Yeah, it looks like the enshittification of StabilityAI is in full force by now. Especially considering the continually worse licensing.
I expect if they ever manage to release an image gen model that's an objective improvement, lets say 80% as good as dalle3, it will be subscription API only.
I'm using Stability in production: they kept their SDXL beta model which was capable of SDXL 1.0 level prompt adherence at a fraction of the cost up for months after was reasonable for a one-off undocumented beta, and it was a huge boon to my product.
Then a few weeks back they went and quietly cut costs to 1/5th or so what they were for SDXL and released a model that produced similar quality outputs to SDXL for my specific usecase in a fraction of the time (SD 1.6)
They're on fire as far as I'm concerned, just quietly making their product cheaper and faster.
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Also Dalle 3 is in a very awkward place for programmatic access, so awkward I wouldn't call them competitive to SD for many usecases: It's got a layer of prompt interference baked in, it's expensive, latency is not very consistent. Text is a cool trick but it's still not reliable enough to expose as a core part of the generation for an end user.
Sounds like they’re doing the same thing OpenAI is doing. Claiming to favor open models but the reality is they’re pumping growth by reducing costs and this lowering prices. They want a massive chunk of this new market, all of it if they can get it. Their perceived valuation then becomes a matter of how many eyeballs they have looking at segments of their website to advertise to, or how many data points they can collect on their users to sell to advertisers. It’s unlikely they can capture the whole market and still make a chunky enough profit to satisfy investors if they also intend to keep prices high enough without needing to resort to enshitification.
This would be a lot more pithy if it weren't in the comment section of a post that showcases exactly how they were likely able to make 1.6 cheaper, and open sources the underlying tech.
There couldn't be a more perfect rebuttal to this theory than the post you decided to leave it under.
> the reality is they’re pumping growth by reducing costs and this lowering prices
At what point did I indicate they weren't making it cheaper? Also their licensing isn't really in the spirit of what open source originally described, which is what I meant.
Sorry if that didn't come across, I guess. I was being intentionally pithy but largely related to standard practices for VC funded startups.
I expect if they ever manage to release an image gen model that's an objective improvement, lets say 80% as good as dalle3, it will be subscription API only.