Midjourney is the most popular discord channel by far with 19.5M+ members, $200M in revenue in 2023 with 0 external investments and only 40 employees.
The problem has nothing to do with commercializing image gen AI and all to do with Emad/Stability having seemingly 0 sensible business plans.
Seriously this seemed to be the plan:
Step 1: Release SD for free
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
The vast majority of users couldn't be bothered to take the steps necessary to get it running locally so I don't even think the open sourcing philosophy would have been a serious hurdle to wider commercial adoption.
In my opinion, a paid, easy to use, robust UI around Stability's models should have been the number one priority and they waited far too long to even begin.
There's been a lot of amazing augmentations to the stable diffusion models (ControlNet, Dreambooth etc) that have propped up, lots of free research and implementations because the research community has latched onto the stability models and I feel they failed to capitalize on any of it.
The problem has nothing to do with commercializing image gen AI and all to do with Emad/Stability having seemingly 0 sensible business plans.
Seriously this seemed to be the plan:
Step 1: Release SD for free
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
The vast majority of users couldn't be bothered to take the steps necessary to get it running locally so I don't even think the open sourcing philosophy would have been a serious hurdle to wider commercial adoption.
In my opinion, a paid, easy to use, robust UI around Stability's models should have been the number one priority and they waited far too long to even begin.
There's been a lot of amazing augmentations to the stable diffusion models (ControlNet, Dreambooth etc) that have propped up, lots of free research and implementations because the research community has latched onto the stability models and I feel they failed to capitalize on any of it.