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by capableweb 1148 days ago
> 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.

2 comments

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.
The strategy was not DreamStudio but variant open models for private data.

We will be open sourcing DreamStudio shortly having refactored it.

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 :)
> Right now, I think it’s only DreamStudio

Clipdrop, also, at least.