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The underlying reason is that current AI businesses and models are failing to capture any significant economic value. We're going to get there, but it will take

• minimaxir 3y ago
  AI businesses/models are capturing economic value: the problem is that costs are increasing much faster than revenue.
  • dheera 3y ago
    No, Stability isn't getting 99.99% of the money people are making from Stable Diffusion. Their (lack of a) business model is the problem.
  • Satam 3y ago
    With the current limitations of AI in mind, it often looks like a solution looking for a problem. It's too unreliable, slow, dumb, and too expensive for a lot of the tasks companies would like to use it for. And that becomes part of the problem because it's hard to sell unreliable technology unless you design the product in a way that plays well with the current shortcomings. We will get there, but it's still a few iterations away.
    • BigJono 3y ago
      I don't think it's that SD and LLMs are solutions looking for problems, it's that there are very clear problems to which they provide 90% of a solution and make it impossible to clear the last 10%. They're the new WYSIWYG/low-code. Everyone that doesn't fully understand the problem space thinks they're some ultimate solution that is going to revolutionise everything. People that do are responding with a resounding 'meh'. Stable Diffusion is a great example. Something that can generate consistent game assets would be an absolute game changer for the entire game industry and open up a new wave of high tech indie game development, but despite every "oh wow" demo hitting the front page of HN, we've had the tech for a couple of years now and the only thing that's come out of it is some janky half solutions (3D meshes from pictures that are unworkable in real games, still no way to generate assets in consistent styles without a huge amount of complex tinkering) and a bunch of fucking hentai lol.
      • roenxi 3y ago
        A game with no consistency in the art is probably enabled. We've crossed the threshold where something like Magic the Gathering could be recreated by a tiny team and a low budget. I don't think the limiting factor here is the software; it looks like we got AI-generated art pretty much as soon as consumer graphics cards could handle it (10 years ago it would have been quite hard). I'd be measuring progress in hardware generations not years and from that perspective Stable Diffusion is young.
        • callalex 3y ago
          Current AI is entirely incapable of generating the balanced and fun/engaging rule sets required for a MtG style game. Sure the art assets could be generated with skilled prompting and touchup but even that is nowhere close to the strong statement you made.
          • VladimirGolovin 3y ago
            OP likely meant that a Midjourney-level AI can easily generate all the card art. Obviously, current AIs cannot generate game rulesets because the game feel is an internal phenomenon that cannot be represented in the material domain and therefore AIs cannot train on it.
          • nine_k 3y ago
            It does not take a large team to generate interesting and balanced rules. I'd hazard to say that with a larger team the task becomes harder. Creating the art, on the other hand, goes from a week per card to half a day per card, or something similar.
      • liuliu 3y ago
        Palworld
      • livueta 3y ago
        And even a lot of the hentai is fucking worthless for the same reasons! Try generating some kinbaku. It's really hard to get something where all the rope actually connects and interacts sensibly because it doesn't actually know what a knot is. Instead, you end up with M. C. Escher: Fetish Edition.
    • tiborsaas 3y ago
      We use AI for simple tasks and it already pays off. It's not unreliable if you do it right.
• echelon 3y ago
  No. There can be tremendous value in AI, you just won't find it here. The reason is that Stability.ai gave away everything for free. Until recently, they didn't even attempt to charge money for their models. I've heard the only reason they're not already closed up is that they're reselling all of the rented GPU quota they leased out years ago. Companies are subletting from Stability, which locked in lots of long term GPU processing capacity. There's no business plan here. This is the Movie Pass of AI.
  • __loam 3y ago
    It will be interesting to see when OpenAI gets as open about their costs as their revenue.
  • yreg 3y ago
    > the only reason they're not already closed up is that they're reselling all of the rented GPU quota They have raised 110M in October and they say that training a particular model costs them hundreds of thousands $ in compute costs. They don't lack money.
    • baobabKoodaa 3y ago
      They needed to take an emergency $50M loan after that, so it clearly didn't last long
• huytersd 3y ago
  OpenAI and midjourney have millions of paying customers.
  • bamboozled 3y ago
    Tens of millions of freeloaders too.
    • rvz 3y ago
      ...and thousands of enterprise customers translating into billions of dollars worth of deals. The point is, OpenAI can afford to have free-loaders as long as their deals from enterprise, governments are paying for the service. Midjourney doesn't have a free plan so no free-loaders there and they're making $200M+ with no VCs. Stability.ai will always suffer from free-loaders due to their fully open source AI.
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Stability.ai will always suffer from free-loaders due to their fully open source AI. Stability's recent models (SD3, SV3D, StableLM2, StableCode, and more) are neither open licensed nor planned for release as open licensed.
      • bamboozled 3y ago
        Sounds like a fairly precarious position they’re in though. This isn’t some new magic tech anymore.
    • raincole 3y ago
      Every single Ad blocker users is a freeloader to Google/Youtube. Didn't stop them from being extremely successful.
      • necovek 3y ago
        I am both a Youtube Family Premium and a dedicated ad-blocker user.
• famouswaffles 3y ago
  Midjourney is the most popular discord channel by far with 19.5M+ members, $200M in revenue in 2023 with 0 external investments and only 40 employees. The problem has nothing to do with commercializing image gen AI and all to do with Emad/Stability having seemingly 0 sensible business plans. Seriously this seemed to be the plan: Step 1: Release SD for free Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit The vast majority of users couldn't be bothered to take the steps necessary to get it running locally so I don't even think the open sourcing philosophy would have been a serious hurdle to wider commercial adoption. In my opinion, a paid, easy to use, robust UI around Stability's models should have been the number one priority and they waited far too long to even begin. There's been a lot of amazing augmentations to the stable diffusion models (ControlNet, Dreambooth etc) that have propped up, lots of free research and implementations because the research community has latched onto the stability models and I feel they failed to capitalize on any of it.
  • epivosism 3y ago
    Yes, and MJ has no public API either. Same for Ideogram, I imagine they have at least 10m in the bank, and aren't even bothering making an API despite being SoTA for lots of areas.
  • Satam 3y ago
    There's money to be made for sure, and Stability's sloppy execution and strategy definitely didn't help them. But I think there are also industry-wide factors at play that make AI companies quite brittle for now.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • andrewljohnson 3y ago
    I wonder if MidJourney is still ripping. I’m actually curious if it’s superior to ChatGPT’s Dall-E images… I switched and cancelled my subscription when ChatGPT added images, but I think I was mostly focused on convenience.
    • 3y ago
• johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >It won't be decades, but a few more years would be helpful I see it this way to be honest: - companies will aggresively try to use AI in the next 2-3 years, downsizing themselves in the meantime - the 3-5 year launch mark will show that downsizing was an awful idea and took too many hits to really be worth it. I don't know if those hits will be in profits (depends on the company) but it will clearly hit that uncanny valley. - 6-8 year mark will have studios hiring like crazy to get the talent they bled back. They won't be as big as before, but it will grow to a more sane level of operation. - 10-12 year mark will have the "Apple" of AI finally nail the happy medium between efficiency and profitability (hopefully without devastating the workers, but who knows?). Competitors will follow throw and properly usher the promises AI is making right now. - 15 year mark is when AI has proper pipelining, training, college courses, legal lines, etc. established and becomes standard faire, no stranger than using an IDE. As I see it, companies and AI tech alike are trying to pretend to be the 10 year mark all the while we're currently in legal talks and figuring out what and where to use AI to begin with. In my biased opinion, I hope there's enough red tape on generative art to make it not worth it for large studios to leverage it easily (e.g. generative art loses all copyright/trademarkability, even if using owned IPs. Likely not that extreme, but close).
  • DrSiemer 3y ago
    Companies are aware of the current AI generation being a tool and not a full replacement (or they will be after the first experiments they perform). They will not downsize, they will train their workforce or hire replacements that are willing to pick up these more powerful and efficient tools. In the hands of a skilled professional there will be no uncanny valley. This will result in surplus funds, that can be invested in more talent, which in turn will keep feeding AI development. The only way is up. Not allowing copyright on AI generated work is a ridiculous and untenable decision that will be overturned eventually.
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      You greatly overestimate how quickly companies learned. Outsourcing has been a thing for decades and to this day some people are still trying to do it to cut costs. I guess that's what happens when you don't value retention nor document previous decisions. You repeat the cycle. Sure, the smart companies will use it as a tool, but most companies aren't smart, or just don't care. It'll vary by industry. There is already talks of sizing down VFX/Animation for a mix of outsourcing and AI reliance, for example. And industry that already underpays its artists. >Not allowing copyright on AI generated work is a ridiculous and untenable decision that will be overturned eventually. Maybe, once the dust settles on who and what and how you copyright AI. It'll be a while, though. But I get the logic. No one can (nor wants to) succinctly explain what sources were used in a generative art work right now, and that generative process drives the art a lot more than the artist for most generative art. Even without AI there is a line between "I lightly edited this existing work on photosshop" and "I significantly altered a base template to the point where you can't recognize the template anymore" where copyright will kick in. Still, my biased hopes involve them being very strict with this line. You can't just give 2 prompts and expect to "own" an artwork.
• deleted 3y ago
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• HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  90% of startups fail, so it's not just a matter of waiting for the tech to get better and having more value - most of the current players will simply fail and go out of business.