Stable Diffusion's creator spent a completely ridiculous amount of money to make that free tool.
OpenAI's mistake may have been "planning to have a business model;" the alternative they should have gone with was "Instead of taking investor money with promises of some kind of return, be a hedge fund manager, make $100 million, and then set $600,000 on fire with no plan to recoup the cost because it's play-money to you."
$600k is an order of magnitude less than what it cost to train GPT-3 or DALL-E 2.
When that figure came out, the popular talking point was how cheap Stable Diffusion cost to make and how easily a well-funded competitor could create their own custom variant.
> how easily a well-funded competitor could create their own custom variant.
Unsurprisingly, Pornhub is already using machine learning. Their first big project is colorizing and upscaling classic porn.[1] (Moderately NSFW). As they point out, they have plenty of training data.
That seems a bit cynical. While SD's creator might not recoup that money directly, a lot of end users have benefited from its creation. That money has figuratively gone up in flames no more than the time or labor cost of an open source developer whose code is used by millions of people, IMO.
It's a bit cynical; my point is that it's the kind of decision you get to make when you're the sole owner of $100 million and not the kind you get to make when you're a startup company founder working with other investors' money.
OpenAI wouldn't have been able to do what StabilityAI did because OpenAI is incentivized to make return on investment; Mohammad Emad Mostaque is not.
I agree but:You know openai is ostensibly a nonprofit and only created a "limited profit partnership" once they thought they could make big bucks? I've been saying the nonprofit part is a grift to get idealistic people work there for years, but technically they had exactly the right incentive structure
I found their sudden non-profit to profit trajectory extremely dishonest. Their mission statement also reads like moralistic verbiage, rather than the statement of disinterested pioneers of AI - which is problematic given how this has become a money thing for OpenAI, rather than an idealistic pursuit.
I agree. While the people on this site undoubtedly won't boggle at installing the CLI software, there are a lot of people who will use Dream Studio over the CLI stuff even if it costs money. It's the of both worlds for them, IMO. They get the benefits of user contributions (and there have been a LOT, both on the base project and in spun-off derivatives... I'm using ImaginAIry myself), while still having a possible viable business model in Dream Studio.
You can't have a business model of "become rich and then use money for X". Business are how (a very few) people become very rich.
Moreover, there are very rich people already, like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, funding projects for doing good like world hunger, education and "AI Safety". And Open AI was a project of this sort of thing, originally. The thing is that even very rich people demand that the enterprises they give money to be as self-supporting as possible and their money is spread fairly thin. The only way Open AI could become an AI development shop, employing many top developers, was to have the financing level of a commercial company. Which means it constantly puts out products that don't seem like they can make money because AI algorithms don't seem to controllable - Open AI seems to only be able to have the first implementation of X, not the best implementation. Once the basic idea is out, someone else can produce a similar thing with a budget that doesn't include a research team.
$600k was the off-the-shelf market value of the GPU time spent. They got this time at a much lower rate (according to the founder himself) and for the PR and fame they got, that money is ridiculously little.
Somewhat tangentially, I speculate that crowd-sourced training will become a thing.
OpenAI's mistake may have been "planning to have a business model;" the alternative they should have gone with was "Instead of taking investor money with promises of some kind of return, be a hedge fund manager, make $100 million, and then set $600,000 on fire with no plan to recoup the cost because it's play-money to you."