6 ms·

Don’t entirely understand Stability’s business model. They’ve been putting out a lot of models recently and Stable Diffusion was novel at the time, but now thei

by JCM9 3y ago

Don’t entirely understand Stability’s business model. They’ve been putting out a lot of models recently and Stable Diffusion was novel at the time, but now their models consistently seem to be somewhat second rate compared to other things out there. For example Midjourney now seems to have far surpassed them in the image generation front. After raising a ton of funding Stability seems to just be throwing a bunch of stuff out there that’s OK but no longer ground breaking. What am I missing? Many other startups in the space will like face similar issues given the rapid commoditization of these models and the underlying tech. It’s very easy to spend a fortune building a model that offers a short lived incremental improvement at best before one can just quickly swap it out for something else someone else paid to train.

liuliu 3y ago
> one can just quickly swap it out for something else someone else paid to train. That doesn't seem to be the case. There are very limited open-source models outside of the small-LLM bubble.
- JCM9 3y ago
  The open space on small models is a whole other developing angle, but O was referring to the general commoditization of a lot of these models. With rare exception after launch it seems the lifespan of any of these models is rather limited. From a business standpoint that sort of scenario is generally very unattractive and thus was trying to understand if they have some other angle they’re trying to play here to make a viable business out of this. Or the business model can just be get acquired before that matters and let that be someone else’s problem to figure out.
  - liuliu 3y ago
    The comoditization of models outside of LLM is delusional. There is no comparable open source image / video models to the private ones.
smusamashah 3y ago
Midjourney has better quality but does not offer any control. Community has done and is still doing a a lot with SD models because they can be played and tinkered with in any way anyone wants to.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
washadjeffmad 3y ago
Midjourney is decidedly underwhelming if you've spent any time using the expansive tooling and control nets of Stable Diffusion. Yes, it's easy to get impressive first gens with MJ, but all of the coolest work and integration happening is using SD.
- capybara_2020 3y ago
  It depends. For great looking pics that you need to get out quickly MJ does a great job. Especially with its image + text feature. Dalle is also an interesting choice. SDXL and controlnet is odd a lot of the time. 1.5 + controlnet still seem to give quicker and better results. Basically SD atleast seems to be for when you want unique content. MJ/Dalle for everything else.
  - hospitalJail 3y ago
    Forgive me for not remembering the name. Stable Diffusion also has an MJ style where you just say what you want and it makes beautiful piutures. You cant customize basically anything but they look great.
    - loudmax 3y ago
      You might be thinking of Fooocus: https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus The Stable Diffusion web interface that got a lot of people's attention originally was Automatic1111: https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui Fooocus is definitely more beginner friendly. It does a lot of the prompt engineering for you. Automatic1111 has a ton of plugins, most notably ControlNet which gives you fine grained control over the images, but there is a learning curve.
emadm 3y ago
Business model is bundling so you have a one stop shop for good quality models of every modality and cultural variants of them. These go on bedrock, on chip, on prem etc and our consulting partners take them to the end user. On the innovation side stable diffusion turbo does like 100 cats with hats per second and the video model outperforms runway, pika etc on blind tests. Stable audio was one of the time innovation of the year winners on music and we released a sota 3d model. Stable LM zephyr is the best 3b chat model works great on a MacBook Air. Most of the pixels in the world will be generated so fast high quality image/video are the core and these other models are to support them. It’s really hard to build good solid models and we are the only company that can build a model of any type for anyone.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  > On the innovation side stable diffusion turbo does like 100 cats with hats per second 2028: Energy use on hat-cat generation exceeds energy use on bitcoin.
  - emadm 3y ago
    There are not enough cats on the internet. We are working to fix this.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  Vouch, I finally tried Stable LM 3b zephyr today and I'm stunned this slipped by. It's the only model I've tried that's not Mistral 7B that can do RAG. And it can run ~any consumer grade hardware released in last 3 years. I'm literally stunned it's been sitting out since December 8th. I've heard 10x more about Phi-2 than it, and I'm not sure why. (Official ONNX version, please!! Then you get Transformers.js / web / I can deploy on every platform from Web to iOS to Windows) re: art, Dalle-3 costs significantly more. XL costs are 1/5th of what they were at launch, 0.0002/image versus Dalle-3's 0.04. And you'd be surprised how often people are happy with XL -- Dalle-3's marginal advantage is mostly text, especially with the excessive filtering of stylistic stuff, and forced prompt rewrites
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
satvikpendem 3y ago
> For example Midjourney now seems to have far surpassed them in the image generation front Nope. Stable Diffusion with alternative models offers far more customization and control than Midjourney. Midjourney is good for beginners but sucks for experts.
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
We use SD at work because we need more control over the image generation pipeline (and to a lesser extent don’t want extra latency from web APIs). Believe it or not, generating a full image from a prompt is a small slice of the image generation pie. Highly tuned in-painting is key to a number of budding startups.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
>Stable Diffusion was novel at the time, but now their models consistently seem to be somewhat second rate compared to other things out there. For example Midjourney now seems to have far surpassed them in the image generation front. This isn’t entirely true, after the fumble that was SD2 they shipped SDXL and SDXL Turbo that are both excellent. And in real world results Midjourney doesn’t just straight out perform them it’s a lot more complex and ultimately SDXL is the more powerful tool. Definitely found the LLMs underwhelming and Stable Audios launch was poor but don’t think Midjourney has outright surpassed them on image gen.
- wincy 3y ago
  For what I’d call “art” or at least artsy works, or anything I want to iterate on (using inpainting and redraws) I want to make I use stable diffusion, but if I just want to send some dumb silly picture to send to my friend I’ve found myself using DALL-E almost every single day. It’s just so easy and in 4 images it’ll almost always get pretty close to what I’m describing. I’m constantly sending my friends dumb pictures because it’s really funny and gets a laugh out of people. That said it was super cool the time I trained a model on my friends selfies and made her into her D&D character. She was super excited about it, made me feel like a real life wizard.
hospitalJail 3y ago
>Midjourney now seems to have far surpassed them in the image generation front. What? Have you actually used either? MJ is just a ultra-fine tuned model with a few layers to prevent stuff from looking bad. Stable Diffusion has their own 'single shot' version, maybe someone remembers it, I played with it for 1-2 hours. Everything looks great, but I want hyper specific stuff in my art and I'm never getting that with 1 shots. Heck, I did a few flyers and used some icons I made with img2img + inpainting + controlnet. The work is completely stunning and scalable. That is never happening even at an individual level with MJ.

by JCM9 3y ago

liuliu 3y ago

> one can just quickly swap it out for something else someone else paid to train. That doesn't seem to be the case. There are very limited open-source models outside of the small-LLM bubble.

JCM9 3y ago
The open space on small models is a whole other developing angle, but O was referring to the general commoditization of a lot of these models. With rare exception after launch it seems the lifespan of any of these models is rather limited. From a business standpoint that sort of scenario is generally very unattractive and thus was trying to understand if they have some other angle they’re trying to play here to make a viable business out of this. Or the business model can just be get acquired before that matters and let that be someone else’s problem to figure out.
- liuliu 3y ago
  The comoditization of models outside of LLM is delusional. There is no comparable open source image / video models to the private ones.

smusamashah 3y ago

Midjourney has better quality but does not offer any control. Community has done and is still doing a a lot with SD models because they can be played and tinkered with in any way anyone wants to.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

washadjeffmad 3y ago

Midjourney is decidedly underwhelming if you've spent any time using the expansive tooling and control nets of Stable Diffusion. Yes, it's easy to get impressive first gens with MJ, but all of the coolest work and integration happening is using SD.

capybara_2020 3y ago
It depends. For great looking pics that you need to get out quickly MJ does a great job. Especially with its image + text feature. Dalle is also an interesting choice. SDXL and controlnet is odd a lot of the time. 1.5 + controlnet still seem to give quicker and better results. Basically SD atleast seems to be for when you want unique content. MJ/Dalle for everything else.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  Forgive me for not remembering the name. Stable Diffusion also has an MJ style where you just say what you want and it makes beautiful piutures. You cant customize basically anything but they look great.
  - loudmax 3y ago
    You might be thinking of Fooocus: https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus The Stable Diffusion web interface that got a lot of people's attention originally was Automatic1111: https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui Fooocus is definitely more beginner friendly. It does a lot of the prompt engineering for you. Automatic1111 has a ton of plugins, most notably ControlNet which gives you fine grained control over the images, but there is a learning curve.

emadm 3y ago

Business model is bundling so you have a one stop shop for good quality models of every modality and cultural variants of them. These go on bedrock, on chip, on prem etc and our consulting partners take them to the end user. On the innovation side stable diffusion turbo does like 100 cats with hats per second and the video model outperforms runway, pika etc on blind tests. Stable audio was one of the time innovation of the year winners on music and we released a sota 3d model. Stable LM zephyr is the best 3b chat model works great on a MacBook Air. Most of the pixels in the world will be generated so fast high quality image/video are the core and these other models are to support them. It’s really hard to build good solid models and we are the only company that can build a model of any type for anyone.

rsynnott 3y ago
> On the innovation side stable diffusion turbo does like 100 cats with hats per second 2028: Energy use on hat-cat generation exceeds energy use on bitcoin.
- emadm 3y ago
  There are not enough cats on the internet. We are working to fix this.
refulgentis 3y ago
Vouch, I finally tried Stable LM 3b zephyr today and I'm stunned this slipped by. It's the only model I've tried that's not Mistral 7B that can do RAG. And it can run ~any consumer grade hardware released in last 3 years. I'm literally stunned it's been sitting out since December 8th. I've heard 10x more about Phi-2 than it, and I'm not sure why. (Official ONNX version, please!! Then you get Transformers.js / web / I can deploy on every platform from Web to iOS to Windows) re: art, Dalle-3 costs significantly more. XL costs are 1/5th of what they were at launch, 0.0002/image versus Dalle-3's 0.04. And you'd be surprised how often people are happy with XL -- Dalle-3's marginal advantage is mostly text, especially with the excessive filtering of stylistic stuff, and forced prompt rewrites
doctorpangloss 3y ago

satvikpendem 3y ago

> For example Midjourney now seems to have far surpassed them in the image generation front Nope. Stable Diffusion with alternative models offers far more customization and control than Midjourney. Midjourney is good for beginners but sucks for experts.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago

We use SD at work because we need more control over the image generation pipeline (and to a lesser extent don’t want extra latency from web APIs). Believe it or not, generating a full image from a prompt is a small slice of the image generation pie. Highly tuned in-painting is key to a number of budding startups.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

>Stable Diffusion was novel at the time, but now their models consistently seem to be somewhat second rate compared to other things out there. For example Midjourney now seems to have far surpassed them in the image generation front. This isn’t entirely true, after the fumble that was SD2 they shipped SDXL and SDXL Turbo that are both excellent. And in real world results Midjourney doesn’t just straight out perform them it’s a lot more complex and ultimately SDXL is the more powerful tool. Definitely found the LLMs underwhelming and Stable Audios launch was poor but don’t think Midjourney has outright surpassed them on image gen.

wincy 3y ago
For what I’d call “art” or at least artsy works, or anything I want to iterate on (using inpainting and redraws) I want to make I use stable diffusion, but if I just want to send some dumb silly picture to send to my friend I’ve found myself using DALL-E almost every single day. It’s just so easy and in 4 images it’ll almost always get pretty close to what I’m describing. I’m constantly sending my friends dumb pictures because it’s really funny and gets a laugh out of people. That said it was super cool the time I trained a model on my friends selfies and made her into her D&D character. She was super excited about it, made me feel like a real life wizard.

hospitalJail 3y ago

>Midjourney now seems to have far surpassed them in the image generation front. What? Have you actually used either? MJ is just a ultra-fine tuned model with a few layers to prevent stuff from looking bad. Stable Diffusion has their own 'single shot' version, maybe someone remembers it, I played with it for 1-2 hours. Everything looks great, but I want hyper specific stuff in my art and I'm never getting that with 1 shots. Heck, I did a few flyers and used some icons I made with img2img + inpainting + controlnet. The work is completely stunning and scalable. That is never happening even at an individual level with MJ.