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Noncommercial use - aside from being one of my licensing pet peeves - seems to indicate that the money is drying up. My guess is that the investors over at Stab

Noncommercial use - aside from being one of my licensing pet peeves - seems to indicate that the money is drying up. My guess is that the investors over at Stability are tired of subsidizing the part of the generative AI market that OpenAI refuses to touch[0]. The thing is, I'm not entirely sure there's a paying portion of the market? Yes, I've heard of people paying for ChatGPT because it answers programming questions really well, but that's individual users, who are cost sensitive. The real money was supposed to be selling these things as worker replacement, but Hollywood unions have (rightfully) shut AI companies out of the markets where a machine that can write endless slop might have made lots of money. OpenAI can remain in Microsoft's orbit for as long as the stupid altruist / accelerationist doomer debate doesn't tear them apart[1]. Google has at least a few more years of monopoly money before either the US breaks them up or the EU bankrupts them with fees. I don't know who the hell is pumping more money into either Anthropic or Stability. [0] Porn. It's always porn. OpenAI doesn't want to touch it for very obvious reasons. [1] For what it's worth, Microsoft has shown that all the AI safety guardrails can be ripped out by the money people at a moment's notice, given how quickly they were able to make the OpenAI board blink.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
Open AI has a pretty robust and profitable business without Microsoft. In every enterprise I’ve been involved with over the last few years we have had some incredibly material and important use cases of OpenAI LLMs (as well as Claude). They aren’t spewing slop or whatever, they’re genuinely achieving valuable and foundational business outcomes. I’ve been a bit stunned at how fast we’ve achieved these things and it tells me that the AI hype isn’t hype, and that if we have done these things in a year, it’s hard to estimate how much impact the technologies will have in five but I think it’s substantial. So is our spend with OpenAI. Or rather, with Azure on OpenAI products. The only value from our experiences Microsoft offers is IAM - which is sufficient frankly. Stability and Midjourney are also making money, but it’s largely with amateurs and people prototyping content for their own creations. A lot of single person Indy game developers are using these tools to generate assets, or at minimum first pass assets. I think a lot of media companies are producing the art for their articles or news letters etc using these tools. Whether this is enough, I don’t know.
- __loam 3y ago
  Sigh I'm really tired of seeing people assume OpenAI is profitable. We have no idea of they are or not and have some indication that they're incinerating money on chatgpt to the point that they're turning off sign ups because they're out of compute.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    I'm not sure that's a useful argument insomuch as A) its unfalsifiable until they IPO (reporting indicates they are very, very profitable) and B) running out of GPUs seems like an odd thing to name as an indicator you're _losing_ money. People are genuinely way, way, way underestimating how intense the GPU shortage is.
    - __loam 3y ago
      I haven't seen any reporting about their costs. I'm sure they're making bonkers numbers in revenue, but that doesn't mean they're profitable if they're losing money on every gpt call. You're saying my claim that they're unprofitable is unfalsifiable. The same is true for claims that they're wildly profitable. We just don't know the financial state of the company because they're not public.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    My understanding, which I can’t prove other than to say it comes from folks affiliated with OpenAI, is that chatgpt doesn’t make money but also doesn’t lose money (in aggregate, some accounts use way more than others but many accounts are fairly idle), and their API business is profitable and accounts for most of their GPU utilization. I have no insight into why they would turn off signups for chatgpt other than they may need the capacity for their enterprise customers, where they make a decent margin.
adventured 3y ago
The EU views Google as a tobacco company. The last thing they want to do is bankrupt them with fees. They want to milk Google - big tech generally - for tax revenue. And besides, it'd take $100 billion per year in fees, which is never going to happen. Meanwhile Google keeps getting bigger year after year (they have nearly doubled in size in four years, up to $300b in sales now) and Bing has made zero headway despite the AI-angled efforts (BingChat etc). Maybe the mainstream adoption of GPT (or similar) would severely damage Google, there's still a lot of time left for Google to take their shot at getting out in front of that outcome. The US breaking Google up also won't end the monopoly money. More likely one of the children will spin out with an even better margin business.
- godelski 3y ago
  > The US breaking Google up also won't end the monopoly money. It's also weird because modern economics with tech has created a space that creates a lot of natural monopolies. Momentum is very powerful and it's the reason silicon valley companies will run at a loss for years creating a userbase. Trick is to keep them (or sell before buyer starts charging). There's what, 2 map companies and only one of them is in high usage because it's a default? Same with browsers. You can't compete because making a better product isn't enough in a system where network effects dominate the economics. Hardware companies are seeing that (along with patent issues, especially across borders). I have no idea how to think about this tbh because it is weird. In some cases breaking these companies up ultimately destroys them while in other cases, exactly what you say.
  - iinnPP 3y ago
    Seems like a great place to mention the MapQuest API. I tested it against 4 other services(inc. Google's) on 200 manually verified geocoding/reverse-geocoding tasks. Google managed a 92% whereas MapQuest scored 99%. If you are doing geocoding or reverse-geocoding MapQuest outperforms Google Maps quite magnificently(YMMV). The cost is also lower and there are plans where you can keep the data. The funny thing being that the C levels didn't give a shit about the results and went ahead with Google Maps anyway. So your point remains correct.
Jackson__ 3y ago
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 need 256xH100 to even finetune the model for your use case, what's stopping you from just training your own base model? Not much, as it turns out. Developers of NovelAI have stated they'll train from scratch for the next version of their model a few weeks ago. So I agree, even with the licensing changes things might be looking somewhat dire for SAI. https://gist.github.com/harubaru/f727cedacae336d1f7877c4bbe2196e1 https://gist.github.com/harubaru/f727cedacae336d1f7877c4bbe2...
- refulgentis 3y ago
  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.
  - Jackson__ 3y ago
    A40: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/a40-pcie.c3700 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/a40-pcie.c3700 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 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. [0] https://huggingface.co/hakurei/waifu-diffusion-v1-4 https://huggingface.co/hakurei/waifu-diffusion-v1-4
godelski 3y ago
> Porn. It's always porn. I've been surprised at the explosion of porn. Well, not actually. Automatic1111 made that easy and anyone that CivitAI knows all too well what those models are being used for. I mean when you give teenagers the ability to undress their crushes[0] what do you think is going to happen (do laws adequately protect people (kids)? Can they? Will this force a shift towards actually chasing producers, distributors, and diddlers?)? Porn is clearly an in demand market. But what does surprise me is that there's been a lot of work in depth maps and 3D rendering from 2D images in the past few years so I'm a bit surprised that given how popular VR headsets are (according to today's LTT episode, half as many Meta Quest 2s as PS5s have been sold?!). I mean if VR headsets are actually that prolific it seems like there'd be a good market for even just turning a bunch of videos into VR videos, not to mention porn (I don't have a VR headset, but I hear a lot of porn is watched. No Linus, I'm not going to buy second hand...). I think all it takes is for some group to optimize these models like they have for LLaMA and SD (because as a researcher I can sure tell you, we're not the optimizers. Use our work as ballpark figures (e.g. GANs 10x Diffusion) but there's a lot of performance on the table). You could definitely convert video frames to 3D on prosumer grade hardware (say a 90 minute movie in <8hrs? Aka: while you sleep). There are a lot of wild things that I think AI is going to change that I'm not sure people are really considering (average people anyways or at least stuff that's not making it into popular conversation). ResNet-50 is still probably the most used model btw. Not sure why, but just about every project I see that's not diffusion of an LLM is using this as a backbone despite research models that are smaller, faster, and better (at least on ImageNet-22k and COCO). [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66877718 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66877718
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  SDXL and ControlNet are already optimized, if thats what you mean: https://github.com/chengzeyi/stable-fast https://github.com/chengzeyi/stable-fast (Note the links to various SD compilers). But the whole field is moving so fast that people aren't even adopting the compilers and optimized implementations at large.
  - godelski 3y ago
orbital-decay 3y ago
Emad just tweeted about the future monetization of their core models. Seems they want to use the Unity model - the original one, not the recent trick Unity pulled. AKA free to use until you make lots of money with it. https://x.com/EMostaque/status/1729609312601887109 https://x.com/EMostaque/status/1729609312601887109
dreampen 3y ago
> Porn. It's always porn. I posted about my AI porn site pornpen.ai here last year and it reached the top of the front page. And yes, it's still going strong :D (and we've integrated SDXL and videos recently)
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago
  oh wow you just got another user sir/madam GYAAAT Edit: okay a lot of these look just bizarre as hell and seems to favour massive grotesque breast size I wonder the damage on women this does
torginus 3y ago
Isn't literally every imagegen AI that's not DALL-E or Midjourney based on Stable Diffusion?
- cubefox 3y ago
  There are exceptions, e.g. https://generated.photos/human-generator https://generated.photos/human-generator uses a GAN based model. Edit: Also, Adobe uses its own model for Photoshop integration (inpainting via cloud). That model seems to be the same as this one: https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  Are we sure that those arent based on stable diffusion? No code black box, and we get to tease the closed source companies for wrapping FOSS stuff. Midjourny I'm most convinced is just a SD with a fine-tuned model. That would explain why everything looks like pixar and can't follow the prompt.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Given that Midjourney predates StableDiffusion, that seems unlikely, though it is possible they threw away all their hard work to create their model to use one that's available to other people for free and then charge money for it.
PeterStuer 3y ago
Are you suggesting the only use for locally run free SD derived models is porn? Creating illustrations for articles/presentations and stock photo alteratives are huge! The ability to run for free on your local machine allows for far more iterations than using SaaS, and the checkpoint/finetune ecosystem the openness sprouted has created models performing way better for these use cases than standard SD.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  No, I'm suggesting that the only models you can use for porn are locally-run. In particular the people offering hosted models do not want to touch porn, because the first thing people do with these things is try to make nonconsensual porn of real people, which is absolutely fucking disgusting. Hence why they have several layers of filtering. SD also has a safety filter, but it's trivially removable, and the people who make nonconsensual porn do not care about trivial things like licensing terms. My assumption is that switching to a noncommercial license would mean that Stability could later add further restrictions to the commercial use terms, i.e. "if you're licensing the model for a generator app like Draw Things, you have to package it up in such a way that removing the safety filter is difficult or impossible".
emadm 3y ago
We build the best video, image and other models with more downloads and usage than anyone. It is quite revolutionary for creative industry which is a few hundred billion in size, which is a reasonable market globally.
MintsJohn 3y ago
There's quite a few hosted SDXL platforms (mage.space, leonardo.ai, novel.ai, tensor.art, invoke.ai to name a few) and most consumers do not have the GPUs needed to run those models, only enthusiasts do. It's always baffled me that stability didn't offer a competitive UI platform to use their models with, clipdrop is just bad quality and very bare-bones, and dreamstudio is pricey and still lacks most features. So this move to a new licensing strategy doesn't surprise me, it actually is somewhat comforting, as i expecting them to just stop releasing further trained models (e.g sdxl1.1 and up), and only offer those on their services (of course, that can still happen) cause how else were they going to monetize the consumers (i know they (planned to) offer custom trained/finetuned models to big corps, but that doesn't monetize consumers). However, as most releases by stability these days, it has this feeling of close-but-no-cigar, and the recent LCM lora's might be a little slower, but these actually offer 1024^2 resolution, work with any existing lora's and finetunes (so they are usable for iterative development, unlike this turbo model, cause well, it's a different model, can't iterate on it then expect sdxl (with lora's, to a lesser extend also without) to generate a similar image) and support cfg-scale (and therefor negative prompts / prompt weighting). I suppose there's some niche market where you need all the speed you can get, but unless there's a giant leap in (temporal) consistency, that will remain niche, i don't see the mentioned real-time 3d "skinning" neither the video img-to-img (frame-to-frame) gimmicks take off with current quality and lack of flexibility. It's good research, optimizations have lots of value, but it needs quality as well. Their recent video model is quite bad as well, especially compared to pika and runway gen-2, but well, but as with the the dalle-3 comparison one can say those are closed source and stability's offering is open. Then we have the 3d model, close sourced, worse than luma's genie unfortunately. The music model is nothing like suno's chirp (which might be multiple models, bark and a music model) used together), and the less said about their llm offerings the better. Bottom line, stability needs a killer model again, they started strong with stable diffusion 1.5, took a wrong turn with 2.0 (kind of recovered by 2.1, but the damage was done), and while SDXL is't bad in a vacuum, neither was it the leap ahead that put it in front of competition like midjourney at the time, and Dalle-3 a little later, and now even a relatively small model like pixart-alpha, also opensource, can offer similar quality to what sdxl offers (with a lot of caveats, as it has been trained on so few images it just doesn't have info on many concepts). And more worrying, there's no hint of something better in the stability's pipeline. But maybe image-gen is as best as stability can get it, and they think they can make an impact pivoting in another direction or multiple directiobs, but currently, it feels a master-of-none situation.
dontupvoteme 3y ago
It's not just porn, there is also copyright infringement, fraud, etc.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

Open AI has a pretty robust and profitable business without Microsoft. In every enterprise I’ve been involved with over the last few years we have had some incredibly material and important use cases of OpenAI LLMs (as well as Claude). They aren’t spewing slop or whatever, they’re genuinely achieving valuable and foundational business outcomes. I’ve been a bit stunned at how fast we’ve achieved these things and it tells me that the AI hype isn’t hype, and that if we have done these things in a year, it’s hard to estimate how much impact the technologies will have in five but I think it’s substantial. So is our spend with OpenAI. Or rather, with Azure on OpenAI products. The only value from our experiences Microsoft offers is IAM - which is sufficient frankly. Stability and Midjourney are also making money, but it’s largely with amateurs and people prototyping content for their own creations. A lot of single person Indy game developers are using these tools to generate assets, or at minimum first pass assets. I think a lot of media companies are producing the art for their articles or news letters etc using these tools. Whether this is enough, I don’t know.

__loam 3y ago
Sigh I'm really tired of seeing people assume OpenAI is profitable. We have no idea of they are or not and have some indication that they're incinerating money on chatgpt to the point that they're turning off sign ups because they're out of compute.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  I'm not sure that's a useful argument insomuch as A) its unfalsifiable until they IPO (reporting indicates they are very, very profitable) and B) running out of GPUs seems like an odd thing to name as an indicator you're _losing_ money. People are genuinely way, way, way underestimating how intense the GPU shortage is.
  - __loam 3y ago
    I haven't seen any reporting about their costs. I'm sure they're making bonkers numbers in revenue, but that doesn't mean they're profitable if they're losing money on every gpt call. You're saying my claim that they're unprofitable is unfalsifiable. The same is true for claims that they're wildly profitable. We just don't know the financial state of the company because they're not public.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  My understanding, which I can’t prove other than to say it comes from folks affiliated with OpenAI, is that chatgpt doesn’t make money but also doesn’t lose money (in aggregate, some accounts use way more than others but many accounts are fairly idle), and their API business is profitable and accounts for most of their GPU utilization. I have no insight into why they would turn off signups for chatgpt other than they may need the capacity for their enterprise customers, where they make a decent margin.

adventured 3y ago

The EU views Google as a tobacco company. The last thing they want to do is bankrupt them with fees. They want to milk Google - big tech generally - for tax revenue. And besides, it'd take $100 billion per year in fees, which is never going to happen. Meanwhile Google keeps getting bigger year after year (they have nearly doubled in size in four years, up to $300b in sales now) and Bing has made zero headway despite the AI-angled efforts (BingChat etc). Maybe the mainstream adoption of GPT (or similar) would severely damage Google, there's still a lot of time left for Google to take their shot at getting out in front of that outcome. The US breaking Google up also won't end the monopoly money. More likely one of the children will spin out with an even better margin business.

godelski 3y ago
> The US breaking Google up also won't end the monopoly money. It's also weird because modern economics with tech has created a space that creates a lot of natural monopolies. Momentum is very powerful and it's the reason silicon valley companies will run at a loss for years creating a userbase. Trick is to keep them (or sell before buyer starts charging). There's what, 2 map companies and only one of them is in high usage because it's a default? Same with browsers. You can't compete because making a better product isn't enough in a system where network effects dominate the economics. Hardware companies are seeing that (along with patent issues, especially across borders). I have no idea how to think about this tbh because it is weird. In some cases breaking these companies up ultimately destroys them while in other cases, exactly what you say.
- iinnPP 3y ago
  Seems like a great place to mention the MapQuest API. I tested it against 4 other services(inc. Google's) on 200 manually verified geocoding/reverse-geocoding tasks. Google managed a 92% whereas MapQuest scored 99%. If you are doing geocoding or reverse-geocoding MapQuest outperforms Google Maps quite magnificently(YMMV). The cost is also lower and there are plans where you can keep the data. The funny thing being that the C levels didn't give a shit about the results and went ahead with Google Maps anyway. So your point remains correct.

Jackson__ 3y ago

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 need 256xH100 to even finetune the model for your use case, what's stopping you from just training your own base model? Not much, as it turns out. Developers of NovelAI have stated they'll train from scratch for the next version of their model a few weeks ago. So I agree, even with the licensing changes things might be looking somewhat dire for SAI. https://gist.github.com/harubaru/f727cedacae336d1f7877c4bbe2196e1 https://gist.github.com/harubaru/f727cedacae336d1f7877c4bbe2...

refulgentis 3y ago
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.
- Jackson__ 3y ago
  A40: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/a40-pcie.c3700 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/a40-pcie.c3700 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 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. [0] https://huggingface.co/hakurei/waifu-diffusion-v1-4 https://huggingface.co/hakurei/waifu-diffusion-v1-4

godelski 3y ago

> Porn. It's always porn. I've been surprised at the explosion of porn. Well, not actually. Automatic1111 made that easy and anyone that CivitAI knows all too well what those models are being used for. I mean when you give teenagers the ability to undress their crushes[0] what do you think is going to happen (do laws adequately protect people (kids)? Can they? Will this force a shift towards actually chasing producers, distributors, and diddlers?)? Porn is clearly an in demand market. But what does surprise me is that there's been a lot of work in depth maps and 3D rendering from 2D images in the past few years so I'm a bit surprised that given how popular VR headsets are (according to today's LTT episode, half as many Meta Quest 2s as PS5s have been sold?!). I mean if VR headsets are actually that prolific it seems like there'd be a good market for even just turning a bunch of videos into VR videos, not to mention porn (I don't have a VR headset, but I hear a lot of porn is watched. No Linus, I'm not going to buy second hand...). I think all it takes is for some group to optimize these models like they have for LLaMA and SD (because as a researcher I can sure tell you, we're not the optimizers. Use our work as ballpark figures (e.g. GANs 10x Diffusion) but there's a lot of performance on the table). You could definitely convert video frames to 3D on prosumer grade hardware (say a 90 minute movie in <8hrs? Aka: while you sleep). There are a lot of wild things that I think AI is going to change that I'm not sure people are really considering (average people anyways or at least stuff that's not making it into popular conversation). ResNet-50 is still probably the most used model btw. Not sure why, but just about every project I see that's not diffusion of an LLM is using this as a backbone despite research models that are smaller, faster, and better (at least on ImageNet-22k and COCO). [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66877718 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66877718

brucethemoose2 3y ago
SDXL and ControlNet are already optimized, if thats what you mean: https://github.com/chengzeyi/stable-fast https://github.com/chengzeyi/stable-fast (Note the links to various SD compilers). But the whole field is moving so fast that people aren't even adopting the compilers and optimized implementations at large.
- godelski 3y ago

orbital-decay 3y ago

Emad just tweeted about the future monetization of their core models. Seems they want to use the Unity model - the original one, not the recent trick Unity pulled. AKA free to use until you make lots of money with it. https://x.com/EMostaque/status/1729609312601887109 https://x.com/EMostaque/status/1729609312601887109

dreampen 3y ago

> Porn. It's always porn. I posted about my AI porn site pornpen.ai here last year and it reached the top of the front page. And yes, it's still going strong :D (and we've integrated SDXL and videos recently)

Unfrozen0688 3y ago
oh wow you just got another user sir/madam GYAAAT Edit: okay a lot of these look just bizarre as hell and seems to favour massive grotesque breast size I wonder the damage on women this does

torginus 3y ago

Isn't literally every imagegen AI that's not DALL-E or Midjourney based on Stable Diffusion?

cubefox 3y ago
There are exceptions, e.g. https://generated.photos/human-generator https://generated.photos/human-generator uses a GAN based model. Edit: Also, Adobe uses its own model for Photoshop integration (inpainting via cloud). That model seems to be the same as this one: https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html
hospitalJail 3y ago
Are we sure that those arent based on stable diffusion? No code black box, and we get to tease the closed source companies for wrapping FOSS stuff. Midjourny I'm most convinced is just a SD with a fine-tuned model. That would explain why everything looks like pixar and can't follow the prompt.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Given that Midjourney predates StableDiffusion, that seems unlikely, though it is possible they threw away all their hard work to create their model to use one that's available to other people for free and then charge money for it.

PeterStuer 3y ago

Are you suggesting the only use for locally run free SD derived models is porn? Creating illustrations for articles/presentations and stock photo alteratives are huge! The ability to run for free on your local machine allows for far more iterations than using SaaS, and the checkpoint/finetune ecosystem the openness sprouted has created models performing way better for these use cases than standard SD.

kmeisthax 3y ago
No, I'm suggesting that the only models you can use for porn are locally-run. In particular the people offering hosted models do not want to touch porn, because the first thing people do with these things is try to make nonconsensual porn of real people, which is absolutely fucking disgusting. Hence why they have several layers of filtering. SD also has a safety filter, but it's trivially removable, and the people who make nonconsensual porn do not care about trivial things like licensing terms. My assumption is that switching to a noncommercial license would mean that Stability could later add further restrictions to the commercial use terms, i.e. "if you're licensing the model for a generator app like Draw Things, you have to package it up in such a way that removing the safety filter is difficult or impossible".

emadm 3y ago

We build the best video, image and other models with more downloads and usage than anyone. It is quite revolutionary for creative industry which is a few hundred billion in size, which is a reasonable market globally.

MintsJohn 3y ago

There's quite a few hosted SDXL platforms (mage.space, leonardo.ai, novel.ai, tensor.art, invoke.ai to name a few) and most consumers do not have the GPUs needed to run those models, only enthusiasts do. It's always baffled me that stability didn't offer a competitive UI platform to use their models with, clipdrop is just bad quality and very bare-bones, and dreamstudio is pricey and still lacks most features. So this move to a new licensing strategy doesn't surprise me, it actually is somewhat comforting, as i expecting them to just stop releasing further trained models (e.g sdxl1.1 and up), and only offer those on their services (of course, that can still happen) cause how else were they going to monetize the consumers (i know they (planned to) offer custom trained/finetuned models to big corps, but that doesn't monetize consumers). However, as most releases by stability these days, it has this feeling of close-but-no-cigar, and the recent LCM lora's might be a little slower, but these actually offer 1024^2 resolution, work with any existing lora's and finetunes (so they are usable for iterative development, unlike this turbo model, cause well, it's a different model, can't iterate on it then expect sdxl (with lora's, to a lesser extend also without) to generate a similar image) and support cfg-scale (and therefor negative prompts / prompt weighting). I suppose there's some niche market where you need all the speed you can get, but unless there's a giant leap in (temporal) consistency, that will remain niche, i don't see the mentioned real-time 3d "skinning" neither the video img-to-img (frame-to-frame) gimmicks take off with current quality and lack of flexibility. It's good research, optimizations have lots of value, but it needs quality as well. Their recent video model is quite bad as well, especially compared to pika and runway gen-2, but well, but as with the the dalle-3 comparison one can say those are closed source and stability's offering is open. Then we have the 3d model, close sourced, worse than luma's genie unfortunately. The music model is nothing like suno's chirp (which might be multiple models, bark and a music model) used together), and the less said about their llm offerings the better. Bottom line, stability needs a killer model again, they started strong with stable diffusion 1.5, took a wrong turn with 2.0 (kind of recovered by 2.1, but the damage was done), and while SDXL is't bad in a vacuum, neither was it the leap ahead that put it in front of competition like midjourney at the time, and Dalle-3 a little later, and now even a relatively small model like pixart-alpha, also opensource, can offer similar quality to what sdxl offers (with a lot of caveats, as it has been trained on so few images it just doesn't have info on many concepts). And more worrying, there's no hint of something better in the stability's pipeline. But maybe image-gen is as best as stability can get it, and they think they can make an impact pivoting in another direction or multiple directiobs, but currently, it feels a master-of-none situation.

dontupvoteme 3y ago

It's not just porn, there is also copyright infringement, fraud, etc.