I keep thinking back to when we didn't have stabilityai and it was just google and meta teasing us with mouth watering papers but never letting us touch them. I'm so thankful stability exists.

Stability is great but Meta's MusicGen is available with code and weights while this isn't so that's a really odd place to make that comparison and complaint.

Before stable diffusion, nobody released weights at all. Meta et al only started sharing their models with the world when they realized how fast a developer ecosystem was building around the best models.

Without stability, all of AI would still be closed and opaque.

>Before stable diffusion, nobody released weights at all.

That's not true. There's been a lot of models with weights from every player before Stability.

>Without stability, all of AI would still be closed and opaque.

Most GANs (the practically spiritual predecessor to diffusion models) for example were available. Huggingface existed and has realistically done more to keep AI open. And again, this specific release we are talking about by Stability is not Open.

Stability is great but you are re-writting history and doing it on the release where it makes least sense to do so.

Nah. Dunno where this is coming from but infamously no AI models were released by big players for years. Rewind 18 months and all you got is GPT-3.0 that no one seems to care about and Disco Diffusion-y type stuff.

You are looking at a very short part of recent history. It has not been like that at all.

I'm all ears. I was "in the room" from 2019 on. Can't name one art model you could run on your GPU from a FAANG or OpenAI before SD, and can't name one LLM with public access before ChatGPT, much less weights available till LLaMA 1.

But please, do share.