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.
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)!
It's pretty amusing how a lot of people that really don't like the EU and speak against it here are not from EU.
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)!
The nuanced version I've heard in other tech industries (bio/agri-tech) is this:
a) Europe organisations and gov't does all the deep research;
b) US private companies turns it into products and reap the PR and money.
In fact, I know of a huge company that does all their research in the EU, where they can get gov't funding, but then the process to turn them into products is in the US (less regulation, larger market).
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.
Epic/Cerner/SAP may be CRUD apps with clunky and outdated interfaces, but I wouldn't classify them as basic. Those applications are massive and have a ton of legacy code to connect different things. I'd suspect much of the rest of their staying power does lie in the company's scale and relationships, as well as their domain knowledge. It would cost massive amounts to build a viable competitor to any of them, and you'd need people who understood the problem space well enough to know what code to write. Doesn't matter if it's just a basic CRUD app built on top of a standard RDBMS, if you don't know what features are needed.
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…
Stable diffusion is just the "brand" of the diffusion generative model, just like Midjourney. If you look at the stable-diffusion repo, it says that SD is based off a colab with StabilityAI and Runway. Most of the value from these models is the training + dataset. The architecture is open source, and we've had flavours of it for several years. SD has some improvements on how it handles diffusions, but most architectu…
Someone from Runway (Patrick Esser) is actually listed as an author on the paper.[1]
The datasets used are provided by LAION.
Here is a honest summary of Stability.Ai's involvement[2]:
> In their project, the LMU scientists had the support of the start-up Stability.Ai, on whose servers the AI model was trained. “This additional computing power and the extra training examples turned our AI model into one of the most powerful image synthesis algorithms,” says the computer scientist with a smile.
That’s why they need to push UBI harder. They’ll just do it in private as always have been and we will lose everything overnight. Next day you useless human beings in gulag or unit 731.
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.
> cut costs without a stable source of revenue, cutting costs mean nothing. What are they selling, and why isn't there buyers? A business cannot survive without revenue, and revenue only comes from people who want to buy something from you that they cannot otherwise get else where. I applaud StabilityAI for releasing SD for free. They could've done what openAI did, and monetized it (which other diffusion model servic…
They could have at least charged money for it. "I'll give you this 4 GiB model file for $50" might have been a better business model than "lemme give this to you for free!".
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)!
Other comments highlighted some aspects, but one thing that should not be underestimated is that German hacker culture has strong anarchistic tendencies and there just is no place to be creative in cs and make money, at least not in the same way as in the us.
So lots of highly talented people just do open source in their free time or work at universities.
The means of production are cloud GPUs, the winners will be those who own them.
In a gold rush, sell shovels. And Nvidia's stock price bump reflects that.
This time around though, the means of production are available to anybody with a credit card, and AWS/GCP/Azure throw credits at startups that apply, just to have them locked into their cloud. Break free of the chains of work, with generative pretrained transformers!
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 pay for stability.ai because the API works and is very inexpensive.