[jhbadger]

Well, the various models on sites like civitai are definitely not created by institutions -- especially not the many, many NSFW ones. Yes, you can argue that they are relying on existing models from StableAI and the like, but even if those were never updated, that wouldn't stop the creation of new models on top of them. We kind of see this already; most checkpoint models and loras on civitai are still based on the older Stable Diffusion 1.5 rather than the newer Stable Diffusion XL.

[__loam]

I mean that's kind of my point. Derivative models are all dependent on models built by institutional players like stability. Is there a limit to how good civitai models can be? If there is, you can't move past that without higher quality base models, which requires a lot of capital. That's just what my intuition says.