from Hacker News

The company behind Stable Diffusion appears to be at risk of going under

by SheddingPattern on 4/7/23, 9:41 PM with 66 comments

• by chmod775 on 4/8/23, 12:51 AM

  Calling them "the" company behind Stable Diffusion is pushing it. Just Stable Diffusion the model, but not the idea, maybe.

  As far as I know they pretty much just paid for servers to train a big shiny model on that was based on research they had no hand in. Throwing money at researchers after they came up with something good, just to let them build a big shiny version of it, does not retroactively make their accomplishments yours.

  Basically they hold no rights to anything relevant, no patents, no secret sauce, nothing. Them going under after exhausting their money will hardly have any effect.

• by fwlr on 4/8/23, 7:49 AM

  We’ve had, what, over two years of “basically free” image generation? (Dall-E 1 was Jan 21.) All the major players (OpenAI, Microsoft, Stability, Midjourney) offer free image generation and you only pay for large amounts.

  There is a ton of momentum behind the general public’s belief and perception that image generation is free for small uses and cheap for large uses. Most of the other players can afford to keep those losing prices for a long time, too. I think it’s going to be an uphill battle to charge for image generation at amounts that turn a profit. I wouldn’t rule out a more creative way of monetizing it, but the obvious routes look unlikely.

• by tomohelix on 4/7/23, 11:46 PM

  Just a question but is it ever profitable to base a company around an open source product the way SD is? Why would anyone pay money to use the company's model when some guys on Reddit is distributing a similar product, albeit with lower performance, for free, that can be run locally?

  What would be the incentive for a person, not a company, to pay Stability AI company instead of downloading and doing a bit of setup to have their own uncensored model?

• by stabilityfan1 on 4/8/23, 12:56 AM

  It would be a huge disaster to lose out on the folks releasing the models for free.

  Nobody benefits from their failure.

  If Runway and Stability can cut costs they will become cherished institutions.

• by MilStdJunkie on 4/8/23, 2:19 PM

  It seems like mandating just a tiny bit of usage data back to the model would give SD a massive lead on training data, but I'm not an expert. Maybe that's happening already.

  Like, example. I use SD in Blender sometimes as part of the compositor. I have maybe a 10% acceptance rate for SD output: sometimes the water isn't right, or the clouds look goofy, or something keeps getting rendered as an anime pillow for some godforsaken reason. If SD captured my prompt history and some of the final model tweaks between runs, they could ostensibly get really solid HITL test data. Then they could be the curator of that "super model" which they could upsell, maybe along with very high rez stuff, or a higher priority on jobs. Again, not an expert, so who knows. And also, having the model local, that gives you back some of the same benefits, but without the scale.

• by bfung on 4/8/23, 1:32 AM

  Interview 7mo ago w/CEO of StabilityAI.

  https://youtu.be/YQ2QtKcK2dA

  Not too surprised about funding issues from the casual answer.

  I’m not saying it was bad to self fund a project, but having to choosing between your life and fun (and potentially very profitable) projects is not easy.

• by blackcat201 on 4/8/23, 1:45 AM

  Note that stability have been funding freelance researcher by providing compute resource such as RWKV[1], Open Assistant, some works by LAION[2] and lucidrains[3]

  [1] https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM

  [2] https://huggingface.co/laion/CLIP-ViT-L-14-laion2B-s32B-b82K

  [3] https://github.com/lucidrains/gigagan-pytorch#appreciation

• by AYBABTME on 4/8/23, 2:14 AM

  The means of production are cloud GPUs, the winners will be those who own them.

• by bugglebeetle on 4/7/23, 11:59 PM

  Stable Diffusion was obviously never intended to make money, but as a Napster-style maneuver to enclose all image data on the internet through AI picture generation. They release something to the public that would get sued into oblivion were it done by an established company, but oops, the genie is out of the bottle, what you gonna do, the only choice now is to restrict it to a few power players who can actually do the necessary rights management. Artists and photographers will get the same shit deal musicians did in the streaming era, i.e. an algorithmically determined pittance for use of their work. Don’t like it? Oh well, either settle for that or people will fine-tune a pirate model on your work in half an hour!

• by cavisne on 4/8/23, 5:49 AM

  It’s going to be so much easier to push these models out to the edge if they are open source (see ggml, diffusion bee etc).

  This won’t be possible without accelerator compute for training. Open source developers can’t afford this compute.

  Apple benefits because they can deploy on iOS devices. Amazon benefits because they can tarball the models and sell it as a managed service.

  I don’t think either wants to be in the business of figuring out which researchers is going to use the compute for deep fakes or for the next big model.

  So something like Stability should exist, Amazon and Apple should figure out how to make that happen.

• by agentgumshoe on 4/8/23, 7:19 AM

  We're going to see a lot more of this. Companies using practically free debt to 'grow' fast with no actual real path to profitability, suddenly finding it hard to repay debt and attract new 'rounds.'

  There's a heap of bad banks and terrible debt floating around, the golden goose has been cooked. Turns out risks aren't just things you can ignore for 'growth.'

• by rvz on 4/8/23, 2:11 AM

  Very unsurprising, as I said before on unprofitable AI companies doing it all themselves and running out of money quicker. [0] They will probably run back to VCs again to attempt to raise money at a lower valuation.

  Focusing on hype and growth over profitability and burning hundreds of millions of VC cash on data scientists and AWS for training, fine-tuning AI models. This is even before mentioning the mounting lawsuits they are already facing.

  The inefficient training of deep learning models is unsustainable for these pre-profit companies.

  [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35465294

• by m3kw9 on 4/8/23, 2:11 AM

  It’s rough because there are lots of models that can do a decent job competing

• by villgax on 4/9/23, 7:14 PM

  I mean just let it die, it's the investors money that sinks

• by f0ld on 4/8/23, 11:22 AM

  That’s why they need to push UBI harder. They’ll just do it in private as always have been and we will lose everything overnight. Next day you useless human beings in gulag or unit 731.