Google continues to blow my mind with these models, but I think their ethics strategy is totally misguided and will result in them failing to capture this market. The original Google Search gave similarly never-before-seen capabilities to people, and you could use it for good or bad - Google did not seem to have any ethical concerns around, for example, letting children use their product and come across NSFW content (as a kid who grew up with Google you can trust me on this).
But now with these models they have such a ridiculously heavy handed approach to the ethics and morals. You can't type any prompt that's "unsafe", you can't generate images of people, there are so many stupid limitations that the product is practically useless other than niche scenarios, because Google thinks it knows better than you and needs to control what you are allowed to use the tech for.
Meanwhile other open source models like Stable Diffusion have no such restrictions and are already publicly available. I'd expect this pattern to continue under Google's current ideological leadership - Google comes up with innovative revolutionary model, nobody gets to use it because "safety", and then some scrappy startup comes along, copies the tech, and eats Google's lunch.
Google: stop being such a scared, risk averse company. Release the model to the public, and change the world once more. You're never going to revolutionize anything if you continue to cower behind "safety" and your heavy handed moralizing.
But now with these models they have such a ridiculously heavy handed approach to the ethics and morals. You can't type any prompt that's "unsafe", you can't generate images of people, there are so many stupid limitations that the product is practically useless other than niche scenarios, because Google thinks it knows better than you and needs to control what you are allowed to use the tech for.
Meanwhile other open source models like Stable Diffusion have no such restrictions and are already publicly available. I'd expect this pattern to continue under Google's current ideological leadership - Google comes up with innovative revolutionary model, nobody gets to use it because "safety", and then some scrappy startup comes along, copies the tech, and eats Google's lunch.
Google: stop being such a scared, risk averse company. Release the model to the public, and change the world once more. You're never going to revolutionize anything if you continue to cower behind "safety" and your heavy handed moralizing.