I think this is why it was very important that their first release of the model weights (the v1.4 model) was and will continue to be very important. While trai

I think this is why it was very important that their first release of the model weights (the v1.4 model) was and will continue to be very important. While training an entire model from scratch requires an insane amount of data and compute right now (and will continue to be out of reach of individuals for some years I think), fine-tuning the model can be done on a consumer graphics card (they call it Dreambooth)... and I believe we will see further refinements that allow more and more useful tuning and features being built by individuals on top that original model, making it more and more powerful for specific uses. So even if future efforts change the functionality, or nerf the output in some way, there will always be people developing tools on the original weights. That cat is out of the bag.