The Man behind Stable Diffusion

I really enjoyed this interview [1] with Emad Mostaque who I gather is probably the key funding and organization player in that stuff. It remains to be seen exactly how "open" it winds up playing out over time, but they're talking a compelling game and the EleutherAI people seem to be pretty heavily involved, which you probably wouldn't do if you weren't serious. Yandex has also put up a ~100B language model [2]. My old colleagues at Meta have also started nibbling around the edges of opening some of this stuff up [3]. The Meta folks still aren't just handing out the big ones, but they're definitely moving the ball forward. In particular their release of the training logs is a really positive development IMHO as it opens the curtains a bit on the reality of training these things: it's a difficult, error/failure-prone process, there's a lot of trial-and-error, restarting from checkpoints, etc. Anything that puts downward pressure on the magical thinking is A-OK in my book. The reality of this stuff is exciting/impressive enough: there's no need to embellish or exaggerate. [1] this video [2] link [3] link

The guy's name is Emad Mostaque btw There's a recent video interview he did that goes into his vision: this video

Stable diffusion is good open source software and is well motivated in a very complicated technology/political space. Sure they inherit all of the existing problems with image datasets but they have some plans to mitigate racial and socio-political bias. The alternative is to either not do the project or make it secretive under the supposed motivation of safety. This interview is a good overview of the principles behind their approach: this video