? They are all bad at first for the average person that uses surface level tools, but SD3 won't have the community to tune it because it is proprietary junk and irrelevant now.
In my experience these open models is where the real work is being done. The large supervised models like DALL-E etc are more flashy but there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than the model itself so it feels like it's hard to gauge the real progress being done
There are a lot of fine-tunes of earlier Stable Diffusion models (SD1.5 and SDXL) that are better than this, and will continue to see refinement for some time yet to come. Those were released with more permissive licenses so they've seen a lot of community work built on them.
I'm not seeing about the lead researcher leaving because of that, just they are leaving. With the expenses far exceeding revenue right now being a suspected reason.
They realized that no matter how much they charged as a one time fee, the people the got the one time fee enterprise license would eventually cost them more in computational costs them the fee. So they switched it to 6000 image generations, which wasn't enough for most of the community that made fixes and trained loras, so none of the "cool" community stuff will work with SD3.
Have they considered a community sponsored "group buy" of compute, to just train the model as far as the community will bear ?
SDXL was so great, surely 100k people could put 5$ a month toward making monthly improvement open source checkpoints happen ?
I don't see any other financing model work out if the output is open source. It simply can't be financed after publication. And it won't get the community support if it's behind a paywall.
Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I was under the impression people paying for the enterprise tier were largely using the model on their own hardware, and that the removal of this tier was largely just rent seeking by SD against people improving on their model and selling access to a better version.
Did SD really sell unlimited access to their compute/ image generator for a fixed price? If so that’s just so dumb it’s hard to believe. I only started paying attention to the company recently though, so maybe I’m missing something.