Earlier quoted context omitted.
But honest question, if this is your goal, why not use a GAN instead? You should still be able to produce high quality images but at a much faster rate (I'd guess around 10 minutes?). Sure, you'll have a bit lower diversity and maybe not SOTA quality image generation, but neither is this thing. Or you could reduce quality. This reddit user seems to be doing fast inference on a pi[0] using stylegan, but that's before…
The quality is not really close, also StyleGAN2 is not conditioned on text.
I presumed it was safe to let users infer that a 2018 (StyleGAN) or 2019 (StyleGAN2) model was not going to compete with performance of a 2023 model, regardless of architecture. There has in fact been improvements in GANs in the last 5 years. Text conditioning is not unique to diffusion and is rather a subnetwork for conditioning (actually StyleGAN's whole innovation was creating a subnetwork for conditioning synthesis)
There are definitely modern GANs that are T2I and computationally cheaper than a latent diffusion model for a comparable benchmark score (but recognizing that our metrics are limited and only rough qualifications of image quality, but that the meaningfulness of the metrics decreases with increased realism so that's not really a hindrance for our specific use case and as mentioned before decreased diversity.)
> The quality is not really close, also StyleGAN is not conditioned on text.
Some examples of T2I GANS with comparable quality (not even something I claimed for context of the request...):
- GigaGAN (2023). Base generator @ 652.5M params and upsampler @ 359.1M params. While 512x512 generation has similar model size to SD 1.5 the inference speed is 16x faster. The gap widens for text conditioned super-resolution 128->1024 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05511
- StyleGAN-T (2023) (notably by Sauer who recently joined Stability and their first paper hit the front page a few weeks ago. Also includes the main SG authors from Nvidia) Figure 1 speaks for itself, noting that this is on T2I. It's also worth noting Sauer's previous work (StyleGAN-XL (2022)) did text conditioned experiments. https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.09515
- LAFITE (2022) comes in at a tiny 75M params for 256x256 generation and has quality comparable to the 12B param (autoregressive) DALL-E while being 1,600x faster in inference https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13792
There are plenty more too. I'm not even suggesting proven architecture and train under comparable settings to that which the popular diffusion models have been trained to (which would be a fair one-to-one comparison), but what has already been done and demonstrated because the context is an engineering project not research. Certainly all the above works, including may diffusion methods, would vastly were they given the same treatment as Stable Diffusion but that's not the context here.
Stop buying into hype. There isn't one model to rule them all, there are models that are better in differing contexts.