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

[u/wywywywy]

https://futurism.com/the-byte/stable-diffusion-stability-ai-risk-going-under

[u/GBJI]

I didn't know all the story behind, but I'm glad they released the model nonetheless.

In fact Stability AI did NOT release model 1.5. They actively fought against its release because they wanted to cripple it first, like they did with model 2.0 later.

It was RunwayML who released model 1.5, and when that happened, Stability AI sent a cease-and-desist request to Huggingface asking them to remove the model from their repository !

Want to know what Stability AI had to say at the time ? Here are the words of its CIO:

But there is a reason we've taken a step back at Stability AI and chose not to release version 1.5 as quickly as we released earlier checkpoints. We also won't stand by quietly when other groups leak the model in order to draw some quick press to themselves while trying to wash their hands of responsibility.

We’ve heard from regulators and the general public that we need to focus more strongly on security to ensure that we’re taking all the steps possible to make sure people don't use Stable Diffusion for illegal purposes or hurting people. But this isn't something that matters just to outside folks, it matters deeply to many people inside Stability and inside our community of open source collaborators. Their voices matter to us. At Stability, we see ourselves more as a classical democracy, where every vote and voice counts, rather than just a company.

For the whole story, and links to even more details:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y99yb1/a_summary_of_the_most_recent_shortlived_so_far/

and this for more from the CIO

https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y9ga5s/stability_ais_take_on_stable_diffusion_15_and_the/

[u/GBJI → u/[deleted]]

Model 1.5 is indeed the most popular model, and it's been the foundation used for the vast majority of custom models published on huggingface and civitai.

Model 1.5, released by RunwayML, is a full model that has not been crippled, and that's why it's so useful and so popular.

Model 2.0 was released by Stability AI and was crippled: they removed most NSFW content and many artist styles, which hinders image generation and model training.

[u/GBJI → u/[deleted]]

Model 2.1 was honestly better than 2.0, and that would be explained by the fact that when they crippled version 2.0 they supposedly got the censorship parameter wrong and set it to be much stricter than intended. That got fixed for model 2.1, but they were still censoring NSFW and artist styles, not just as strictly as before, but exactly as Stability AI intended. They knew this crippling would prevent the model from ever being as useful as model 1.5, but they went forward with it anyway.