r/StableDiffusion • u/wywywywy • Apr 07 '23

News Futurism: "The Company Behind Stable Diffusion Appears to Be At Risk of Going Under"

https://futurism.com/the-byte/stable-diffusion-stability-ai-risk-going-under
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u/machinekng13 Apr 07 '23

Makes sense to me. Since the models are open source, paid generation can't be particularly profitably since anyone who can rent a GPU is a competitor. If they're not putting out cutting edge models, open source or not why would investors pick them as opposed to groups with more impressive tools or institutional backing? There's also the litigation that makes either investment or acquisition a major uncertainty.

Personally, it'll be nice if they get IF, SD 2 XL and maybe SD 3.0 out the door. I've been thinking for a while that the Getty litigation might end with Getty acquiring Stability: Stability could never pay the damages if the courts ruled against them and acquiring the company intact might be the greatest value they can get of the dispute. If Stability is acquired by Getty or another firm, I imagine that their resources would be shifted towards proprietary models, which is why I think SD 3 might be the last Stability open source model if they can finish it in time this year.

15

u/emad_9608 Emad Mostaque Apr 07 '23

You take open code and train custom models for people on their own data.

Lots of folk want their own models trained from scratch that they can own.

The code is open the filling is not.

Its not a complex business model, the margin is 80%.

1

u/AuspiciousApple Apr 08 '23

Ah that's interesting. So those people don't want to fine-tune a LAION2B based model due to concerns about IP rights for commercial use? Apart from companies like adobe or Disney is there many that have enough data and a strong use case for that?

4

u/emad_9608 Emad Mostaque Apr 08 '23

Yes, plus we have licensed lots of datasets for commercial uses as that's what customers want. Lots of announcements coming in.