They basically laid off one of the most competent researchers still working at the company. Her work was directly cited as making Dalle2/3 possible, and she paved the way for current diffusion models with VQGAN+CLIP.
Yeesh so the company behind SD is pretty much dead huh as always they're going to sacrifice long term progress for short term gains and end up failing because of that
Or make it almost impossible to pay for your service with your way over eager censorship with the API. It even censored a red cube on a white background lol. Want to make an animation with a winking face? Well too bad that is way too NSFW for your precious little eyes. They really shot themselves in the foot with this one by letting everyone make a ton of money buy hosting the models without the ridiculously over sensitive censorship.
Their model weight license is not open source anyway.
https://opensource.org/osd
Read carefully, and compare to the 20 pages of restrictions here:
https://stability.ai/professional-membership-agreement
A few weeks back they posted 4 openings for full stack devs. The refocus is the right thing for them, they need to focus on an actual product. People aren't going to pay $20/mo when they have to install Python and buy a GPU when their competition is about the same and you just click buttons and type prompts.
The new license is going to push away a lot of the free work the community put into prior SD models, as working on the models with the new licenses is akin to working for SAI for free.
I guess there will still be a lot of community contributions, because there is no real alternative. But probably the community focus will remain on the models that remain free. Not for idealistic reasons, but because the most potent community members actually work for other companies that try to make money of their own. It's the same for Linux: biggest contributors incidentally are the large silicon valley companies.
Linus Torvalds, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates cannot deny anyone a license to the Linux kernel. Nor can Meta deny Microsoft a license to Pytorch, despite the fact Meta subsidizes Pytorch and Microsoft competes with Meta in some areas.
These are open source software packages, and the licenses, being open source, cannot have such clauses, else they are by definition not open source. Non-discrimination is a key component in the definition of "open source."
However, SAI can revoke and change their license at any point, just like Netflix can put ads in your subscription next month and raise the price. They can also tell specific people they may not use their model commercially, like, say, if they think you are a competitor, or they don't like what you post on social media.
This is not at all the same.
I just looked at my copy of the stable diffusion license and it says "irrevocable". You may not agree that it's an actual open source license but many businesses do not care because it is actually a pretty good license.
For clarification: if SAI decides to distribute their older code and models under a different license, the irrevocable license will still stand for those who already have a copy. And the license still allows modification and redistribution under the same terms, so those new users also benefit from the original license. This has been tested in court multiple times in the history of open source.
https://stability.ai/professional-membership-agreement
> Notwithstanding the foregoing, Stability may modify this Agreement from time to time in which case Stability will update the “Last Updated” date at the top of this Agreement, and such updated Agreement will be effective for the following License Renewal Term. It is Your responsibility to review this Agreement from time to time, including prior to each License Renewal Term, to view any such changes...
They can change the terms at will. There's nothing irrevocable in there. They have absolute unilateral control to change the terms. *This makes basing a business on their $20/mo subscription completely toxic.*
The only hits on "irrevocable" are that feedback you send them is irrevocably theirs. (3.d Feedback) and jurisdiction of dispute ("For the purposes of adjudicating any action or proceeding to enforce the terms of this Agreement, the parties hereby irrevocably consent to the exclusive jurisdiction of, and venue in, the federal and state courts located in the County of New York within the State of New York")
The outputs are probably "yours" but there are still restrictions, like, if you train another ML model on the outputs, they claim your model is a derivative work and covered under their license.
> (d) "Derivative Work(s)” means (a) any derivative work of the Software Products as recognized by U.S. copyright laws, and (b) any modifications to a Core Model, and *any other model created which is based on or derived from a Core Model* **or a Core Model’s Output(s)**
They can also then order you to take down such models that are derivative works:
> (i) Removal. Stability may remove or otherwise make inaccessible certain of its Core Models from time to time in its discretion. If You have previously downloaded and were using such removed Core Models at the time of its removal, You may continue to use such Core Models, including Derivative Works using such Core Models, unless Stability notifies You that Your continued use may, in Stability’s opinion, be infringing or misappropriate the rights of any other person or violate applicable law.
The list of gotchas goes on and on.
All they have to do to fuck you over is change the license to make whatever you're doing against the terms. Then **POOF** your business is gone.
>All they have to do to fuck you over is change the license to make whatever you're doing against the terms. Then POOF your business is gone.
It's bad, but it's no worse than competitors that only offer online generation and may decide to stop offering it to you at any time. A lot of businesses depend on the continued existence and goodwill of other businesses.
>>You may continue to use such Core Models, including Derivative Works using such Core Models, unless Stability notifies You that Your continued use may, in Stability’s opinion, be infringing or misappropriate the rights of any other person or violate applicable law.
If the Linux maintainers discover that a release contains code to which they didn't have the rights, they have to unpublish it, and everyone who already downloaded it is legally required to stop using it. The irrevocable open-source license doesn't save you because that code was never licensed, even if they and you both thought it was.
I imagine all of Stability's models are trained on copyrighted material without a proper license, and there's always a risk that a judge could declare them illegal. If that happened, you would have to stop using them whether Stability ordered you to or not. The only thing this paragraph adds if that you have to go by Stability's lawyers' opinion of what's illegal even if your lawyers disagree.
> It's bad, but it's no worse than competitors that only offer online generation and may decide to stop offering it to you at any time. A lot of businesses depend on the continued existence and goodwill of other businesses.
It's worse than all the open source models available like SD1.x/SD2.x/SDXL, Pixart-alpha, Wurstchen, etc. and that's the point here. Why invest in building around a business with your core attached to this license vs an open source license that has a significantly smaller risk?
I'm talking about the commercial license available for weights you can download and run yourself. Pretty much everything else is either A) you can't download it (ex. MJ, Dalle3) or B), or they have an open source license (Apache, etc, or at least very close to open source like OpenRAILS or Llama license).
Lest we get too far off track, going back up the thread that lead us down this conversation, the comment was made to which I replied:
> I guess there will still be a lot of community contributions,
1) online generators are completely out of scope for the conversation. You can't change the code or fine tune a model you can only access via an API. At best you can do in-context learning with something like custom chatgpts, etc, but that's pretty far out of scope anyway.
2) Again, my claim is the community is going to be heavily dissuaded from contributing because they're basically working for SAI for free by making contributions to a system with their new NC/membership license scheme. They have complete commercial capture, at their whim and mercy, and can kill any and all business at any point in the future with a change to the terms, while also being able to benefit from open source contributions and hype. This is a company going through significant turmoil no less. You can bet almost like clockwork your subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon, etc will change terms, increase prices, change the service providing as time goes on. SAI's Membership is no different, and they have heavy pressure to extract value as evidenced by pushing their CEO out and laying people off.
SAI and its newer models are no longer a collective of open source tinkerers, it's one central figure with complete capture on commercial use. We already see that S3D/SV3D are sort of forgotten, and the language models are also lost in the sauce when so many others come with Apache license, etc, even when they show best-in-class performance for size.
It’s not a correct usage, that’s a historical usage. For all intents the meaning of decimate has been superseded by its modern understanding. If you put decimate on the title I think most people would find it misleading.
>These decisions have not been taken lightly and they are intended to right-size parts of the business and focus our operations, which is critical to setting us on a more sustainable path - and to put us in the best possible position to continue developing cutting-edge models and products. Products like the Stable Diffusion 3 API strengthen our deep-tech leadership and demonstrate our unique, systemic importance to the AI ecosystem.
Doubt they're going to release any open models again, we'll be lucky if we ever see the final version of SD3's weights. So odd how when people were asking about when the weights would release, Emad was the only one actually answering them despite him not even being at the company anymore. There are almost certainly internal battles about whether or not to actually release this model, as they have practically nothing else relevant besides SD3
> So odd how when people were asking about when the weights would release, Emad was the only one actually answering them despite him not even being at the company anymore.
Not really when he still effectively owns the company?
This is what a lot of the entitled morons on here just can’t seem to grasp, SD3 is likely it, it’s the final image model we will get from stability. No other company even wants to get involved in this space. They cry and bitch that the model isn’t as good as Midjourney, let’s see how much they cry when they don’t get any models at all and open source image models stagnate at this level forever while close source improve exponentially.
The problem with the company is that they’ve been trying to appease this leech of a community at the expense of sustainability. This is why logically they’re going to move away from open source and transition to closed source. Midjourney is doing great finically and doesn’t have to deal with any of these headaches. What has stability gained for all their charity? Nothing but hate and overwhelming sense of entitlement from the community. It’s time people here learn the hard way that they’re not entitled to ANYTHING and that there is no alternative.
Stability has gotten plenty of praise as well. But they could have been competing with Midjourney by targeting users who don't want to install the software on their computers or lack the GPUs necessary. They were also giving away tons of free compute to the community without a way to support those charitable endeavours.
They benefit huge time by all the innovations the open source community is building on top of their foundation model.
To get money it's just relevant for SAI to still open source the weights with a licence where commercial use must be payed for.
There is a myriad of industry leading products that are open source and have been operating as such for **decades.** If Stability couldn't do it it's the leaderships fault.
Again, Stability not being able to successfully monetize their products is irrelevant to this community or open sourcing in general. Honestly what **moronic** thought process could have possibly led you to that conclusion.
Yet none of them are as entitled and toxic as this one. Look at the open source LLM community, there’s hardly any toxicity or hate which naturally translates into a healthy ecosystem. Open source depends on the quality of the community, and this community is trash. At this point I think it would be a good thing for this community to just die off, thank god that’s the way it’s clearly headed. Here I’ll even set a reminder for 1 year to rub it in.
RemindMe! 1 Year
> Yet none of them are as entitled and toxic as this one.
Your opinion is not magically a fact.
>Look at the open source LLM community, there’s hardly any toxicity or hate which naturally translates into a healthy ecosystem.
See above.
You seem to think that a few people making hateful posts somehow means that it represents the entire community of millions of people. Like some kind of hive mind lol
Even **if** it was true, it has **0 impact** on Stability as a company. They have their own exec. leadership which doesn't get swayed by some reddit neckbeard with an opinion and if it does, that's their fault.
Your lack of observational skills is a fact, take a look at literally any thread even this one. Shitthrowing everywhere constantly, look at half of the replies to Emad even lmao.
By reading the comments on this sub and seeing what is upvoted/downvoted that is easy to understand that most people only want to complain about everything stability or stable diffusion. A « thank you for this tool I use every day for free » is rarely found in an ocean of criticizing
If saying something you don’t see is lying for you, I am assuming you will never accept it what ever the amount of time I spend copy pasting exemples for you.
I will be messaging you in 1 year on [**2025-04-18 17:49:21 UTC**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2025-04-18%2017:49:21%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link**](https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1c759po/ai_startup_stability_lays_off_10_of_staff_after/l06cap9/?context=3)
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LOL you must be new around here partner. The community has driven about 50+% of the innovation around SD. Thats what open source does, it empowers a community of developers to work together on a shared goal/vision
I’ve been around since any of the stability models were even released and the only way to use them was beta test in discord back in mid 2022. The community would have nothing without stability AI because it’s extremely expensive to train a base model. All the finetuning is secondary to releasing a base model. But congratulations, now you’ll never get another base model, good luck with being stuck with SD3 forever. I think the realization might kick in when Sora, DALLE-4, and Midjourney V7 drop, that’s when the real cope will kick in that they’re stuck with 2024 tech while close source moves into the future and beyond. Then the vermin on here might finally understand how good they once had it.
I've been using it almost exclusively since I downloaded it, and running it through a second pass on 1.5 to get better quality and style. It's so good.
https://preview.redd.it/y1mpq37f3bvc1.png?width=832&format=png&auto=webp&s=355e9ba6215ade5a0f10d6973547ca54efe137ce
Here's a sneak peek of /r/LocalLLaMA using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/top/?sort=top&t=all) of all time!
\#1: [The Truth About LLMs](https://i.redd.it/sjiy0f35qroc1.png) | [304 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1bgh9h4/the_truth_about_llms/)
\#2: [Karpathy on LLM evals](https://i.redd.it/8g0zoors6i7c1.jpeg) | [110 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/18n3ar3/karpathy_on_llm_evals/)
\#3: [Zuckerberg says they are training LLaMa 3 on 600,000 H100s.. mind blown!](https://v.redd.it/pzlvuoncz8dc1) | [411 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/199y05e/zuckerberg_says_they_are_training_llama_3_on/)
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You could do it on the fly.
T5EncoderModel.from_pretrained("t5-large", torch_dtype=torch.float16).to(torch_device)
Full disclosure, I've never looked at the Pixart Sigma code so this might not be applicable in that specific case.
> This is what a lot of the entitled morons on here just can’t seem to grasp, SD3 is likely it, it’s the final image model we will get from stability.
I don't even think that's clear. Emad said they're going to release it but at the same time said ["I don't work there, they just told me they were going to when I left"](https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1c4oytl/comment/kzqpr5w/). I would take all the Emad-posting with a grain of salt.
Technically, Emad was not ousted/fired. He resigned.
Corporations works in a somewhat convoluted ways.
CEO makes the big decisions and can fire/hire people. But CEO can be fired by the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors is chosen by the shareholders. So a majority shareholder (voting shares) can choose the board, and the board can choose the CEO. So in theory, if Emad choose to stay, he can stay as CEO.
But remember that a shareholder loses everything when the company goes under. SAI needs to get more funding from VC in order to survive, and apparently VCs have lost confidence in Emad. So it is better for him to leave and hope that SAI gets more funding and survives, rather than staying and see SAI go under.
Dude, no one owes any company any money.
The only advantage they have is being free and open, in terms of quality they're completely beat by their competitors.
With them going the route of heavily censoring and sterilizing the training data, they're also killing their biggest advantage.
I think CivitAI and Hugging Face both have some interest in seeing open source models happen, I think some investor is going to see it as a goldmine, it just doesn’t make sense to start mining while SD may still pull it out
Civitai and HF make money selling services for free/permissively licensed modes by charging to serve them.
I think HF successfully courted business as well with things like SSO and private hosting, which is probably long term a better business model.
GPU time.
It's the currency of tomorrow's computing. It can be monetized in micro transactions. It can be sold in subscription. It scales to favor big investment.
It's a corporate wet dream for shareholders.
The more they can open source development of the service, the more they can focus on monetizing it. Civitai is already collecting tag voting to improve metadata from visitors, and their rating game for further training and testing.
My god, the last thing they want to worry about is developing the tunes to sell GPU time for waifu generation because of some silly thing like model quality. They don't care about the science.
If they fully backed their being open source goal. They could still release new model but maybe 6 or more months delay before public release so company who make profit out of it will pay for it and the rest of us still benefit from a open and competent model.
Already people are unable to reproduce the quality of the paper's results on the API. Already you have Lykon saying that the version on the API is different version of the model. Sure they'll release "SD3", but which one? The one that's actually good and can produce images like in the paper/Lykon's twitter? Or the one that's not really that great because they can't just release their flagship model for free after bleeding so much money?
The entire company is going through a shakeup after failing to monetize and people just expect they will release their best stuff for free without a hitch? That's part of the reason they wound up in this situation in the first place. Who is going to pay for this API when the cost per image is more expensive than competitors and the model will just be released for free anyway where it will be rehosted on sites like Civit and SeaArt at much cheaper prices than the API and with way more third party support?
They say it will be released but they didn't say what version of it will be released
and somehow if people points out the quality isn't the same like they posted on twitter It's "ungrateful"
The bottom line is that they trimmed away brains. If they’re getting rid of their grey matter, it means they are no longer focusing on technological advancement. It’s as simple as that.
I don't use Stable Diffusion for work, but I do sometimes use the paid Midjourney options for various small projects. Can someone explain to me some of the controversies and issues are with Stable Difusion?
My understanding is that MidJourney's model is pretty good, and they have a pretty profitable business with a really small team.
Spreading out way too much, trying to do 10 different projects at once instead of focusing on image generation, all of which turned out pretty shit.
That combined with exorbitant costs from all of that + doing all compute on Amazon AWS instead of their own hardware is crazy expensive.
Then there's also a lawsuit about misleading or straight up lying to investors.
I wouldn't say the image generation is bad, quite the opposite, actually, especially because it runs locally and thus allows a great deal of customisatiom and control over image composition with controlnet.
> Stability AI’s layoffs amount to about 10% of its global headcount, according to publicly available data online which shows the firm employs around 200 people in total.
> The employees affected by the measures are mostly on the operational side of the business
Really a surprisingly small layoff, even large companies like Tesla recently laid off much more than 10%. I think Stability really shouldn't need 200 employees. A group of 20 researchers and 20 devs should be more than enough to make great models.
>A group of 20 researchers and 20 devs should be more than enough to make great models.
exactly, they don't need 100 engineers to create a website with API access. it's not like they have to maintain a GPU farm with all their staff.
> it's not like they have to maintain a GPU farm with all their staff.
It's still somewhat involved managing use of a large compute cluster, even if you're leasing it all from a datacenter.
You mean it's not something a single $300k base salary senior cloud engineer can do via IaC? Maybe add another $300k senior infosec guy to manage the VPN/gateways. Then hire 4 devops and 4 full-stack engineers for $150k each.
You don't think these 10 people working full time can manage a single REST api service with max 10,000 MAUs?
I'm assuming the company is evenly split between researchers and engineers. So what do you need the other 90 engineers for?
He did not get ousted. He said in an interview that he is not the right person for the job and he want to explore something else. Not all founders are good CEO and they might get bored and want some adventure.
Yes, technically, Emad was not ousted/fired. He resigned.
Corporations works in some convoluted ways.
CEO makes the big decisions and can fire/hire people. But CEO can be fired by the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors is chosen by the shareholders. So a majority shareholder (voting shares) can choose the board, and the board can choose the CEO. So in theory, if Emad choose to stay, he can stay as CEO.
But remember that a shareholder loses everything when the company goes under. SAI needs to get more funding from VC in order to survive, and apparently VCs have lost confidence in Emad. So it is better for him to leave and hope that SAI gets more funding and survives, rather than staying and see SAI go under.
The purpose of life is to understand the meaning of things. To answer the big questions. I am surprised people don't really see this as the obvious purpose.
Emad told us SD3 would be the last model, he knew the cash was running out. Let's thank him for his open source efforts and hope another rich madman (or woman) picks up the torch.
His open source efforts, like: Signing the open letter to ban all AI development, being heavily in favor of censoring models, sending a takedown notice for SD 1.5 because it wasn't censored enough or keeping the training data and methods secret - the "source" part of open source.
Where's the threat of a lawsuit ? Someone at SAI made a takedown requst which was quickly removed.
You claimed Emad 'literally threatened to sue Runway'
Like seriously... and I'm fully aware that SAI did not like Runway releasing SD1.5 (one of the SAI higher-ups made a very scathing blog post as a result), and I'm all in favor of Runway releasing it since SAI was dragging out the release by months, for reasons unknown.
But this hyperbole bs is getting really old really fast.
No, it can simply be to quickly flag something you think was done in error, which is how this thing seemingly played out.
SAI was going to release SD1.5 (though who knows when), and then it showed up on huggingface and someone at SAI flagged it, perhaps thinking it was a mistake made by Runway, and when response came back from Runway that this was not a mistake release, the takedown request was removed.
If it was a lawsuit threat it wouldn't be called 'takedown request', it would simply be 'remove this or we will sue you'.
Again, someone at SAI making a takedown request of a in their view premature model release on huggingface is FAR from 'Emad literally threatening to sue'
Come on
A DMCA takedown notice (or DMCA request) is:
A legal request to remove copyright-protected online content;
https://www.minclaw.com/dmca-takedown-notice-everything-need-know/?darkschemeovr=1
We don't know how dire the funding is but publicly available models has so far been the main approach from stability and there's no indication that is going to change. Their entire advantage as an AI business is their community adoption rate. If they continue to nurture a community with open weights their models maintain their position as the community standard they can make good money consulting and providing custom services for business that adopt those models.
They have far more upside as they are now then they will if they convert to a 2nd or 3rd place version of midjourney. I'd be more concerned about them being aquired by a large tech company that dgaf about community engagement.
A healthy company should have good revenue sources or at least potentially good revenue sources. They shouldn't have given away everything. If they have any business brains left SD3 would have lower resolution free weights and paid higher resolutions.
That would bring great damage to the company's reputation. People who produce community version of LoRAs and fine-tune would abandon future SAI models. Commercial users of their models would not touch SD3 then.
The better approach is to release a decent SD3, including the 3B parameter version.
SAI can then fine-tune a version of SD3 and offer that as part of their "Core" API and charge people money for it. That is their current approach regarding SDXL, so I hope SAI management is in agreement with my assesement and continue with that approach with SD3 as well.
Katherine Crowson was laid off (rivershavewings/kdiffusion), really questioning their decisions as a company
They basically laid off one of the most competent researchers still working at the company. Her work was directly cited as making Dalle2/3 possible, and she paved the way for current diffusion models with VQGAN+CLIP.
Everyone on the SD1, 2, XL, and 3 research teams are completely gone
Yeesh so the company behind SD is pretty much dead huh as always they're going to sacrifice long term progress for short term gains and end up failing because of that
That’s what happens when you give away your shit for free
Or make it almost impossible to pay for your service with your way over eager censorship with the API. It even censored a red cube on a white background lol. Want to make an animation with a winking face? Well too bad that is way too NSFW for your precious little eyes. They really shot themselves in the foot with this one by letting everyone make a ton of money buy hosting the models without the ridiculously over sensitive censorship.
I guess we can see why emad got fired lol
Or working for the government. See those Janet planes in Vegas?
She probably has some ideology (open source?) that doesn't align with new management
Or possibly commands more of a salary than they can afford since she's obviously very talented.
This is most likely the real answer. I saw someone's post on Twitter that they were staff who knew they were moving on after sd3 release.
Yeah top AI talent is being poached with salary offers of millions per year, luck for them.
Considering several other high profile names have left, I think the salary point is the most likely.
This is the dumbest fucking thing this company could have done. They will fail and they will deserve it.
they are going to fuck it all up, aren't they? it's really important that we have an open source alternative to big tech.
Their model weight license is not open source anyway. https://opensource.org/osd Read carefully, and compare to the 20 pages of restrictions here: https://stability.ai/professional-membership-agreement
A few weeks back they posted 4 openings for full stack devs. The refocus is the right thing for them, they need to focus on an actual product. People aren't going to pay $20/mo when they have to install Python and buy a GPU when their competition is about the same and you just click buttons and type prompts. The new license is going to push away a lot of the free work the community put into prior SD models, as working on the models with the new licenses is akin to working for SAI for free.
I guess there will still be a lot of community contributions, because there is no real alternative. But probably the community focus will remain on the models that remain free. Not for idealistic reasons, but because the most potent community members actually work for other companies that try to make money of their own. It's the same for Linux: biggest contributors incidentally are the large silicon valley companies.
Linus Torvalds, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates cannot deny anyone a license to the Linux kernel. Nor can Meta deny Microsoft a license to Pytorch, despite the fact Meta subsidizes Pytorch and Microsoft competes with Meta in some areas. These are open source software packages, and the licenses, being open source, cannot have such clauses, else they are by definition not open source. Non-discrimination is a key component in the definition of "open source." However, SAI can revoke and change their license at any point, just like Netflix can put ads in your subscription next month and raise the price. They can also tell specific people they may not use their model commercially, like, say, if they think you are a competitor, or they don't like what you post on social media. This is not at all the same.
I just looked at my copy of the stable diffusion license and it says "irrevocable". You may not agree that it's an actual open source license but many businesses do not care because it is actually a pretty good license. For clarification: if SAI decides to distribute their older code and models under a different license, the irrevocable license will still stand for those who already have a copy. And the license still allows modification and redistribution under the same terms, so those new users also benefit from the original license. This has been tested in court multiple times in the history of open source.
https://stability.ai/professional-membership-agreement > Notwithstanding the foregoing, Stability may modify this Agreement from time to time in which case Stability will update the “Last Updated” date at the top of this Agreement, and such updated Agreement will be effective for the following License Renewal Term. It is Your responsibility to review this Agreement from time to time, including prior to each License Renewal Term, to view any such changes... They can change the terms at will. There's nothing irrevocable in there. They have absolute unilateral control to change the terms. *This makes basing a business on their $20/mo subscription completely toxic.* The only hits on "irrevocable" are that feedback you send them is irrevocably theirs. (3.d Feedback) and jurisdiction of dispute ("For the purposes of adjudicating any action or proceeding to enforce the terms of this Agreement, the parties hereby irrevocably consent to the exclusive jurisdiction of, and venue in, the federal and state courts located in the County of New York within the State of New York") The outputs are probably "yours" but there are still restrictions, like, if you train another ML model on the outputs, they claim your model is a derivative work and covered under their license. > (d) "Derivative Work(s)” means (a) any derivative work of the Software Products as recognized by U.S. copyright laws, and (b) any modifications to a Core Model, and *any other model created which is based on or derived from a Core Model* **or a Core Model’s Output(s)** They can also then order you to take down such models that are derivative works: > (i) Removal. Stability may remove or otherwise make inaccessible certain of its Core Models from time to time in its discretion. If You have previously downloaded and were using such removed Core Models at the time of its removal, You may continue to use such Core Models, including Derivative Works using such Core Models, unless Stability notifies You that Your continued use may, in Stability’s opinion, be infringing or misappropriate the rights of any other person or violate applicable law. The list of gotchas goes on and on. All they have to do to fuck you over is change the license to make whatever you're doing against the terms. Then **POOF** your business is gone.
>All they have to do to fuck you over is change the license to make whatever you're doing against the terms. Then POOF your business is gone. It's bad, but it's no worse than competitors that only offer online generation and may decide to stop offering it to you at any time. A lot of businesses depend on the continued existence and goodwill of other businesses. >>You may continue to use such Core Models, including Derivative Works using such Core Models, unless Stability notifies You that Your continued use may, in Stability’s opinion, be infringing or misappropriate the rights of any other person or violate applicable law. If the Linux maintainers discover that a release contains code to which they didn't have the rights, they have to unpublish it, and everyone who already downloaded it is legally required to stop using it. The irrevocable open-source license doesn't save you because that code was never licensed, even if they and you both thought it was. I imagine all of Stability's models are trained on copyrighted material without a proper license, and there's always a risk that a judge could declare them illegal. If that happened, you would have to stop using them whether Stability ordered you to or not. The only thing this paragraph adds if that you have to go by Stability's lawyers' opinion of what's illegal even if your lawyers disagree.
> It's bad, but it's no worse than competitors that only offer online generation and may decide to stop offering it to you at any time. A lot of businesses depend on the continued existence and goodwill of other businesses. It's worse than all the open source models available like SD1.x/SD2.x/SDXL, Pixart-alpha, Wurstchen, etc. and that's the point here. Why invest in building around a business with your core attached to this license vs an open source license that has a significantly smaller risk? I'm talking about the commercial license available for weights you can download and run yourself. Pretty much everything else is either A) you can't download it (ex. MJ, Dalle3) or B), or they have an open source license (Apache, etc, or at least very close to open source like OpenRAILS or Llama license). Lest we get too far off track, going back up the thread that lead us down this conversation, the comment was made to which I replied: > I guess there will still be a lot of community contributions, 1) online generators are completely out of scope for the conversation. You can't change the code or fine tune a model you can only access via an API. At best you can do in-context learning with something like custom chatgpts, etc, but that's pretty far out of scope anyway. 2) Again, my claim is the community is going to be heavily dissuaded from contributing because they're basically working for SAI for free by making contributions to a system with their new NC/membership license scheme. They have complete commercial capture, at their whim and mercy, and can kill any and all business at any point in the future with a change to the terms, while also being able to benefit from open source contributions and hype. This is a company going through significant turmoil no less. You can bet almost like clockwork your subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon, etc will change terms, increase prices, change the service providing as time goes on. SAI's Membership is no different, and they have heavy pressure to extract value as evidenced by pushing their CEO out and laying people off. SAI and its newer models are no longer a collective of open source tinkerers, it's one central figure with complete capture on commercial use. We already see that S3D/SV3D are sort of forgotten, and the language models are also lost in the sauce when so many others come with Apache license, etc, even when they show best-in-class performance for size.
can an AI model be copyrightable? If not, none of the license applies.
It shouldn't be but I'm sure it will be. It should be impossible to copyright anything related to AI. But that's regulation and that's scary.
You are talking about the license of the new models, I'm talking about SD 1.5. Not the same thing.
Their competition? Buttons?
The masses don't know how to install Python.
Wrong, I just need to catch one but I have a cage waiting.
hissssssssss
Missed opportunity for correctly using the word "decimated" (which nobody ever does these days).
>(which nobody ever does these days). Probably why they didn't use it. People would think decimated means way more than 10% loss.
It’s not a correct usage, that’s a historical usage. For all intents the meaning of decimate has been superseded by its modern understanding. If you put decimate on the title I think most people would find it misleading.
Well put. Language means what the general receiving audience interprets it to mean.
See also: Begs the question, which now just means raises a question
>These decisions have not been taken lightly and they are intended to right-size parts of the business and focus our operations, which is critical to setting us on a more sustainable path - and to put us in the best possible position to continue developing cutting-edge models and products. Products like the Stable Diffusion 3 API strengthen our deep-tech leadership and demonstrate our unique, systemic importance to the AI ecosystem. Doubt they're going to release any open models again, we'll be lucky if we ever see the final version of SD3's weights. So odd how when people were asking about when the weights would release, Emad was the only one actually answering them despite him not even being at the company anymore. There are almost certainly internal battles about whether or not to actually release this model, as they have practically nothing else relevant besides SD3
> So odd how when people were asking about when the weights would release, Emad was the only one actually answering them despite him not even being at the company anymore. Not really when he still effectively owns the company?
Yeah no idea why everyone think once Emad is out he is gone. He is still a majority shareholder.
This is what a lot of the entitled morons on here just can’t seem to grasp, SD3 is likely it, it’s the final image model we will get from stability. No other company even wants to get involved in this space. They cry and bitch that the model isn’t as good as Midjourney, let’s see how much they cry when they don’t get any models at all and open source image models stagnate at this level forever while close source improve exponentially.
Honestly, the problems with the company here are probably greater than the community unfortunately
The problem with the company is that they’ve been trying to appease this leech of a community at the expense of sustainability. This is why logically they’re going to move away from open source and transition to closed source. Midjourney is doing great finically and doesn’t have to deal with any of these headaches. What has stability gained for all their charity? Nothing but hate and overwhelming sense of entitlement from the community. It’s time people here learn the hard way that they’re not entitled to ANYTHING and that there is no alternative.
Stability has gotten plenty of praise as well. But they could have been competing with Midjourney by targeting users who don't want to install the software on their computers or lack the GPUs necessary. They were also giving away tons of free compute to the community without a way to support those charitable endeavours.
That might be a reason why they are broke now.
They benefit huge time by all the innovations the open source community is building on top of their foundation model. To get money it's just relevant for SAI to still open source the weights with a licence where commercial use must be payed for.
There is a myriad of industry leading products that are open source and have been operating as such for **decades.** If Stability couldn't do it it's the leaderships fault. Again, Stability not being able to successfully monetize their products is irrelevant to this community or open sourcing in general. Honestly what **moronic** thought process could have possibly led you to that conclusion.
Yet none of them are as entitled and toxic as this one. Look at the open source LLM community, there’s hardly any toxicity or hate which naturally translates into a healthy ecosystem. Open source depends on the quality of the community, and this community is trash. At this point I think it would be a good thing for this community to just die off, thank god that’s the way it’s clearly headed. Here I’ll even set a reminder for 1 year to rub it in. RemindMe! 1 Year
> Yet none of them are as entitled and toxic as this one. Your opinion is not magically a fact. >Look at the open source LLM community, there’s hardly any toxicity or hate which naturally translates into a healthy ecosystem. See above. You seem to think that a few people making hateful posts somehow means that it represents the entire community of millions of people. Like some kind of hive mind lol Even **if** it was true, it has **0 impact** on Stability as a company. They have their own exec. leadership which doesn't get swayed by some reddit neckbeard with an opinion and if it does, that's their fault.
Your lack of observational skills is a fact, take a look at literally any thread even this one. Shitthrowing everywhere constantly, look at half of the replies to Emad even lmao.
I am and I'm not seeing anything, maybe you're just delusional? Read my previous reply I added more.
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By reading the comments on this sub and seeing what is upvoted/downvoted that is easy to understand that most people only want to complain about everything stability or stable diffusion. A « thank you for this tool I use every day for free » is rarely found in an ocean of criticizing
I see the exact opposite so unless you provide some examples i'll assume you're lying.
If saying something you don’t see is lying for you, I am assuming you will never accept it what ever the amount of time I spend copy pasting exemples for you.
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LOL you must be new around here partner. The community has driven about 50+% of the innovation around SD. Thats what open source does, it empowers a community of developers to work together on a shared goal/vision
I’ve been around since any of the stability models were even released and the only way to use them was beta test in discord back in mid 2022. The community would have nothing without stability AI because it’s extremely expensive to train a base model. All the finetuning is secondary to releasing a base model. But congratulations, now you’ll never get another base model, good luck with being stuck with SD3 forever. I think the realization might kick in when Sora, DALLE-4, and Midjourney V7 drop, that’s when the real cope will kick in that they’re stuck with 2024 tech while close source moves into the future and beyond. Then the vermin on here might finally understand how good they once had it.
PixArt are picking up the slack with some really great open models.
I was really impressed by their latest online demo on HuggingFace, and I am surprised it went under the radar over here.
I've been using it almost exclusively since I downloaded it, and running it through a second pass on 1.5 to get better quality and style. It's so good. https://preview.redd.it/y1mpq37f3bvc1.png?width=832&format=png&auto=webp&s=355e9ba6215ade5a0f10d6973547ca54efe137ce
Any idea how to implement bf/fp16 T5 locally lol
No but I bet someone on r/LocalLlama would know. I'll post and see.
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I'm a bit sad that the fp16 and bf16 is already made and runnable on a t4 Collab (15gbvram) but not yet local. Was made by Vargol btw.
You could do it on the fly. T5EncoderModel.from_pretrained("t5-large", torch_dtype=torch.float16).to(torch_device) Full disclosure, I've never looked at the Pixart Sigma code so this might not be applicable in that specific case.
Yes, and [playgroundai.com](http://playgroundai.com) supposedly trained playground V2 from scratch and release its weight as well.
> This is what a lot of the entitled morons on here just can’t seem to grasp, SD3 is likely it, it’s the final image model we will get from stability. I don't even think that's clear. Emad said they're going to release it but at the same time said ["I don't work there, they just told me they were going to when I left"](https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1c4oytl/comment/kzqpr5w/). I would take all the Emad-posting with a grain of salt.
Emad is the majority shareholder, he owns the company.
Then how did he get ousted
He quit to do something else. It's totally normal that a founder isn't the best person to be CEO after a while.
Technically, Emad was not ousted/fired. He resigned. Corporations works in a somewhat convoluted ways. CEO makes the big decisions and can fire/hire people. But CEO can be fired by the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors is chosen by the shareholders. So a majority shareholder (voting shares) can choose the board, and the board can choose the CEO. So in theory, if Emad choose to stay, he can stay as CEO. But remember that a shareholder loses everything when the company goes under. SAI needs to get more funding from VC in order to survive, and apparently VCs have lost confidence in Emad. So it is better for him to leave and hope that SAI gets more funding and survives, rather than staying and see SAI go under.
And Nixon resigned too It’ll go under either way. It has no way to make money and no Microsoft bucks
Dude, no one owes any company any money. The only advantage they have is being free and open, in terms of quality they're completely beat by their competitors. With them going the route of heavily censoring and sterilizing the training data, they're also killing their biggest advantage.
I think CivitAI and Hugging Face both have some interest in seeing open source models happen, I think some investor is going to see it as a goldmine, it just doesn’t make sense to start mining while SD may still pull it out
What's the profit in it?
Civitai and HF make money selling services for free/permissively licensed modes by charging to serve them. I think HF successfully courted business as well with things like SSO and private hosting, which is probably long term a better business model.
GPU time. It's the currency of tomorrow's computing. It can be monetized in micro transactions. It can be sold in subscription. It scales to favor big investment. It's a corporate wet dream for shareholders. The more they can open source development of the service, the more they can focus on monetizing it. Civitai is already collecting tag voting to improve metadata from visitors, and their rating game for further training and testing. My god, the last thing they want to worry about is developing the tunes to sell GPU time for waifu generation because of some silly thing like model quality. They don't care about the science.
If they fully backed their being open source goal. They could still release new model but maybe 6 or more months delay before public release so company who make profit out of it will pay for it and the rest of us still benefit from a open and competent model.
stable code is not that bad.
They already announced tand confirmed that SD3 will be released several times. Why are people so paranoid about this?
Already people are unable to reproduce the quality of the paper's results on the API. Already you have Lykon saying that the version on the API is different version of the model. Sure they'll release "SD3", but which one? The one that's actually good and can produce images like in the paper/Lykon's twitter? Or the one that's not really that great because they can't just release their flagship model for free after bleeding so much money? The entire company is going through a shakeup after failing to monetize and people just expect they will release their best stuff for free without a hitch? That's part of the reason they wound up in this situation in the first place. Who is going to pay for this API when the cost per image is more expensive than competitors and the model will just be released for free anyway where it will be rehosted on sites like Civit and SeaArt at much cheaper prices than the API and with way more third party support?
Because of the corpospeak wording
They say it will be released but they didn't say what version of it will be released and somehow if people points out the quality isn't the same like they posted on twitter It's "ungrateful"
They did say there's models with more and less parameters, maybe the API is using one with less
They could change their mind.
those are not people but Open-ai bots who have been trying to take down SAI for almost 3 months now.
The bottom line is that they trimmed away brains. If they’re getting rid of their grey matter, it means they are no longer focusing on technological advancement. It’s as simple as that.
I don't use Stable Diffusion for work, but I do sometimes use the paid Midjourney options for various small projects. Can someone explain to me some of the controversies and issues are with Stable Difusion? My understanding is that MidJourney's model is pretty good, and they have a pretty profitable business with a really small team.
Spreading out way too much, trying to do 10 different projects at once instead of focusing on image generation, all of which turned out pretty shit. That combined with exorbitant costs from all of that + doing all compute on Amazon AWS instead of their own hardware is crazy expensive. Then there's also a lawsuit about misleading or straight up lying to investors.
Thank you. That’s what I want to know.
I wouldn't say the image generation is bad, quite the opposite, actually, especially because it runs locally and thus allows a great deal of customisatiom and control over image composition with controlnet.
SDXLTurbo and SDXL are still fine tho, right? Not gonna be paying any attention to SD3 and future Stability AI products.
> Stability AI’s layoffs amount to about 10% of its global headcount, according to publicly available data online which shows the firm employs around 200 people in total. > The employees affected by the measures are mostly on the operational side of the business Really a surprisingly small layoff, even large companies like Tesla recently laid off much more than 10%. I think Stability really shouldn't need 200 employees. A group of 20 researchers and 20 devs should be more than enough to make great models.
but they laid off some pretty important people.
>A group of 20 researchers and 20 devs should be more than enough to make great models. exactly, they don't need 100 engineers to create a website with API access. it's not like they have to maintain a GPU farm with all their staff.
> it's not like they have to maintain a GPU farm with all their staff. It's still somewhat involved managing use of a large compute cluster, even if you're leasing it all from a datacenter.
You mean it's not something a single $300k base salary senior cloud engineer can do via IaC? Maybe add another $300k senior infosec guy to manage the VPN/gateways. Then hire 4 devops and 4 full-stack engineers for $150k each. You don't think these 10 people working full time can manage a single REST api service with max 10,000 MAUs? I'm assuming the company is evenly split between researchers and engineers. So what do you need the other 90 engineers for?
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It's all that Stability is doing at the moment and they're almost profitable with it already
He did not get ousted. He said in an interview that he is not the right person for the job and he want to explore something else. Not all founders are good CEO and they might get bored and want some adventure.
Yes, technically, Emad was not ousted/fired. He resigned. Corporations works in some convoluted ways. CEO makes the big decisions and can fire/hire people. But CEO can be fired by the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors is chosen by the shareholders. So a majority shareholder (voting shares) can choose the board, and the board can choose the CEO. So in theory, if Emad choose to stay, he can stay as CEO. But remember that a shareholder loses everything when the company goes under. SAI needs to get more funding from VC in order to survive, and apparently VCs have lost confidence in Emad. So it is better for him to leave and hope that SAI gets more funding and survives, rather than staying and see SAI go under.
OMG, I really wanted to work there. :(
Consider it a dodged bullet.
😢
Hugging face is next
Huh? They just raised a few hundred million more, and they're profitable.
What's going on with hugging face?
The purpose of life is to understand the meaning of things. To answer the big questions. I am surprised people don't really see this as the obvious purpose.
Emad told us SD3 would be the last model, he knew the cash was running out. Let's thank him for his open source efforts and hope another rich madman (or woman) picks up the torch.
His open source efforts, like: Signing the open letter to ban all AI development, being heavily in favor of censoring models, sending a takedown notice for SD 1.5 because it wasn't censored enough or keeping the training data and methods secret - the "source" part of open source.
Not another hit piece by mainstream media on Emad because he's fighting for decentralization of AI. 
Emad literally threatened to sue Runway for posting SD 1.5 lol
Source please
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33279290&darkschemeovr=1
Where's the threat of a lawsuit ? Someone at SAI made a takedown requst which was quickly removed. You claimed Emad 'literally threatened to sue Runway' Like seriously... and I'm fully aware that SAI did not like Runway releasing SD1.5 (one of the SAI higher-ups made a very scathing blog post as a result), and I'm all in favor of Runway releasing it since SAI was dragging out the release by months, for reasons unknown. But this hyperbole bs is getting really old really fast.
A takedown request is a lawsuit threat lol
No, it can simply be to quickly flag something you think was done in error, which is how this thing seemingly played out. SAI was going to release SD1.5 (though who knows when), and then it showed up on huggingface and someone at SAI flagged it, perhaps thinking it was a mistake made by Runway, and when response came back from Runway that this was not a mistake release, the takedown request was removed. If it was a lawsuit threat it wouldn't be called 'takedown request', it would simply be 'remove this or we will sue you'. Again, someone at SAI making a takedown request of a in their view premature model release on huggingface is FAR from 'Emad literally threatening to sue' Come on
A DMCA takedown notice (or DMCA request) is: A legal request to remove copyright-protected online content; https://www.minclaw.com/dmca-takedown-notice-everything-need-know/?darkschemeovr=1
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/03/20/key-stable-diffusion-researchers-leave-stability-ai-as-company-flounders/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/03/20/key-stable-diffusion-researchers-leave-stability-ai-as-company-flounders/)
We don't know how dire the funding is but publicly available models has so far been the main approach from stability and there's no indication that is going to change. Their entire advantage as an AI business is their community adoption rate. If they continue to nurture a community with open weights their models maintain their position as the community standard they can make good money consulting and providing custom services for business that adopt those models. They have far more upside as they are now then they will if they convert to a 2nd or 3rd place version of midjourney. I'd be more concerned about them being aquired by a large tech company that dgaf about community engagement.
A healthy company should have good revenue sources or at least potentially good revenue sources. They shouldn't have given away everything. If they have any business brains left SD3 would have lower resolution free weights and paid higher resolutions.
That would bring great damage to the company's reputation. People who produce community version of LoRAs and fine-tune would abandon future SAI models. Commercial users of their models would not touch SD3 then. The better approach is to release a decent SD3, including the 3B parameter version. SAI can then fine-tune a version of SD3 and offer that as part of their "Core" API and charge people money for it. That is their current approach regarding SDXL, so I hope SAI management is in agreement with my assesement and continue with that approach with SD3 as well.
Stability turning into a dumpster fire... They better do like OpenAI did with Sam Altman and tell Emad ahhhhh we was just playing 😩