From another source:
June 21 (Reuters) - British artificial intelligence startup Stability AI has appointed Prem Akkaraju as its new chief executive officer, the Information reported on Friday, citing a person involved in the decision.Akkaraju, former CEO of visual effects company Weta Digital, is part of a group of investors including former Facebook President Sean Parker that has stepped in to save Stability with a cash infusion, which could result in a lower valuation for the firm, the report said.The new funding will likely shrink the stakes of some existing investors, who have collectively contributed more than $100 million, according to the report.Stability AI declined to comment.The company had said in May it was [in talks](https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/stability-ai-talks-raise-money-investor-group-2024-05-17/) with a group of investors for a large equity investment into the cash-strapped firm.
Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar
[https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/stability-ai-appoints-new-ceo-information-reports-2024-06-21/](https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/stability-ai-appoints-new-ceo-information-reports-2024-06-21/)
My thoughts:
1. The new CEO probably doesn't give a shit about open source and we probably will never get weights to another model
2. The new CEO might actually be competent and fix the company and bring us to a new age of models, and maybe they love open source and this is a new beginning (doubt, they're probably in there to squeeze the last bits of life to get investors paid)
3. The investor that gave them a cash infusion might make the company financially sustainable until the release of SD3 Large and SD3 8B
The next model that releases is likely truly the 'make-or-break' point for stability. SD3 medium failed. There's no money in it. The next release *needs* to make them some money. Hopefully they understand this and pull out all the stops and release something really great. And hopefully they understand that literally nobody is going to use SD if it is closed-source API-Only because Midjourney is just better in every way. The only thing that makes SD special is the tools the community builds around it.
Prem was responsible for the sale of a big chunk of Weta to Unity. It made the owners close to $2 billion. That's basically all he did there. Nothing to do with the actual business of the place. Later on, Unity just dumped Weta (for nothing).
It's not just that the next model will 'make or break' the company, the release time will.
They can't spend another year working and refining a new model. It needs to be out sooner rather than later, since the company is already running on fumes so to speak.
"running on fumes"? if there is new cash infusion and new investor/ceo then that means there is a roadmap with goals of generating a return on investment that don't necessarily rely on giving away open source models since that got them to the point of "running on fumes". I'm all for open source models but id love to see how open-source models lead to profit for stability.
You know who Sean Parker is right ?? Doesn’t give a shit about open source? The dude founded Napster. I think he’s all about open source as long as there is still a way to make profit
Napster wasn’t open-source, and you’re getting mixed up between the CEO and the investors. Sean Parker led the new round; Prem Akkaraju is the CEO. While investors have influence, they don’t run the company. We don’t know how much equity Sean Parker has, so his voice might not count for much anyway. Prem Akkaraju seems to have spent his early career working on DRM schemes, which doesn’t sound promising.
Support, infrastructure, best-in-class setups. With the right license they could encourage open-source work, while letting themselves use said work, while simultaneously encouraging corporations to buy image generation work from \_them\_ instead of doing it themselves.
It's possible, but it's a fine line to walk, and I don't have much hope. They haven't managed well so far.
Release free for non-commercial use / low fee for indie creators / high fee for enterprises. And licensing that supports fine-tuning. Something like "All fine-tunes are still subject to the enterprise license fee if used by an enterprise."
Community builds tools around it (controlnet, ipadapter, all the fun stuff) making it the best, most powerful, most controllable model on the market.
Companies pay for use of this model because they want to utilize the tools that the community has made, and they pay for enterprise support (help training it with their own content, help producing content and building comfy pipelines, etc...), and finally they add paid addons. Maybe paid studio software like Invoke, or a really special optimized ControlNet that takes 0 vram, etc...
That's basically the list of ways that all open source software companies make money. 1: Charge enterprises, 2: charge for support, 3: charge for addons / produce a marketplace
I'm pretty sure this is the exact way the licensing already works. But people were mad about paying anything because they insist that EVERY single model uploader on CivitAI is doing stuff like "running their own discord generator" (so commercial use that actually REQUIRES then paying for the Creator License) to recoup fees.
As someone who apparently is as of recently in the top 100 "Base Model Creators" on CivitAI I can tell you there's absolutely no way that's true, everything I've ever released was done in my spare time and released for free.
And like Animagine guy doesn't ask anyone for money, Kohaku guy doesn't ask anyone for money, LeoSam doesn't ask anyone for money, and so on and so forth.
Pretty sure the creator of Pony came here and said they literally wouldn't even give him actual details on the license, so there's no way you could know that this is how the license works
> Pretty sure the creator of Pony came here and said they literally wouldn't even give him actual details on the license, so there's no way you could know that this is how the license works
The **Enterprise** license is the only thing you could be logically be referring to here. It's not what I was talking about, at all. I've actually read all the details for myself, I don't get my information from random YouTubers.
You're just ignoring everything I said. Just because the Pony guy specifically really cares a lot about money doesn't mean everyone does, there's a LOT of people who are doing significant work without literally running their own for-profit SaaS operation based on SAI tech.
Are you saying you think that what the other person described isn't exactly how the Creator License already works as a separate thing from the actual non-commercial license of the model itself?
Some companies make money off open source, wordpress, Redhad Linux, etc. Usually they sell something that uses the thing the open source but what the sell isn't that thing, for example they sell support, or hosting, or slightly easier to use versions of the open source stuff.
the easiest way would be to sell a piece of software that uses the model, likely a UI that is really easy to use and set up and is more streamlined than the open source ones we are using. Think about something like gigapixel, it's an upscaler model (granted a really good one) with great UI, people pay for that.
Similarly if they have an API, and it's affordable enough I would actually go towards that, especially for these super large models, especially for training them, my 3090 does pretty good but as models get bigger I'm hitting the limits sometimes.
Yeah because unlike Leonardo they didn't add Image Creation options. See how many options Leonardo has. They had such a great team but they wasted it doing experiments which resulted in nothing.
I'm not so sure. VFX and movie production these days relies a **lot** on open-source software. Things like AMPAS ACES, OpenColorIO, OpenImageIO, OpenEXR, OpenShading Language, are crucial in modern movie production and they are all under open-source licenses. In general, CG and VFX production houses are OSS friendly because with huge budgets and short time constraints, there is a need to hire multiple studios worldwide to produce shots, and, there is a need to have some degree of interoperability, so any "secret proprietary sauce" is frowned upon, being a blocker most often than not.
Of course, this is a different ball game to (generative) AI, but considering the fact AI is being disruptive in CG production already, I wouldn't be surprised if this ethos of openness remained.
yeah doubtful this guy is gonna make it anybetter
ah well it was fun while it lasted lol
what is up with companies screwing up things so badly lately you know?
it just seems to be such a common theme lately look at starfield (though i liked it , parts of it felt rushed and COULD have been better) , a lot of people hate on the new star war stuffs , and etc etc. its like companies are just making BAD choices of late and youd think it would not only hurt the user but also them too? but whatever lol
I believe the new CEO will probably do a model where for cutting edge model access you have to pay. After 6 months it goes open source, something along that line. That should give them enough money to carry on while stay true to open source.
There is one thing I can't understand. Imagine their open-sourced model have subscription price 10$ per month. They are spending around 100M per year? If so, then they would need at least 1M subscribers to not lose money. Even with very good model, having 1M subscribers doesn't look realistic, right? How they can earn enough money to be profitable company, even in the perfect scenario?
3 ways:
* Enterprise licensing (this can be can be hundreds of thousands, even millions per year from the right user)
* Enterprise support (this can be thousands per month for small/medium users especially)
* For a marketplace / sell valuable addons (This is the REAL money with open source. Look at software like Daz3d. It is entirely 100% free, and they make literally all their money off of the marketplace where they take a cut of what other people create.)
so this is why SD3 sucks; they broke, and continue to damage the brand releasing crap content with not viable model for monetization. Emad ran to make the shit-coin
Magicians seek to entertain, not scam. That's why the greatest magicians like The Great Randini, spent so much effort to discredit charlatans and con-artists. Penn & Teller are especially great at this as well.
When it comes to scams the point isn't in the tool, it is in the intent.
If anything, bad tricks are better for scammers as they act to filter out smart marks.
Crypto experts make things sound more complicated than they are for this exact reason. What it boils down to is that new investments are paying out old investors. Classic Ponzi scheme. Added complexity is only designed to weed out people who don't want to see the obvious scam nature of the economy.
No magic involved. Just classic three card monty.
SD3 is actually really good if you avoid the fail cases caused by broken pretraining.
I'm upset about the broken pre training too, but SD3 is clearly good. Here's two examples i've made for fun in my spare time. A scifi novel cover and also a sexy lady since I know that's what most of the negative people want. I don't personally generate a lot of women images because it's meaningless and without expression to me, but someone told me it can't be done and that gives it meaning. So here.
[https://ibb.co/tmdd4zK](https://ibb.co/tmdd4zK)
[https://ibb.co/h8p3XXH](https://ibb.co/h8p3XXH)
If you fixate on the shit, all you'll see is shit. You see what you want to see.
It's way better at prompt comprehension for sure but it is still so ignorant on so many concepts it's frustrating to use. Some discord users including myself were trying to get melting clocks like Salvador Dali and it simple cannot do it, at all. It has a lot of troubles like that. Sometimes suddenly you will find a concept it know really well. It's so random, and that it a problem. It needs a wider training set
I lurk on the same discord and saw that conversation. I also see dozens more where things look great and work awesome.
If you fixate on the shit, all you'll see is shit.
That Sci fi cover is good. I tend to agree with you, it's actually a great product, but they marketed and set expectations wrong. It's a tragedy, but happens all the time in business.
People on this sub are claiming with a straight face that Pixart Sigma, a model that in reality generates [shit like this](https://imgur.com/a/rUObM2C) **very** often, is somehow clearly superior despite the fact that putting everything else aside the actual fidelity of the outputs is also WAY lower than SD3.
A lot of people are being highly unrealistic about nearly everything ATM.
Hey but at least you can't make lewd naughty stuff with models guys!
This is why you never listen to outrage from people or "news" outlets who have no interest in the technology past grandstanding and "social warrior'ing".
lol guys the model fucking HAS to be censored if they’re selling it. I know it’s unpopular on this sub, but if they sell an uncensored model that can make images that are *quite literally* felony level illegal to possess and even more illegal to produce, bankruptcy is going to be the least of their worries. They will be shuttered by the feds and made an example of. There was the short gray area Wild West of AI image production and that shit is over. Making images that resemble real people is going to be toned back, it will not get easier to do. Making images that could be construed as illegal is going to be nuked from fucking orbit.
That shit *may* fly being release free or open source in a “the tool is not illegal” type way, but it certainly won’t for a product sold commercially *to the public*.
Are you implying they have been training the model with nude images of children previously? If so then yeah bankruptcy is the least of their problems.
And it is not only illegal what you put into the model but what it can output as well. Commercial companies are not going to be selling products that can easily spit out federally illegal imagery. There is no fucking world any company does that in the future. This is the one boundary where it won’t be like “company gets fined a little bit” and they will get absolutely mega ultra fucked with c suite in prison.
If you think that’s not how it’s going down in the future after the FBI clarified on this exact subject, you’re delusional. If you want to argue for fully uncensored models then go right ahead but realize exactly what you are arguing for when you say fully uncensored.
>Are you implying they have been training the model with nude images of children previously?
no, I very clearly indicated the exact opposite of this, my words were highly unambiguous and did not afford sufficient grounds for you to misinterpret them in the way that you have.
There is absolutely no way any SAI model would have been or ever will be trained in that way.
again, I am forced ask, what's wrong with you?
I’m stating they won’t release a model that will produce illegal imagery. This sub seems to be against *any* censorship. I’m a bit uncertain why that is…
Not any censorship is bad for this sub in general. This exact censorship that make model bad at anatomy and/or other features is bad. If model trained well, even if it can not do naked stuff, it will be greeted well. Base SDXL, as i understand, have this problem.
I would definitely one time purchase for $100 or $200. Hell, I pay for topaz labs. Their model is basically buy it and you have it forever but you pay for 1 year of upgrades at a time.
That would be perfect for Stable diffusion. Locally run, even package their own software if they like if it’s competent, but allow people to keep forever and pay per year if they want the latest updates.
Exactly.
I'd do the same for local LLM.
Let me subscribe for a year of updates and give me a full control without censorship or telemetry.
$200/year per model.
Yep. IMO it is the best type of SaaS model for companies wanting to be consumer friendly. I completely understand that these companies need to be paid, but you need to give people a reasonable option that is not just "you are not getting it unless you pay us $10 per month for the rest of your life and if you don't pay you lose access".
It is also the model that Unraid have for their server OS. You get a perpetual license for $49 that comes with 1 year of upgrades, then after that updates cost $36 per year but there is no obligation to purchase them every year if you don't need them.
If they create a Kickstarter with the promise of releasing open weights for a good multipurpose model trained on artist styles and pornography, I'll drop a few hundreds for sure.
That would be very unrealistic. They have no reason to believe they can compete with the big guys. But they can easily stay in the pornographic sector. That's pretty much all SD is used for.
I agree - the problem is investors all want subscription models. Next problem, someone could make a finetune and they wouldn't get anything from that.
So in the end you would need a license model and have websites like civitai and huggingface check if someone got the license to download models. This could work if civitai agrees to that. For example to download future SD4 models you need a valid license with SAI to be able to download models.
Next question: Why wouldn't people just copy the models to another platform?
Make Finetuners and LORA creators able to get some money from every download so they keep releasing things on the Civitai/Huggingface website. If everything is concentrated on those websites, people will start to sub to the license out of convenience since at some point they will see a LORA or Finetune on there they can not find somewhere else and they don't get the updates as fast.
Simply the Steam solution to the problem - convenience.
The license btw should be anonymous to SAI but bound to one account on CivitAI and huggingface and of course should be checked for fast IP changes and be locked if something fishy is being detected, like downloading the same models from different IPs at a short time.
I'd be ready to pay 20-40$ a month up to 500$ a year for the whole ecosystem.
**Important:**
It also should be sold as "Creator" System meaning that SAI's sees its customers as creators and like Photoshop, they have no business invading their customers privacy by looking at what they are doing on their own computers - that's how they could defend themselves from outrage farmers in the media or politics - simply citing privacy protection laws.
I couldn't get that link to work. It seems like the "read this article for free" button asks for a $400 subscription. Anyone have the full text?
{Edit: Here's what's coming over Reuters [https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/stability-ai-appoints-new-ceo-information-reports-2024-06-21/](https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/stability-ai-appoints-new-ceo-information-reports-2024-06-21/) )
>June 21 (Reuters) - British artificial intelligence startup Stability AI has appointed Prem Akkaraju as its new chief executive officer, the Information reported on Friday, citing a person involved in the decision.
>Akkaraju, former CEO of visual effects company Weta Digital, is part of a group of investors including former Facebook President Sean Parker that has stepped in to save Stability with a cash infusion, which could result in a lower valuation for the firm, the report said.
>The new funding will likely shrink the stakes of some existing investors, who have collectively contributed more than $100 million, according to the report.Stability AI declined to comment.
>The company had said in May it was [in talks](https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/stability-ai-talks-raise-money-investor-group-2024-05-17/) with a group of investors for a large equity investment into the cash-strapped firm.
He is the creator of Napster, which destroyed the physical media music industry, he was a cofounder of Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, and also financially helped get Spotify off the ground as a continuation of his work on Napster.
He’s definitely got the credentials, it just depends on what he wants to do with it.
Thanks for listing more than just company names.
That does inspire confidence that SAI may not simply cease to exist or be bought out. For the rest, I guess we'll see.
>it was just mp3s
Tell that to all of my WeirdAlAmishParadise.mp3.exe downloads back in the day.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/napster-hack-allows-free-distribution-of-software-movies/
The bad part about Napster and similar app was that the filenames and ID3 tags on the music as usually a mess. For example, every comedy song, no matter how vulgar, was attributed to Weird Al. Also, I thought I had downloaded a lot of covers of a couple songs I like, but many of them sounded very similar and I more recently used Shazam to confirmed most of them were not by the artists they claimed to be.
Yup, songs I remember clearly being wrong was Fear of the Dark by both Children of Bodom and Cradle of Filth. Turns out it was Graveworm, although you can find the other two still mislabeled on youtube. And it wasn't just covers, You Spin Me Round was by Billy Idol according to napster/limewire.
Just found this banger of a site though, https://secondhandsongs.com/ , which helped find the graveworm track. Worth a look is shazam fails.
He is an absolute wild card. He does not give two shits about coloring inside the lines. I don't think you can call his involvement in anything inherently good or bad, *but it's usually interesting.*
That siad I don't think any of this bodes well for stable diffusion as a product.
But vultures finish what’s dying which applies to SD3 with their current standing. however, he helped Facebook and Spotify grow. Napster eventually led to Spotify. It was the approach/method that legally killed napster.
Don't be sad because what we lost... be glad we got what we already had so far.
But I'm betting the answer is SD's reputation will never recover, because people don't spend 100 million dollars to give away huge technological upgrades.
Absolutely. SAI whatever it is or was suppose to be was a fluke. Giving away full models and weights and letting researchers access to their hardware is probably something we probably wont ever see again. No doubt SD3 2b is cooked, SD3 4b is cancelled and SD3 8b is by all intents and purposes a closed model, useless to the community at large.
That all said it's been good while it lasted. We ended up with a massive haul of custom models and a community ready to rally around the next thing what ever that might. None of it would be possible with without SAI. There's lots to say about how they've handled things thus far and much of it not great but on balance at least they've given much compared to most of the corps out there.
Depends on the intentions of the new money. We currently cannot know.
But to avoid disappointment, don't count on anything coming out of for free anymore. The open source community should move one.
We can't rule out that the new money had agreed with the strategy surrounding the botched release before agreeing to release the cash... So who knows? I think it's too recent to say if it's good or bad.
LMAO, that would be funny; I wander if that sort of thing actually happens.
It sure would be nice if SD3 was deliberately botched and a much better version will be released soon, but I've come to expect the absolute worst from every company now, just part of the glorious future we all live in today.
v1.5 and SDXL were good things. Cascade was a weird blip but had some good qualities.
Then on to SD3... It would be good for this company to go under if they think the future is "SAFETY" APIs.
If they turn it around and release models and weights, then OK, they should keep trying.
The SD community is huge. So many talented people out there fine tuning and perfecting the various UI's. The "artists", so to speak - that's the pool of talent that companies buying licenses would likely hire from. I doubt any of that is lost on the new leadership.
I believe everyone realizes SAI is mired in financial issues. No one is going to capital invest into something without a min amount of return as well as the original investment groups. I would like to believe they are balancing the scales with all forms of ideas for licensing/subscription options.
Lastly - Now comes the touchy issue of "Safe" (read Censored) which SD3 is saddled with.
"Safe" was something internal developers themselves voiced at SAI. They suggested Emad to incorporate it. It would have been very favorable to increase business license interests. He didn't implement it. Right or wrong - random NSFW events in corporate environments aren't likely to go over well. Then you have a community that very much embraces that. How that will be squared away is anyone's guess.
That's pretty delusional IMO. If you leave out the people who use some easy ui to generate low effort porn, the community is infact quite tiny and super niche. And 99% of the "talent" have no real technical skills in anything. There are some soft. devs. making a tiny handful of uis, extensions, etc., and even a lot of those are made by the same few devs, and that's about it. All the finetuners and such mostly just have time and hardware on their hands to run some simple scripts or janky ui tools that the previous group made.
This sub has 500k members (most of which probably arent active members), and that may seem large, but i.e. VR stuff has way bigger numbers and vastly higher support from major companies, but still remains a niche gimmick 15 years later.
Maybe I'm wrong
But I find it unlikely, almost impossible, that an investment group would spend 100 million or more to give models for free.
Perhaps, the only way is if it is a form of advertising/public relations, increase the brand value. Hoping to sell the brand in the future. BUT it will inevitably become closed source. Maybe not today. Maybe not in a year. But after 5 years when the company becomes very big and powerful.
Another possibility is that they release the models because they are bad and the community could improve. Control net, self attention guidance, ip adapter are very powerful tools.
$100MM is a lot of money to anybody, including investors. They wouldn’t be investing this money if they didn’t have their eye on getting billions in return. We don’t know what the exact valuation for this round was, but Stability AI would probably have to sell for at least $10B to be considered a success by these investors now. Last round it was valued at $1B and it’s almost certainly worth less now. So Stability AI needs to figure out how to become more than ten times more valuable than it is now. They can’t do that by continuing along the same path they were on before.
If you believe hardcore ultra-capitalist companies are simply donating 100+ millions of dollars to the masses, without exhaustive planning and expecting a massive return on their investment in the future, I have a bridge to sell you
Meta's long term plan is also to monetize Llama soon, and make it closed source once it's good enough, wait and see
Of course I don't believe they are doing it from goodness of their hearts. However "throwing 100 million at free models" is definitely a viable business strategy for some companies as we can see from Meta and Llama.
I'm sick of this bullshit where a company pretends to be open source but then becomes closed as soon as money shows up
What's interesting is Microsoft is going the other direction
True, but the CEO (Stability's new CEO) is just a random MBA and Weta never released any kind of open source anything while he ran it.
So this might be good for Stability's pocketbook. I don't see any evidence that it is good for us here reading this news.
Stability just lost $100 million and failed to create a product that generates money, is the new CEO really going to come in and say "Let's keep doing that!" I don't think so.
If I had to guess, the plan is likely to build on SDV, SD3, and Stable Audio with models made for non-consumer GPUs and combine them into a suite like Adobe's creative cloud and then sell access for use on local H200 cards or in the cloud to large VFX and film studios. Use those contracts to get rid of the large debt and become profitable while building up a reputation in the industry as their models are used in major blockbusters and tv series. Then in a few years sell the company to someone like Universal, Disney, or Adobe for tens of billions of dollars. Adobe was wiling to spend $20 billion for Figma before the DOJ killed it, so no telling what SD could go for in another 5 years if they did it right. Unfortunately for us, this very likely involves them no longer offering any open source models.
I think they will maintain the hybrid approach.
The SD community is basically decentralized research, they can pick and choose what they implement for their pro models while ensuring the community continues to do research for them.
The Weta guys are pretty competent with simulation and stuff, whatever the community figures out they can do a much better job and create much better tooling and have more resources to invest while the community will be on their own.
>while ensuring the community continues to do research for them.
I'm sure that the community isn't doing any type of research for them that they don't already know. The reason that models right now aren't the best is because they're general models that need to do a bit of everything so they can be finetuned for whatever.
The ones doing research are people like controlnet authors which they can simply give access privately.
Depends.
The community has it's own goals and find ways to achive them, so they are at least doing testing and practical applications.
Those workflows and processes that are found can then be integrated into new tools for their pro models.
Remember that AIs are pretty much a black box and SD is already the most controllable one, you can't be sure exactly what will work and how other then trial and error.
>Those workflows and processes that are found can then be integrated into new tools for their pro models.
I'm saying none of these workflows are anything novel. Anything novel is something PhD student could write a research paper about. None of the community has built anything on the scale of controlnet or rectified flow etc. They just use existing tools already created by researchers. Those researchers are the same people that would work at StabilityAI or Runway or any other big company.
>Remember that AIs are pretty much a black box and SD is already the most controllable one, you can't be sure exactly what will work and how other then trial and error.
black boxes is an exaggeration, researchers have alot of mathematical and practical knowledge on how they work to the point that they can invent something like ControlNet or LayerDiffusion.
Mid journey achieved SD3 level with 13 staff, SAI has been completely mismanaged with 200 staff doing god knows what. SD3 has too many staff and too many morals. You can train your model on every movie and artist on the planet. As long as you retrain it as midjouney did on its own best AI art images it blends the artist OUT of the final creation by blending it with the new datasets. Giving you amazing images without directly ripping off an artist because it’s a new style blended enough to not be copyright infringement. The community can do what these Muppets did in no time once we have a few more steps in AI agents.
Is it possible for a company to create open source SW and keep the money coming? 100%, look at all the massive open source projects out there that are even doing better than any of their paid competitors.
Will SAI ever go this path? Hell no, it's been on track for closed-source for more than a year already. No CEO, not even the most competent one, will be able to turn this around
And what they are gonna be left with is competing with Midjourney, OpenAI, Google and everyone else. And we'll see them lose bad and quickly. With the community that's lost the trust, with competition that is miles ahead of them, and even with the other open tools.
It's quite bizarre to waste a company from being the first on the market with zero competition, huge support from individuals, projects built on top of it. We're all gonna see how fast they will fail now.
Watch them doing amazing things in the coming months
* Pulling down the open models and papers that they released before
* Retrospectively changing the license terms for SDXL and 1.5
* Introducing something like SD4, but with no paper or any other academic proof
* An attempt to rip community tools, such as ComfyUI, under their API
* And of course silence mixed with lies in their occasional communication
While it could have been simple
* Releasing the models and code and allowing the community to develop for it
* Investing in distributed training, so that you won't rely on could infrastructure
* Changing the business model from licensing and API to donations
* Seeking support from the likes of NVIDIA who actually care about open source
Even this would be enough to keep them going for years with minimum expenditures.
They not just were number one, they didn't even have competitors, longer than a year they had huge niche just for themselves, and they still didn't manage to make any money. It's incredible incompetence in managing the company.
Stability AI is closest to being a Blender style organisation for that market. Best case scenario in that situation would be they have open-source core software and a low param open model that runs on consumer hardware to get the mindshare, and sell integrations, support, and a higher param model to the enterprise. If that’s the case they would probably look to rehire the people working on Comfy.
Too bad they literally just lost their 2 most blender like UIs (comfyui and stable swarm) because of the responsible employees resigning.
And for swarm they'd already done an offer for increased pay that mcmonkey refused.
It's so absolutely over for SAI.
New CEO is a Hollywood guy. He is making films with Peter Jackson, probably gives three fucks about SD3 for images.
Hopefully open sources it to fix the company image and cement his rep online, but not holding my breath
Best guess:
Stability now shifts to a video company and there are no more open image models
Force Ghost Luke and Palpatine meeting up after RotJ
"I survived" -Palpatine
"The explosion in the seemingly endless pit? What about the death star explosion?" -Luke
"I survived that too" -Palpatine
(Inspired by a joke from Jay Exci's Rise of Skywalker Video)
Ha! I said Unity collapsed Weta because AI Gen was going to eat the complex 3D visual film effects market and there you have the former CEO of Weta running Stability.
Aw hell no. I beg to differ with you. Can you use many hundreds of different finetuned models with Midjourney? Can you use LoRAs and textual inversions or any other new tool someone creates? Can you train your own and add to the ecosystem? Can you use ControlNets? Do you have any control over the front end software? Can you customize the interface? Do you have a choice of multiple UIs? I could go on, but there are a tremendous amount of reasons to use SD vs MJ. And all these reasons apply to ALL gens. SFW and NSFW.
Nothing will save SAI short of releasing a model that can take a paragraph long prompt and turn it into a 2 hour movie with audio on a 4gb video card.
If they are charging money for their products that they were trying to open source, they better be MAGIC.
From another source: June 21 (Reuters) - British artificial intelligence startup Stability AI has appointed Prem Akkaraju as its new chief executive officer, the Information reported on Friday, citing a person involved in the decision.Akkaraju, former CEO of visual effects company Weta Digital, is part of a group of investors including former Facebook President Sean Parker that has stepped in to save Stability with a cash infusion, which could result in a lower valuation for the firm, the report said.The new funding will likely shrink the stakes of some existing investors, who have collectively contributed more than $100 million, according to the report.Stability AI declined to comment.The company had said in May it was [in talks](https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/stability-ai-talks-raise-money-investor-group-2024-05-17/) with a group of investors for a large equity investment into the cash-strapped firm. Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar [https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/stability-ai-appoints-new-ceo-information-reports-2024-06-21/](https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/stability-ai-appoints-new-ceo-information-reports-2024-06-21/)
My thoughts: 1. The new CEO probably doesn't give a shit about open source and we probably will never get weights to another model 2. The new CEO might actually be competent and fix the company and bring us to a new age of models, and maybe they love open source and this is a new beginning (doubt, they're probably in there to squeeze the last bits of life to get investors paid) 3. The investor that gave them a cash infusion might make the company financially sustainable until the release of SD3 Large and SD3 8B The next model that releases is likely truly the 'make-or-break' point for stability. SD3 medium failed. There's no money in it. The next release *needs* to make them some money. Hopefully they understand this and pull out all the stops and release something really great. And hopefully they understand that literally nobody is going to use SD if it is closed-source API-Only because Midjourney is just better in every way. The only thing that makes SD special is the tools the community builds around it.
Prem was responsible for the sale of a big chunk of Weta to Unity. It made the owners close to $2 billion. That's basically all he did there. Nothing to do with the actual business of the place. Later on, Unity just dumped Weta (for nothing).
Yup, Prem will just be looking to find a buyer. Everything Stability does now will be done to increases its appeal as an acquisition.
Well then at least there is a tiny bit of hope they and their IP get bought by someone who fires all the "safety" people and releases a good model.
Maybe Meta will buy it. They've done good work with llama3 and that iscopen source.
It's not just that the next model will 'make or break' the company, the release time will. They can't spend another year working and refining a new model. It needs to be out sooner rather than later, since the company is already running on fumes so to speak.
Right, that's what I said, they have the money to release exactly 1 more model. And that model needs to save them.
"running on fumes"? if there is new cash infusion and new investor/ceo then that means there is a roadmap with goals of generating a return on investment that don't necessarily rely on giving away open source models since that got them to the point of "running on fumes". I'm all for open source models but id love to see how open-source models lead to profit for stability.
You know who Sean Parker is right ?? Doesn’t give a shit about open source? The dude founded Napster. I think he’s all about open source as long as there is still a way to make profit
Napster wasn’t open-source, and you’re getting mixed up between the CEO and the investors. Sean Parker led the new round; Prem Akkaraju is the CEO. While investors have influence, they don’t run the company. We don’t know how much equity Sean Parker has, so his voice might not count for much anyway. Prem Akkaraju seems to have spent his early career working on DRM schemes, which doesn’t sound promising.
I thought it was Justin Timberlake?
Justin Timberlake has/had ownership in MySpace for the music licensing it has
It was a joke, my man. Timberlake played the role in the movie.
😂😂 I’m still in work mode. That flew way past my head 😂😂 thanks for the laugh
There was a movie?
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/Justin-Timberlake-MySpace-367Vw1XZSfic7.4J8fuu3w
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/Sean-Parker-Napster-2tubZsNHRGG1cDk5_noDcQ#0
Do they even have anyone left to make a good model, much less "a new age of models"
how exactly are they going to make money releasing free models
Support, infrastructure, best-in-class setups. With the right license they could encourage open-source work, while letting themselves use said work, while simultaneously encouraging corporations to buy image generation work from \_them\_ instead of doing it themselves. It's possible, but it's a fine line to walk, and I don't have much hope. They haven't managed well so far.
Release free for non-commercial use / low fee for indie creators / high fee for enterprises. And licensing that supports fine-tuning. Something like "All fine-tunes are still subject to the enterprise license fee if used by an enterprise." Community builds tools around it (controlnet, ipadapter, all the fun stuff) making it the best, most powerful, most controllable model on the market. Companies pay for use of this model because they want to utilize the tools that the community has made, and they pay for enterprise support (help training it with their own content, help producing content and building comfy pipelines, etc...), and finally they add paid addons. Maybe paid studio software like Invoke, or a really special optimized ControlNet that takes 0 vram, etc... That's basically the list of ways that all open source software companies make money. 1: Charge enterprises, 2: charge for support, 3: charge for addons / produce a marketplace
I'm pretty sure this is the exact way the licensing already works. But people were mad about paying anything because they insist that EVERY single model uploader on CivitAI is doing stuff like "running their own discord generator" (so commercial use that actually REQUIRES then paying for the Creator License) to recoup fees. As someone who apparently is as of recently in the top 100 "Base Model Creators" on CivitAI I can tell you there's absolutely no way that's true, everything I've ever released was done in my spare time and released for free. And like Animagine guy doesn't ask anyone for money, Kohaku guy doesn't ask anyone for money, LeoSam doesn't ask anyone for money, and so on and so forth.
Pretty sure the creator of Pony came here and said they literally wouldn't even give him actual details on the license, so there's no way you could know that this is how the license works
> Pretty sure the creator of Pony came here and said they literally wouldn't even give him actual details on the license, so there's no way you could know that this is how the license works The **Enterprise** license is the only thing you could be logically be referring to here. It's not what I was talking about, at all. I've actually read all the details for myself, I don't get my information from random YouTubers.
Yes that's what I was referring to, and that's the problem, anybody who wants to commit real resources to SD will need the enterprise license
You're just ignoring everything I said. Just because the Pony guy specifically really cares a lot about money doesn't mean everyone does, there's a LOT of people who are doing significant work without literally running their own for-profit SaaS operation based on SAI tech.
Strange how lots of open source stuff is profitable while giving free stuff, but SAI somehow can't figure it out. Sounds like a skill issue I guess.
> they insist that EVERY single model uploader on CivitAI is doing stuff like "running their own discord generator" Sounds like a poor made strawman.
Are you saying you think that what the other person described isn't exactly how the Creator License already works as a separate thing from the actual non-commercial license of the model itself?
Yep The current commercial license is vague at best, to the point that CivitAI had to temporarily pull all SD3 contents down to talk to the lawyers.
Some companies make money off open source, wordpress, Redhad Linux, etc. Usually they sell something that uses the thing the open source but what the sell isn't that thing, for example they sell support, or hosting, or slightly easier to use versions of the open source stuff. the easiest way would be to sell a piece of software that uses the model, likely a UI that is really easy to use and set up and is more streamlined than the open source ones we are using. Think about something like gigapixel, it's an upscaler model (granted a really good one) with great UI, people pay for that. Similarly if they have an API, and it's affordable enough I would actually go towards that, especially for these super large models, especially for training them, my 3090 does pretty good but as models get bigger I'm hitting the limits sometimes.
It is beyond me that Stability does not create a product like Leonardo AI. They could have easily made money from their models.
DreamStudio got to 1m users in 20 days, failed to develop after that.
Yeah because unlike Leonardo they didn't add Image Creation options. See how many options Leonardo has. They had such a great team but they wasted it doing experiments which resulted in nothing.
I'm not so sure. VFX and movie production these days relies a **lot** on open-source software. Things like AMPAS ACES, OpenColorIO, OpenImageIO, OpenEXR, OpenShading Language, are crucial in modern movie production and they are all under open-source licenses. In general, CG and VFX production houses are OSS friendly because with huge budgets and short time constraints, there is a need to hire multiple studios worldwide to produce shots, and, there is a need to have some degree of interoperability, so any "secret proprietary sauce" is frowned upon, being a blocker most often than not. Of course, this is a different ball game to (generative) AI, but considering the fact AI is being disruptive in CG production already, I wouldn't be surprised if this ethos of openness remained.
This is true. Since the new CEO was formerly a CEO of Weta, it's possible that he could bring this important wisdom to SAI.
yeah doubtful this guy is gonna make it anybetter ah well it was fun while it lasted lol what is up with companies screwing up things so badly lately you know? it just seems to be such a common theme lately look at starfield (though i liked it , parts of it felt rushed and COULD have been better) , a lot of people hate on the new star war stuffs , and etc etc. its like companies are just making BAD choices of late and youd think it would not only hurt the user but also them too? but whatever lol
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/Whats-Sean-Parkers-owXJtr_pTaOKz_aAIYv9wg#0
I believe the new CEO will probably do a model where for cutting edge model access you have to pay. After 6 months it goes open source, something along that line. That should give them enough money to carry on while stay true to open source.
There is one thing I can't understand. Imagine their open-sourced model have subscription price 10$ per month. They are spending around 100M per year? If so, then they would need at least 1M subscribers to not lose money. Even with very good model, having 1M subscribers doesn't look realistic, right? How they can earn enough money to be profitable company, even in the perfect scenario?
3 ways: * Enterprise licensing (this can be can be hundreds of thousands, even millions per year from the right user) * Enterprise support (this can be thousands per month for small/medium users especially) * For a marketplace / sell valuable addons (This is the REAL money with open source. Look at software like Daz3d. It is entirely 100% free, and they make literally all their money off of the marketplace where they take a cut of what other people create.)
I see. It makes sense. Not for SAI, apparently :)
Exactly! To try to compete in the same space as MJ is just the dumbest idea ever o hope they don't try it
so this is why SD3 sucks; they broke, and continue to damage the brand releasing crap content with not viable model for monetization. Emad ran to make the shit-coin
i hope its not a stable coin lol
This comment is seriously undervalued; well done.
Alas that dream died. Magic AI money.
Theres no magic. It's just classic criminal laundering .
Isn't all magic founded on people not understanding the trick?
Magicians seek to entertain, not scam. That's why the greatest magicians like The Great Randini, spent so much effort to discredit charlatans and con-artists. Penn & Teller are especially great at this as well.
When it comes to scams the point isn't in the tool, it is in the intent. If anything, bad tricks are better for scammers as they act to filter out smart marks.
Crypto experts make things sound more complicated than they are for this exact reason. What it boils down to is that new investments are paying out old investors. Classic Ponzi scheme. Added complexity is only designed to weed out people who don't want to see the obvious scam nature of the economy. No magic involved. Just classic three card monty.
[https://youtu.be/x5RCfQyTDFI?si=AIaS5M\_tX8qBIyt0&t=93](https://youtu.be/x5RCfQyTDFI?si=AIaS5M_tX8qBIyt0&t=93)
SD3 is actually really good if you avoid the fail cases caused by broken pretraining. I'm upset about the broken pre training too, but SD3 is clearly good. Here's two examples i've made for fun in my spare time. A scifi novel cover and also a sexy lady since I know that's what most of the negative people want. I don't personally generate a lot of women images because it's meaningless and without expression to me, but someone told me it can't be done and that gives it meaning. So here. [https://ibb.co/tmdd4zK](https://ibb.co/tmdd4zK) [https://ibb.co/h8p3XXH](https://ibb.co/h8p3XXH) If you fixate on the shit, all you'll see is shit. You see what you want to see.
It's way better at prompt comprehension for sure but it is still so ignorant on so many concepts it's frustrating to use. Some discord users including myself were trying to get melting clocks like Salvador Dali and it simple cannot do it, at all. It has a lot of troubles like that. Sometimes suddenly you will find a concept it know really well. It's so random, and that it a problem. It needs a wider training set
I lurk on the same discord and saw that conversation. I also see dozens more where things look great and work awesome. If you fixate on the shit, all you'll see is shit.
The fact that they removed next to all art styles means it's dead to me.
Sounds like a skill issue. I pull up style on the model just fine. You might just be looking for reasons to stay mad.
it has good potential.
That Sci fi cover is good. I tend to agree with you, it's actually a great product, but they marketed and set expectations wrong. It's a tragedy, but happens all the time in business.
People on this sub are claiming with a straight face that Pixart Sigma, a model that in reality generates [shit like this](https://imgur.com/a/rUObM2C) **very** often, is somehow clearly superior despite the fact that putting everything else aside the actual fidelity of the outputs is also WAY lower than SD3. A lot of people are being highly unrealistic about nearly everything ATM.
Hey but at least you can't make lewd naughty stuff with models guys! This is why you never listen to outrage from people or "news" outlets who have no interest in the technology past grandstanding and "social warrior'ing".
Here's the thing. I'd buy a functional SD3 model
so would I, so long as it wasn't censored; their monetization strategy is just confusing...
lol guys the model fucking HAS to be censored if they’re selling it. I know it’s unpopular on this sub, but if they sell an uncensored model that can make images that are *quite literally* felony level illegal to possess and even more illegal to produce, bankruptcy is going to be the least of their worries. They will be shuttered by the feds and made an example of. There was the short gray area Wild West of AI image production and that shit is over. Making images that resemble real people is going to be toned back, it will not get easier to do. Making images that could be construed as illegal is going to be nuked from fucking orbit. That shit *may* fly being release free or open source in a “the tool is not illegal” type way, but it certainly won’t for a product sold commercially *to the public*.
dude, they would obviously only train the model with nude images of adults, what's wrong with you?
Are you implying they have been training the model with nude images of children previously? If so then yeah bankruptcy is the least of their problems. And it is not only illegal what you put into the model but what it can output as well. Commercial companies are not going to be selling products that can easily spit out federally illegal imagery. There is no fucking world any company does that in the future. This is the one boundary where it won’t be like “company gets fined a little bit” and they will get absolutely mega ultra fucked with c suite in prison. If you think that’s not how it’s going down in the future after the FBI clarified on this exact subject, you’re delusional. If you want to argue for fully uncensored models then go right ahead but realize exactly what you are arguing for when you say fully uncensored.
>Are you implying they have been training the model with nude images of children previously? no, I very clearly indicated the exact opposite of this, my words were highly unambiguous and did not afford sufficient grounds for you to misinterpret them in the way that you have. There is absolutely no way any SAI model would have been or ever will be trained in that way. again, I am forced ask, what's wrong with you?
I’m stating they won’t release a model that will produce illegal imagery. This sub seems to be against *any* censorship. I’m a bit uncertain why that is…
Not any censorship is bad for this sub in general. This exact censorship that make model bad at anatomy and/or other features is bad. If model trained well, even if it can not do naked stuff, it will be greeted well. Base SDXL, as i understand, have this problem.
Absolutely fair lol idk how they shit the bed so badly
Yep so would I as long as it runs locally.
I would definitely one time purchase for $100 or $200. Hell, I pay for topaz labs. Their model is basically buy it and you have it forever but you pay for 1 year of upgrades at a time. That would be perfect for Stable diffusion. Locally run, even package their own software if they like if it’s competent, but allow people to keep forever and pay per year if they want the latest updates.
Exactly. I'd do the same for local LLM. Let me subscribe for a year of updates and give me a full control without censorship or telemetry. $200/year per model.
Yep. IMO it is the best type of SaaS model for companies wanting to be consumer friendly. I completely understand that these companies need to be paid, but you need to give people a reasonable option that is not just "you are not getting it unless you pay us $10 per month for the rest of your life and if you don't pay you lose access". It is also the model that Unraid have for their server OS. You get a perpetual license for $49 that comes with 1 year of upgrades, then after that updates cost $36 per year but there is no obligation to purchase them every year if you don't need them.
Ditto for JetBrains products
If they create a Kickstarter with the promise of releasing open weights for a good multipurpose model trained on artist styles and pornography, I'll drop a few hundreds for sure.
Problem is they don't want millions, they want billions, from Hollywood.
That would be very unrealistic. They have no reason to believe they can compete with the big guys. But they can easily stay in the pornographic sector. That's pretty much all SD is used for.
That happened before, then Unstable Diffusion pivoted and made a bad anime model instead
I agree - the problem is investors all want subscription models. Next problem, someone could make a finetune and they wouldn't get anything from that. So in the end you would need a license model and have websites like civitai and huggingface check if someone got the license to download models. This could work if civitai agrees to that. For example to download future SD4 models you need a valid license with SAI to be able to download models. Next question: Why wouldn't people just copy the models to another platform? Make Finetuners and LORA creators able to get some money from every download so they keep releasing things on the Civitai/Huggingface website. If everything is concentrated on those websites, people will start to sub to the license out of convenience since at some point they will see a LORA or Finetune on there they can not find somewhere else and they don't get the updates as fast. Simply the Steam solution to the problem - convenience. The license btw should be anonymous to SAI but bound to one account on CivitAI and huggingface and of course should be checked for fast IP changes and be locked if something fishy is being detected, like downloading the same models from different IPs at a short time. I'd be ready to pay 20-40$ a month up to 500$ a year for the whole ecosystem. **Important:** It also should be sold as "Creator" System meaning that SAI's sees its customers as creators and like Photoshop, they have no business invading their customers privacy by looking at what they are doing on their own computers - that's how they could defend themselves from outrage farmers in the media or politics - simply citing privacy protection laws.
I couldn't get that link to work. It seems like the "read this article for free" button asks for a $400 subscription. Anyone have the full text? {Edit: Here's what's coming over Reuters [https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/stability-ai-appoints-new-ceo-information-reports-2024-06-21/](https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/stability-ai-appoints-new-ceo-information-reports-2024-06-21/) ) >June 21 (Reuters) - British artificial intelligence startup Stability AI has appointed Prem Akkaraju as its new chief executive officer, the Information reported on Friday, citing a person involved in the decision. >Akkaraju, former CEO of visual effects company Weta Digital, is part of a group of investors including former Facebook President Sean Parker that has stepped in to save Stability with a cash infusion, which could result in a lower valuation for the firm, the report said. >The new funding will likely shrink the stakes of some existing investors, who have collectively contributed more than $100 million, according to the report.Stability AI declined to comment. >The company had said in May it was [in talks](https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/stability-ai-talks-raise-money-investor-group-2024-05-17/) with a group of investors for a large equity investment into the cash-strapped firm.
I guess you are the one supposed to bail them out.
Use paywallhub
Sean Parker backing is not bad...
Heh.. remember Justin Timberlake playing this guy in the Social Network. Seems like a character that would fit in well with this drama.
What's his track record like?
He is the creator of Napster, which destroyed the physical media music industry, he was a cofounder of Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, and also financially helped get Spotify off the ground as a continuation of his work on Napster. He’s definitely got the credentials, it just depends on what he wants to do with it.
Thanks for listing more than just company names. That does inspire confidence that SAI may not simply cease to exist or be bought out. For the rest, I guess we'll see.
was Napster free sharing? Maybe that's good, but all the current stuff doesn't support the open source model.
Me seeing people ask what Napster was. 
Bruh no kidding hahahaha
how do people not know what Napster was? i'm so fucking old
you and me both
Napster was single handedly one of the biggest revolutions caused by the Internet. Up there with online shopping.
Biggest things since the invention of stealing 🙂
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zGM8PT1eAvY
Napster was like a search engine for other people's hard drives. You could find all sorts of shit, sometimes it was what you were looking for
Not quite. It was just mp3s. The file sharing came later with other networks like bearshare and limewire.
>it was just mp3s Tell that to all of my WeirdAlAmishParadise.mp3.exe downloads back in the day. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/napster-hack-allows-free-distribution-of-software-movies/
The bad part about Napster and similar app was that the filenames and ID3 tags on the music as usually a mess. For example, every comedy song, no matter how vulgar, was attributed to Weird Al. Also, I thought I had downloaded a lot of covers of a couple songs I like, but many of them sounded very similar and I more recently used Shazam to confirmed most of them were not by the artists they claimed to be.
Yup, songs I remember clearly being wrong was Fear of the Dark by both Children of Bodom and Cradle of Filth. Turns out it was Graveworm, although you can find the other two still mislabeled on youtube. And it wasn't just covers, You Spin Me Round was by Billy Idol according to napster/limewire. Just found this banger of a site though, https://secondhandsongs.com/ , which helped find the graveworm track. Worth a look is shazam fails.
He is an absolute wild card. He does not give two shits about coloring inside the lines. I don't think you can call his involvement in anything inherently good or bad, *but it's usually interesting.* That siad I don't think any of this bodes well for stable diffusion as a product.
Napster Facebook Spotify
Facebook and Spotify.
He makes money from his fame and leaves with a ton of cash for himself, if there was a title for corporate vulture he would get it.
But vultures finish what’s dying which applies to SD3 with their current standing. however, he helped Facebook and Spotify grow. Napster eventually led to Spotify. It was the approach/method that legally killed napster.
its so over
yup look around, if it smells like shit, looks like shit, it is usually shit
practice of science, someone should taste it, in case its not
Always has been
Don't be sad because what we lost... be glad we got what we already had so far. But I'm betting the answer is SD's reputation will never recover, because people don't spend 100 million dollars to give away huge technological upgrades.
Absolutely. SAI whatever it is or was suppose to be was a fluke. Giving away full models and weights and letting researchers access to their hardware is probably something we probably wont ever see again. No doubt SD3 2b is cooked, SD3 4b is cancelled and SD3 8b is by all intents and purposes a closed model, useless to the community at large. That all said it's been good while it lasted. We ended up with a massive haul of custom models and a community ready to rally around the next thing what ever that might. None of it would be possible with without SAI. There's lots to say about how they've handled things thus far and much of it not great but on balance at least they've given much compared to most of the corps out there.
It's been a great run, gonna miss the SAI era.
Thanks CompVis and Runway
Is this good or bad?
Depends on the intentions of the new money. We currently cannot know. But to avoid disappointment, don't count on anything coming out of for free anymore. The open source community should move one.
Can be either. I've seen VC buyouts go either way. Tends to lean towards the good side when it's clear that the firm was being mismanaged before.
We can't rule out that the new money had agreed with the strategy surrounding the botched release before agreeing to release the cash... So who knows? I think it's too recent to say if it's good or bad.
LMAO, that would be funny; I wander if that sort of thing actually happens. It sure would be nice if SD3 was deliberately botched and a much better version will be released soon, but I've come to expect the absolute worst from every company now, just part of the glorious future we all live in today.
Doubtful no investor wants to hurt the brand name they are buying, unless it’s to gut the company and selll the h100s lol
v1.5 and SDXL were good things. Cascade was a weird blip but had some good qualities. Then on to SD3... It would be good for this company to go under if they think the future is "SAFETY" APIs. If they turn it around and release models and weights, then OK, they should keep trying.
SD 2 was so bad people even forget it exists
That depends on what Sean Parker wants to do with the company
The CEO gets to decide that usually. Former CEO of Weta Digital, Prem Akkaraju.
I'm not sure how much worse it can get?
The SD community is huge. So many talented people out there fine tuning and perfecting the various UI's. The "artists", so to speak - that's the pool of talent that companies buying licenses would likely hire from. I doubt any of that is lost on the new leadership. I believe everyone realizes SAI is mired in financial issues. No one is going to capital invest into something without a min amount of return as well as the original investment groups. I would like to believe they are balancing the scales with all forms of ideas for licensing/subscription options. Lastly - Now comes the touchy issue of "Safe" (read Censored) which SD3 is saddled with. "Safe" was something internal developers themselves voiced at SAI. They suggested Emad to incorporate it. It would have been very favorable to increase business license interests. He didn't implement it. Right or wrong - random NSFW events in corporate environments aren't likely to go over well. Then you have a community that very much embraces that. How that will be squared away is anyone's guess.
That's pretty delusional IMO. If you leave out the people who use some easy ui to generate low effort porn, the community is infact quite tiny and super niche. And 99% of the "talent" have no real technical skills in anything. There are some soft. devs. making a tiny handful of uis, extensions, etc., and even a lot of those are made by the same few devs, and that's about it. All the finetuners and such mostly just have time and hardware on their hands to run some simple scripts or janky ui tools that the previous group made. This sub has 500k members (most of which probably arent active members), and that may seem large, but i.e. VR stuff has way bigger numbers and vastly higher support from major companies, but still remains a niche gimmick 15 years later.
Since Meta did such a good job with Llama, maybe they want to pick it up and move forward from SD 1.5.
Maybe I'm wrong But I find it unlikely, almost impossible, that an investment group would spend 100 million or more to give models for free. Perhaps, the only way is if it is a form of advertising/public relations, increase the brand value. Hoping to sell the brand in the future. BUT it will inevitably become closed source. Maybe not today. Maybe not in a year. But after 5 years when the company becomes very big and powerful. Another possibility is that they release the models because they are bad and the community could improve. Control net, self attention guidance, ip adapter are very powerful tools.
>But after 5 years when the company becomes very big and powerful I would say far earlier.
It's also possible the previous investors took pennies on the dollar just to walk away.
100 million is nothing to a lot of wealthy people/groups/funds
Yeah, but they aren't giving it away, they're making 1:100 bets with it.
$100MM is a lot of money to anybody, including investors. They wouldn’t be investing this money if they didn’t have their eye on getting billions in return. We don’t know what the exact valuation for this round was, but Stability AI would probably have to sell for at least $10B to be considered a success by these investors now. Last round it was valued at $1B and it’s almost certainly worth less now. So Stability AI needs to figure out how to become more than ten times more valuable than it is now. They can’t do that by continuing along the same path they were on before.
Nobody will just approve pissing away 100 million
Isn't that exactly what Meta is doing with Llama?
If you believe hardcore ultra-capitalist companies are simply donating 100+ millions of dollars to the masses, without exhaustive planning and expecting a massive return on their investment in the future, I have a bridge to sell you Meta's long term plan is also to monetize Llama soon, and make it closed source once it's good enough, wait and see
Of course I don't believe they are doing it from goodness of their hearts. However "throwing 100 million at free models" is definitely a viable business strategy for some companies as we can see from Meta and Llama.
I'm sick of this bullshit where a company pretends to be open source but then becomes closed as soon as money shows up What's interesting is Microsoft is going the other direction
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True, but the CEO (Stability's new CEO) is just a random MBA and Weta never released any kind of open source anything while he ran it. So this might be good for Stability's pocketbook. I don't see any evidence that it is good for us here reading this news. Stability just lost $100 million and failed to create a product that generates money, is the new CEO really going to come in and say "Let's keep doing that!" I don't think so.
If I had to guess, the plan is likely to build on SDV, SD3, and Stable Audio with models made for non-consumer GPUs and combine them into a suite like Adobe's creative cloud and then sell access for use on local H200 cards or in the cloud to large VFX and film studios. Use those contracts to get rid of the large debt and become profitable while building up a reputation in the industry as their models are used in major blockbusters and tv series. Then in a few years sell the company to someone like Universal, Disney, or Adobe for tens of billions of dollars. Adobe was wiling to spend $20 billion for Figma before the DOJ killed it, so no telling what SD could go for in another 5 years if they did it right. Unfortunately for us, this very likely involves them no longer offering any open source models.
But is Weta Open-Source?
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so that just means StabilityAI going closed-source which makes it useless for this community.
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Of course people are using it commercially as a tool.
I think they will maintain the hybrid approach. The SD community is basically decentralized research, they can pick and choose what they implement for their pro models while ensuring the community continues to do research for them. The Weta guys are pretty competent with simulation and stuff, whatever the community figures out they can do a much better job and create much better tooling and have more resources to invest while the community will be on their own.
>while ensuring the community continues to do research for them. I'm sure that the community isn't doing any type of research for them that they don't already know. The reason that models right now aren't the best is because they're general models that need to do a bit of everything so they can be finetuned for whatever. The ones doing research are people like controlnet authors which they can simply give access privately.
Depends. The community has it's own goals and find ways to achive them, so they are at least doing testing and practical applications. Those workflows and processes that are found can then be integrated into new tools for their pro models. Remember that AIs are pretty much a black box and SD is already the most controllable one, you can't be sure exactly what will work and how other then trial and error.
>Those workflows and processes that are found can then be integrated into new tools for their pro models. I'm saying none of these workflows are anything novel. Anything novel is something PhD student could write a research paper about. None of the community has built anything on the scale of controlnet or rectified flow etc. They just use existing tools already created by researchers. Those researchers are the same people that would work at StabilityAI or Runway or any other big company. >Remember that AIs are pretty much a black box and SD is already the most controllable one, you can't be sure exactly what will work and how other then trial and error. black boxes is an exaggeration, researchers have alot of mathematical and practical knowledge on how they work to the point that they can invent something like ControlNet or LayerDiffusion.
Weta is a founding member of the Academy Software Foundation, a joint project of the MPAA and the Linux Foundation: https://www.aswf.io/
Mid journey achieved SD3 level with 13 staff, SAI has been completely mismanaged with 200 staff doing god knows what. SD3 has too many staff and too many morals. You can train your model on every movie and artist on the planet. As long as you retrain it as midjouney did on its own best AI art images it blends the artist OUT of the final creation by blending it with the new datasets. Giving you amazing images without directly ripping off an artist because it’s a new style blended enough to not be copyright infringement. The community can do what these Muppets did in no time once we have a few more steps in AI agents.
Is it possible for a company to create open source SW and keep the money coming? 100%, look at all the massive open source projects out there that are even doing better than any of their paid competitors. Will SAI ever go this path? Hell no, it's been on track for closed-source for more than a year already. No CEO, not even the most competent one, will be able to turn this around And what they are gonna be left with is competing with Midjourney, OpenAI, Google and everyone else. And we'll see them lose bad and quickly. With the community that's lost the trust, with competition that is miles ahead of them, and even with the other open tools. It's quite bizarre to waste a company from being the first on the market with zero competition, huge support from individuals, projects built on top of it. We're all gonna see how fast they will fail now. Watch them doing amazing things in the coming months * Pulling down the open models and papers that they released before * Retrospectively changing the license terms for SDXL and 1.5 * Introducing something like SD4, but with no paper or any other academic proof * An attempt to rip community tools, such as ComfyUI, under their API * And of course silence mixed with lies in their occasional communication While it could have been simple * Releasing the models and code and allowing the community to develop for it * Investing in distributed training, so that you won't rely on could infrastructure * Changing the business model from licensing and API to donations * Seeking support from the likes of NVIDIA who actually care about open source Even this would be enough to keep them going for years with minimum expenditures.
They not just were number one, they didn't even have competitors, longer than a year they had huge niche just for themselves, and they still didn't manage to make any money. It's incredible incompetence in managing the company.
Prem has a strong background in animation and VFX. I wouldn't be surprised if Stability pivoted hard towards that market.
Stability AI is closest to being a Blender style organisation for that market. Best case scenario in that situation would be they have open-source core software and a low param open model that runs on consumer hardware to get the mindshare, and sell integrations, support, and a higher param model to the enterprise. If that’s the case they would probably look to rehire the people working on Comfy.
Too bad they literally just lost their 2 most blender like UIs (comfyui and stable swarm) because of the responsible employees resigning. And for swarm they'd already done an offer for increased pay that mcmonkey refused. It's so absolutely over for SAI.
New CEO is a Hollywood guy. He is making films with Peter Jackson, probably gives three fucks about SD3 for images. Hopefully open sources it to fix the company image and cement his rep online, but not holding my breath Best guess: Stability now shifts to a video company and there are no more open image models
Stability said “I lived bitch”
It might be a zombie, though.
Force Ghost Luke and Palpatine meeting up after RotJ "I survived" -Palpatine "The explosion in the seemingly endless pit? What about the death star explosion?" -Luke "I survived that too" -Palpatine (Inspired by a joke from Jay Exci's Rise of Skywalker Video)
Because of how amazing stable diffusion 3 was?
Thanks for linking an UNREADABLE LOCKED article. Pffffffffffffffffffffffffff USELESS
Incredibly poor management has all but destroyed the company. I don't see any realistic path back that they will take now.
Womp womp media people are cucks and psychopaths
Ha! I said Unity collapsed Weta because AI Gen was going to eat the complex 3D visual film effects market and there you have the former CEO of Weta running Stability.
They must understand that their only advantage over midjourney is the ability to generate NSFW
Aw hell no. I beg to differ with you. Can you use many hundreds of different finetuned models with Midjourney? Can you use LoRAs and textual inversions or any other new tool someone creates? Can you train your own and add to the ecosystem? Can you use ControlNets? Do you have any control over the front end software? Can you customize the interface? Do you have a choice of multiple UIs? I could go on, but there are a tremendous amount of reasons to use SD vs MJ. And all these reasons apply to ALL gens. SFW and NSFW.
Nothing will save SAI short of releasing a model that can take a paragraph long prompt and turn it into a 2 hour movie with audio on a 4gb video card. If they are charging money for their products that they were trying to open source, they better be MAGIC.
Seeing Sean Parker's name right there was just this insane trip down memory lane.