I wondered what stable diffusion was, so went to stablediffusion.com. The front page gives no indication as to what it is. So I clicked on their FAQ page:
> What does Stablilty AI do?
Stability AI is building open AI tools to provide the foundation to awaken humanity’s potential.
Our values are lived by every team member and shown by everyone who excels at Stability AI. They are how we measure ourselves and our work.
Our vibrant communities consist of experts, leaders and partners across the globe. They are developing cutting-edge open AI models for Image, Language, Audio, Video, 3D, and Biology. AI by the people, for the people.
Still don't know what it does. Continuing to the next FAQ:
> What’s our business model?
We’re a company of builders who care deeply about real-world implications and applications. Many of our most considerable advances grow from working across multiple teams. We are unafraid to go against established norms and explore creativity.
Our primary drive is to generate breakthrough ideas and convert them into solutions. We respect innovation over tradition. We trust that our differences make us more robust, and so we seek reason within every difference of perspective.
Not meaning to be rude, but you may be living under a rock. There’ve been many, many HN posts [0][1] about the open source, free to use txt2img and img2img ML model that is Stable Diffusion over the past few months.
Though I agree that their website provides no useful information at all.
It doesn't have a fancy product website because it's not really a product, it's 'just' the model. Developers can use it to build a product. The Stability.ai people themselves built one called Dream Studio (https://dreamstudio.ai), but there are also some free and open source frontends you can run on your own hardware if you have a GPU.
I guess your confusion comes from the fact that people tend to talk about "Stable diffusion" and not "Dream Studio" or one of the many frontends available for it.
Yeah, the home page is terrible. They have bigger plans, but for now, it's another machine learning image generation tool. An easy way to try it out is to get an account at http://dreamstudio.ai/.
Stable Diffusion is an image generation model that's been released to the public at large. If you have a decent GPU, you can run the model yourself. (Even without a decent GPU technically you can still do it, though it's much slower)
> What does Stablilty AI do? Stability AI is building open AI tools to provide the foundation to awaken humanity’s potential. Our values are lived by every team member and shown by everyone who excels at Stability AI. They are how we measure ourselves and our work. Our vibrant communities consist of experts, leaders and partners across the globe. They are developing cutting-edge open AI models for Image, Language, Audio, Video, 3D, and Biology. AI by the people, for the people.
Still don't know what it does. Continuing to the next FAQ:
> What’s our business model? We’re a company of builders who care deeply about real-world implications and applications. Many of our most considerable advances grow from working across multiple teams. We are unafraid to go against established norms and explore creativity. Our primary drive is to generate breakthrough ideas and convert them into solutions. We respect innovation over tradition. We trust that our differences make us more robust, and so we seek reason within every difference of perspective.
Oh well. I give up.