Stability AI Launches StableStudio: An Open Source Design Suite for Generative AI

Innovative AI startup Stability AI, which is renowned for its Stable Diffusion text-to-image model, hit the headlines with the announcement of its new project, StableStudio. It’s an open source version of their commercial AI-powered design software, DreamStudio. This unique and exciting move is an attempt to get closer to their goal of collaborative development and to outpace the speed at which things move in this generative field of AI and art compared to individual companies and their behind-closed-door efforts. This move is also considered a leverage move after recent investments from tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

In a recent article post, Stability AI has expressed its opinion on future improvements to generative AI.

They believe that open, collaborative, and community-driven development would better facilitate the expansion of generative AI. They expressed their vision of working with the wider community to create a best-in-class user interface, giving users full control over the creative potential of generative AI.

Started as an animation studio for the open source AI generative art model Disco Diffusion, DreamStudio has gradually set a new goal and focused on image generation with the introduction of Stable Diffusion. This new shift in focus has put DreamStudio in close and close competition with other rival generative imaging platforms like Midjourny and NightCafe.

While StableStudio and DreamStudio share many similarities, there are some important differences. Stable Studio does not share the DreamStudio branding or Stability-specific account features, such as billing and API management. On top of that, the back-end API calls have been replaced with a plugin system.

Although StableStudio shares a vision of collaborative development, some skeptics see this release of StableStudio as an attempt by Stability AI to outsource DreamStudio development to the open source community. While this perspective is not entirely unfounded and illogical, it is also a fact that Stability AI is under a lot of pressure to monetize its various endeavors, which span art, animation, biomedicine, and generative audio.

Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque hinted at Stability AI going public with an initial public offering (IPO). Interestingly, according to recent posts on Stability Ai, despite raising over $100 million in venture capital in October of last year at a valuation over $1 billion, it needed to be faster to generate revenue and is quickly burning through its cash reserves.

This new approach comes with an existential challenge for Stability AI. Unlike Stable Diffusion, which the company did not inherently develop but instead partnered with research organizations to create and develop, Stability AI focused primarily on providing cloud access to the computational power required to train AI models rather than developing their models.

This approach is forever evolving. There were some key standout developments several weeks ago, such as Stability AI, which released a set of text-generating AI models intended to compete with systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and ChatGPT. On top of that, Stability AI introduced Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL), an improved version of the original model that features significant improvements such as hand generation.

This bold move by Stability AI, to open its project, strategically aligns with the company’s ongoing efforts to secure more funding. As time goes by, let’s see how this move turns out for them.

review the project page. Don’t forget to join our 22k+ ML SubReddit, discord channel, and electronic newsletter, where we share the latest AI research news, exciting AI projects, and more. If you have any questions about the article above or if we missed anything, feel free to email us at [email protected]

🚀 Check out 100 AI tools at AI Tools Club