My pet theory is that Stability was a surprise viral hit during aug/sep. Then got a massive capital round. And NOW, growth is already slowing and investors are getting buyers-remorse?
Or maybe growth is accelerating, and those who passed on series-A are upset?
Stability never had any revenue, nor any easy ways to measure their user base.
Their 'growth' is basically dependant on them being able to release open source models that get so popular, unbeatable ecosystems get formed around them.
On this front. SD1.4/1.5 is extremely successful, but there has been no followup. SD2.0 was a total disaster that shocked the community, SD2.1 is still no better than SD1.5. StableLM currently is still a joke in performance. Like, they don't seem to even test their models before releasing them.
Compare their releases, to the polished and immediately dominant releases from OpenAI, and you have to question their researching chops. Did they only succeed with SD1.4 because of collaboration with other companies?
That’s a fair point, and what Stability has given the ecosystem has been amazing, I’m rooting for them as they are one of the only orgs left that is still committed to open source
> Stability never had any revenue, nor any easy ways to measure their user base
They do, for the products they have/will have. Right now, I think it's only DreamStudio, but like any SaaS product, they can and surely do measure the amount of users, and trivial for them to see the revenue.
What you're talking about, the models they help release, are not products themselves, more like research output they give away for free. Probably in order to drive users to their paid products.
Dreamstudio is a joke, not intended to be a serious product, but merely for someone to try out SD in under a minute.
99.9% of SD usage happens outside of Dreamstudio. The power of SD comes from using fine-tuned models, and dreamstudio doesn't allow that (For copyright reasons presumably). There are websites like happyaccidents that do allow using fine-tunes, because they are willing to shoulder the massive legal risk as smaller startups.
SD's primary business model was always intended to sign up corporate clients in a semi-LLM-consulting/support role for their open sourced models. Like Redhat in a way. And to succeed in that space, you need massive name recognition.
As someone who develops software using Stable Diffusion and gets sold for money, I'm well aware how simple Dreamstudio is. No professional would use it. Doesn't mean they are not developing it to be a real product, that they'll try to get people to buy for real money.
That's exciting to hear! I wish you all the best with the release, the community will surely appreciate it. Thanks for the work you do with Stability AI, there are quite a few of us that really appreciate it, no matter of these hit-pieces :)
Or maybe growth is accelerating, and those who passed on series-A are upset?
Or maybe the lizard men are involved?