> The company is spending significant amounts of money to grow its business. At the time of its deal with Intel, Stability was spending roughly $8 million a month on bills and payroll and earning a fraction of that in revenue, two of the people familiar with the matter said.

> It made $1.2 million in revenue in August and was on track to make $3 million this month from software and services, according to a post Mostaque wrote on Monday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The post has since been deleted.

https://fortune.com/2023/11/29/stability-ai-sale-intel-ceo-r...

Given how much VC money is chasing the AI space, this isn't necessarily a bad plan. Give stuff away for free while developing deep expertise, then either figure out something to sell, or pivot to proprietary, or get aquihired by a tech giant.

The main reason is probably Mid journey and OpenAi using their tech without any kind of contribution back. AI desperately needs a GPL equivalent…

I am not sure if that is still the case.

For MJ in particular, knowing that they at least used to use Stable Diffusion under the hood, it would not surprise me if the majority of the secret sauce is actually a middle layer that processes the prompt and converts it to one that is better for working with SD. Prompting SD to get output at the MJ quality level takes significantly more tokens, lots of refinement, heavy tweaking of negative prompting, etc. Also a stack of embeddings and LoRAs, though I would place those more in the category of finetuning like you had mentioned.

I've also used it to generate art for deskmats I got printed at https://specterlabs.co/

For commercial stuff I still pay human artists.

I like them quite a bit, and you can get basically any size cut to fit your needs even if they don't directly offer it on the site.

Of course, art is so subjective none of this has any real meaning. MJ routinely blows my mind though and it is very rare something from SD does. The secret MJ sauce is obviously all the human feedback that has gone into the model at this point.

I think AI video will be a different story though. I think that is when comfyUI/SD will destroy MJ because MJ is simply not going to be able to have an economic model with the amount of compute needed.

For fine art MJ destroys everything and it is even close. I say this with using comfyUI/SD all the time.

But you do you and your anime porn.

In fact, anything that involves non-explicitly guided one-shot generation of anything with light/shadow/colors/perspective is entirely out of the question with the current crop, because all models are hallucinating hard and aren't controllable within a single generation. There are attempts at fixing the perspective without explicit guidance, but it's going to be a long way and it's not super relevant to how things are done anyway.

And for fine art, nothing beats a human painter, doing it by throwing prompts at AI mostly misses the point. I'm not even sure what you mean by fine art in this context, actually - surely not generating artsy-looking images from a prompt for fun?

Why not just the GPL then?

The model weights are shared openly, but the training data used to create these models isn't. This is at least partly because all these models, including OpenAI's, are trained on copyrighted data, so the copyright status of the models themselves is somewhat murky.

In the future we may see models that are 100% trained in the open, but foundational models are currently very expensive to train from scratch. Either prices would need to come down, or enthusiasts will need some way to share radically distributed GPU resources.

There are approaches to get the right type of augmented and generated data to feed these models right, check out our QDAIF paper we worked on for example

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.13032.pdf

Just did some pes2o ablations too which were eh

One thing that’s hard to measure is the knowledge contained in books3. If someone asks about certain books, it won’t be able to give an answer unless the knowledge is there in some form. I’ve often wondered whether scraping the internet is enough rather than training on books directly.

But be careful about relying too much on evals. Ultimately the only benchmark that matters is whether users find the model useful. The clearest test of this would be to train two models side by side, with and without books3, and then ask some people which they prefer.

It’s really tricky to get all of this right. But if there’s more details on the pes2o ablations I’d be curious to see.

HN search doesn't seem to agree with me today though and I cannot find the specific comment/s I have in mind, maybe someone else has any luck? This is their user https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=emadm

We now have top models of every type, sites like www.stableaudio.com, memberships, custom model deals etc so lots of demand

We're the only AI company that can make a model of any type for anyone from scratch & are the most liked / one of the most downloaded on HuggingFace (https://x.com/Jarvis_Data/status/1730394474285572148?s=20, https://x.com/EMostaque/status/1727055672057962634?s=20)

Its going ok, team working hard and shipping good models, the team are accelerating their work on building ComfyUI to bring it all together.

My favourite recent model was CheXagent, I think medical models should be open & will really save lives: https://x.com/Kseniase_/status/1754575702824038717?s=20

All the original Stable Diffusion researchers (Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, Dominik Lorenz, Andreas Blattman) also work for Stability AI.

Instead we've given 10m+ supercomputer hours in grants to all sorts of projects, now we have our grant team in place & there is a huge increase in available funding for folk that can actually build stuff we can tap into.