[HN Gopher] Stable Diffusion 3 API Now Available
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       Stable Diffusion 3 API Now Available
        
       Author : roborovskis
       Score  : 208 points
       Date   : 2024-04-17 14:26 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (stability.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (stability.ai)
        
       | MyFirstSass wrote:
       | - Models will be released
       | 
       | - Free to use for non commercial projects
       | 
       | - 20$/m subscription needed if project has less than $1m annual
       | revenue or <1m users
       | 
       | - Undisclosed "Enterprise" subscription needed for projects
       | larger than above
       | 
       | To me the $240/y sounds pretty awesome for a smaller commercial
       | project, and i like they've set the threshold pretty high up.
       | 
       | But still don't like "undisclosed" black box enterprise pricing
       | though when they're running their own API, because it basically
       | means they can tax you to death if you build a service that
       | competes with their API right - so in effect only viable to
       | create small companies with this tech?
        
         | theolivenbaum wrote:
         | *under $1m annual revenue and <1m users
        
         | Lacerda69 wrote:
         | What SaaS company discloses their Enterprise prices?
        
           | MyFirstSass wrote:
           | A tangent but i believe all pricing should public information
           | by law above some threshold to battle corruption, nepotism,
           | cartel making and monopolies.
           | 
           | I've seen too many governments and even medium sized
           | companies paying absurd amounts to some shitty locked in
           | cloud platform with lots of better alternatives, because
           | someone got kickbacks, gifts, vacations or a seat on some
           | board, and everyone should be more enraged.
           | 
           | The EU has tried to battle this with various public
           | procurement processes but it's a big clown show of course so
           | i don't know what the solution is.
        
             | Turing_Machine wrote:
             | Unless there's absolutely no alternative, and it's
             | something I desperately need, I basically won't buy
             | anything that says "call for pricing" or some such, because
             | I interpret that as "call so one of our trained liars
             | (i.e., salesmen) can figure out how hard we can screw you".
             | 
             | In many cases I'd even pay a premium to avoid talking to
             | one of those people.
        
               | satvikpendem wrote:
               | You're not the target market, the CTO, CIO, or business
               | development representatives are. So many developers say
               | they won't ever buy "call for pricing" software, like,
               | yeah, they know you won't, in fact that's what they bank
               | on.
        
               | Sharlin wrote:
               | And the execs won't really worry about "how hard the
               | salesmen can screw them", they know the rules of the game
               | and understand that negotiations are negotiations. It's a
               | negotiator's job to try to get a good deal, and that
               | works both ways.
        
               | satvikpendem wrote:
               | Yes. Devs who don't know sales are obviously not their
               | demographic, they'll be speaking to layers of other biz
               | dev people before they even get to the execs, and each
               | one knows exactly how to extract concessions and
               | discounts, and the opposing salesperson knows exactly how
               | much of a discount they can give. In this way, it is much
               | more of an efficient market than most devs think.
               | 
               | Devs' reaction to all this is honestly the same as when a
               | non-technical exec tells a dev why they "can't just get
               | it done in a day, it shouldn't be that hard right?"
               | People have their own competencies and are usually blind
               | to others'.
        
               | pid-1 wrote:
               | CTO in a financial institution here.
               | 
               | I don't talk to sales.
        
               | dheera wrote:
               | Yeah on multiple occasions I've e-mailed said businesses
               | and said "This other business has it for $X. Beat that
               | and I'll buy yours. I don't have time for a call."
               | 
               | I want products at my doorstep in exchange for $. I don't
               | want a goddamn coffee chat.
        
             | dheera wrote:
             | I fully agree, or at the VERY LEAST pricing information
             | should be disclosable and any NDA around pricing should be
             | automatically void and unenforceable.
             | 
             | How the hell do I know they're not giving me higher prices
             | due to racial profiling or some other unethical reason?
             | 
             | That would allow, at least, some sort of website or chrome
             | plugin to exist that fetches and displays previously-
             | submitted pricing information as an overlay next to any
             | idiotic "call for pricing" statements.
             | 
             | That is the way I would run a country if I was its
             | president.
        
             | EricMausler wrote:
             | I specialize in costing/pricing, not in saas however. There
             | are a lot of reasons why what you are asking for is likely
             | not realistic. It unfortunately does get abused, though,
             | and I fully agree with how bullshit some of the
             | arrangements are. It's just the people taking advantage of
             | the situation are doing so knowing that the "cover" for it
             | is legitimate.
             | 
             | Maybe there are ways to address the abuse without forcing
             | upfront pricing?
        
         | CharlesW wrote:
         | > _...they can tax you to death if you build a service that
         | competes with their API right..._
         | 
         | I'm curious why that'd be a concern, since building a service
         | that effectively just resells an API isn't a viable business
         | model.
        
         | ranit wrote:
         | > But still don't like "undisclosed" black box enterprise
         | pricing though when they're running their own API, _because it
         | basically means they can tax you to death if you build a
         | service that competes with their API right_ - so in effect only
         | viable to create small companies with this tech?
         | 
         | "undisclosed" doesn't imply changing the price after it was
         | negotiated with you. It just mean they will negotiate the
         | contracts for large projects, without disclosing the terms to
         | the public ... in my view.
        
           | black3r wrote:
           | The "undisclosed" also mean they can just straight up give
           | you different prices than they give to your competition which
           | can affect fair competition in your field. Imagine that you
           | compete with them in some different field..., or an easier
           | one - if you compete with their investors' other
           | investments...,
           | 
           | or you're in a country with politicians donation/spending
           | limits (which are common outside USA) and they give their
           | software for $1 to "that one annoying politician" and it
           | won't count as a discount towards their donation limit,
           | because the "original price" is unknown.
        
             | chmod775 wrote:
             | > The "undisclosed" also mean they can just straight up
             | give you different prices than they give to your
             | competition which can affect fair competition in your
             | field.
             | 
             | They could do that anyways. This changes nothing.
             | 
             | Negotiating custom contracts is standard practice at the
             | high end anyways. If your company is spending hundreds of
             | thousands of dollars each month on something at _list
             | price_ , chances are you either got too much money or the
             | company is run by suckers.
        
         | wongarsu wrote:
         | > so in effect only viable to create small companies with this
         | tech
         | 
         | I assume stability wants to be in the role of building AI
         | models not applications, so if you provide a clear and
         | nontrivial value add beyond their API you should be fine. If
         | you build a tool that allows architects to make their building
         | renderings more lifelike by adding realistic crowds,
         | vegetation, storefronts etc right from the comfort of their
         | existing tooling it's in Stability's interest that you are
         | successful. If you only resell their API but in green they
         | might not be as invested in your success.
        
           | alexvitkov wrote:
           | "Should be fine" doesn't cut it if you want to base your
           | business on it and have no alternatives.
        
             | wongarsu wrote:
             | Every Android or iOS App is a "should be fine" type of
             | deal. So are lots of other things. If you are really
             | worried I'm sure there's a sales person willing to take
             | your call right now. It's not ideal, but honestly not that
             | exceptional. And if push comes to shove you do have
             | alternatives, you just need to sacrifice a bit of quality,
             | maybe deployment complexity, and tune your prompts
             | differently for one of the other models.
        
               | daveguy wrote:
               | Do android and iOS stores have undisclosed fee structures
               | for high revenue or high usage apps? I was under the
               | impression that the fees were at least transparent, even
               | if they do represent monopolistic rent seeking.
        
               | ethbr1 wrote:
               | There were several instances that came out in recent
               | court cases of the app stores negotiating custom deals
               | with strategically-important apps.
               | 
               | E.g. Spotify:
               | https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23969690/google-
               | spotify-...
               | 
               | So typical "above this negotiating power, let's talk
               | terms", and everybody smaller has to pay list price.
        
               | astrange wrote:
               | The Android app stores. The iOS app store doesn't have
               | any known deals.
        
               | frumper wrote:
               | https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348108/apple-amazon-
               | pri...
        
         | etaioinshrdlu wrote:
         | The enterprise subscription costs $120k/year. You might be able
         | to haggle it down.
        
         | BaculumMeumEst wrote:
         | I'm still goofing around with stable diffusion 1.5 based
         | models. It has such a vibrant open source scene and it's free
         | for commercial usage forever so.. I'm not really interested in
         | V3. I guess corporations might be or whatever?
        
         | dheera wrote:
         | Seems ripe for a "project sharding" platform that splits your
         | project into multiple identical backend projects that each have
         | <1M annual revenue and <1M of your users.
         | 
         | Would save you from the unnecessary calls and coffee chats, you
         | just pay N * subscription fee and get on with your life.
         | 
         | You could probably also use part of the revenue to buy treasury
         | bonds and automagically pay the subscription fees, and it would
         | be a closed intervention-free system.
        
       | apetresc wrote:
       | > In keeping with our commitment to open generative AI, we aim to
       | make the model weights available for self-hosting with a
       | Stability AI Membership in the near future.
       | 
       | This is new, right? All previous releases as far as I can tell
       | were just released on HuggingFace. Does this statement just imply
       | something about licensing for commercial usage, or are they
       | pretending that by gating the download behind a paywall that will
       | somehow require people to buy memberships to get the weights?
        
       | poniko wrote:
       | Big jump in price per generation and now is in line with dall3.
       | So is the model 20-30 times more gpu intense or did they decide
       | to finally make money?
        
         | jsheard wrote:
         | After that report a few weeks ago saying they literally can't
         | afford to pay their AWS bills I would guess it's the latter.
         | 
         | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2024/03/29/how-stabi...
         | 
         |  _> By October 2023, Stability would have less than $4 million
         | left in the bank [...] Stability was  "underpaying AWS bills
         | for July (by $1M)" and "not planning to pay AWS at the end of
         | October for August usage ($7M)." Then there were the September
         | and October bills, plus $1 million owed to Google Cloud and
         | $600,000 to GPU cloud data center CoreWeave [...] Stability was
         | on track to lose more money per month than it made in an entire
         | year._
        
           | emadm wrote:
           | Made that 4m last a long time eh ^_^
        
       | the_duke wrote:
       | This Reddit thread from someone with early access has some sample
       | images:
       | https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1c2je28/i_...
       | 
       | Maybe the early access beta was limiting the available resources,
       | or they used bad settings, bud juding by that thread it looks
       | like the model got worse during training or the earlier examples
       | were quite cherry-picked.
        
         | airstrike wrote:
         | I didn't think those were bad at all
        
           | the_duke wrote:
           | Not bad, but also not the big jump over fine-tuned SD1.5/SDXL
           | checkpoints that some expected.
        
           | Turing_Machine wrote:
           | That woman at the top (at least I assume it's supposed to be
           | a woman) should be wearing a beauty pageant sash reading "Ms
           | Uncanny Valley of 2024". Creepy AF, IMO.
           | 
           | Agreed that some of the others aren't so bad, however the bar
           | for a convincing swamp creature is a lot lower than for a
           | convincing human being.
           | 
           | If breasts come out looking like that, I'd be taking a hard
           | look at my training data.
        
             | Hoasi wrote:
             | The whole picture reeks of bad taste. The hands are
             | particularly terrible. Total fail! But then again, maybe
             | it's due to a poor prompt.
        
         | GaggiX wrote:
         | The real value of Stable Diffusion models are the finetuned
         | models when the base model is released.
        
           | dragonwriter wrote:
           | Non-open licensing may adversely impact that.
        
         | wongarsu wrote:
         | To be fair, this has been my initial impression with basically
         | all image generation models. The current generation is finally
         | at the point where throwing untuned prompts at untuned models
         | gives good results, but those never match the results of finely
         | tuned (positive and negative) prompts with parameters adjusted
         | from experience; ideally with model fine-tunes added.
         | 
         | If you want the best results there is still skill and work
         | involved. Consequently a showcase by people experienced with
         | the model far surpasses what you get when you shout prompts
         | over the internet for somebody else to try
        
         | butterchaos wrote:
         | Those are shockingly bad.
         | 
         | I am sure someone will tell me there is a reason why I am wrong
         | and these aren't that bad.
         | 
         | Midjourney has never needed an explanation though with words.
         | The proof is in the output. Everything else is nonsense.
        
       | panki27 wrote:
       | "In keeping with our commitment to open generative AI, we aim to
       | make the model weights available for self-hosting with a
       | Stability AI Membership in the near future."
       | 
       | Does this mean that SD3 will not be available from Huggingface
       | etc.?
        
         | glass-z13 wrote:
         | Looks like it
        
         | accrual wrote:
         | I've noticed some models on Hugging Face require an extra layer
         | of terms acceptance, like a EULA. Maybe it'll be like that?
         | Otherwise I'm guessing they want one to make a dedicated
         | Stability AI account, accept some terms, and then enable the
         | download.
        
         | astrange wrote:
         | Emad said it will be the same as before on reddit.
         | 
         | https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1c6awnl/co...
        
       | zone411 wrote:
       | I ran the same quick prompt adherence and composition test on
       | which ImageFX by Google surpasses DALL-E 3 by a bit
       | (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-
       | thread-315/comment/493...):
       | 
       | 1. "A stained glass picture of a woman in a library with a raven
       | on her shoulder with a key in its mouth"
       | 
       | 2 out of 20 tries
       | 
       | 2. "An oil painting of a man in a factory looking at a cat
       | wearing a top hat"
       | 
       | First try
       | 
       | 3. "A digital art picture of a child riding a llama with a bell
       | on its tail through a desert"
       | 
       | 0 out of 20 tries
       | 
       | 4. "A 3D render of an astronaut in space holding a fox wearing
       | lipstick"
       | 
       | 2 out of 20 tries
       | 
       | 5. "Pixel art of a farmer in a cathedral holding a red
       | basketball"
       | 
       | First try
       | 
       | So about even with these models and much better than previous
       | versions of SD. Better than Midjourney v6.
        
         | Kerbonut wrote:
         | You're essentially mixing units. "2 out of 20" does not match
         | with "first try". I would have liked to see you run all of them
         | for 20 and added comments in addition like "this got it right
         | on the first try", which could also have been luck. I mean if
         | it got 1 out of 20 but happened to get it right the first try,
         | is that better or worse than 2 out of 20?
        
           | zone411 wrote:
           | Like I said, it's a quick test, not a benchmark. The original
           | question was about getting at least one of out 10 right
           | (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-
           | to...). Feel free to run them yourself, takes 5 minutes.
        
       | zone411 wrote:
       | [deleted]
        
       | perstablintome wrote:
       | I stumbled upon a thread debating whether SD3 will fully replace
       | SD 1.5 and SDXL, or if it will still have trade-offs for
       | different uses.
       | 
       | Context: Stability is cutting out thousands of artists for
       | "safety" reason, which means billions of images won't make the
       | cut. I wondered how much the model will be nerfed in terms of
       | nudity, artist names, and the like, and whether these issues can
       | be resolved with some fine-tuning.
       | 
       | Since I still don't have access to SD3, I'm compiling a list of
       | all the Stable Diffusion 3 generations out there. I managed to
       | scrape this info from Twitter using their premium API (which cost
       | me a Benjamin!). I manually curated the images to ensure they are
       | indeed SD3 generations and made it searchable.
       | 
       | In case someone finds it useful, it's available here
       | https://sd3.art/
        
         | spywaregorilla wrote:
         | Doesn't really matter. If the model is generally more capable
         | and released, then it's trivial to teach it a few more things.
        
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