you're interested in comparing. From my experience, it is a world of a difference between the NovelAI and WaifuDiffusion models in both quality and prompt understanding.
Note, the very baseline I set for the WaifuDiffusionSDXL model was to beat their SD2.1 based model[0], which it did not in my opinion.