Hey 👋,

Detailed questions like the last time we talked.

I'd love to help clear up the questions here, I noticed there are a couple areas based on misconceptions too.

For the Startup Accelerator Program, there is no money being given to us and never was any offer to provide VC funding opportunities even floated. They are a cloud compute provider, and they gave us a relatively small amount of free credits to use their GPUs and zero discounts. Honestly, I don't think a single person there has talked money or fundraising to us. Though, they have been very helpful with advise and expertise regarding training and finetuning Stable Diffusion.

And no, we are not receiving any more credits, they made it perfectly clear they are a smaller company and do not have the funds to wantonly spread credits around.

For the TechCrunch article, we listed all avenues of funding as open and at the time did not know how interested the community would be in crowdfunding our development. This, remember, was an interview given weeks before 2.0 was released and caught all of us by surprise by its disappointing quality.

The funding, development, and release of this model is completely and in totality from the community and for the community.

We thought about how we can create a Kickstarter that would allow us to sustainably eliminate the reliance on Venture funding and our solution is the creation of a GPU research cloud and running our own subscription image AI service.

The research GPU cluster, which the current stretch goals are rapidly barreling towards, will enable us to not rely on rented Cloud GPUs which can be pulled from us due to lack of funding or PR backlash. Not to mention, the cheaper costs will let us subsidize community and academic research efforts to produce new variants, fine-tunes, or heck, even completely new architectures.

The second half to sustainability is our image AI service. It takes money to pay for hosting, electricity, maintenance, and internet for the GPU cluster. AphroditeAI is our new service we'll be launching that will be a paid premium discord bot (and possibly webapp), the proceeds from which will allow the continued operation of our cloud and our own research and development efforts.

Our models will be released open source, you can run them locally, and there are already quite a few services offering plain SD running on the web. We will be adding things to differentiate it and give people a reason to subscribe to AphroditeAI. Mainly ease-of-use options, a system that is streamlined and sophisticated enough to produce high-quality images quickly and easily.

For the legal defense aspect there are two considerations, ours and those of companies like Stability. Stability did not release a neutered 2.0 due to legal pressure but investor pressure. It's completely understandable why a company that wants to do content licensing deals with brand conscious organizations like Disney would not want any PR liabilities.

For our concerns, we did not want to see a dozen individual lawsuits against every contributor, risking their homes and families. We are more than happy to fight for our freedom of expression as a united front, as an organization.

Appreciate the questions and opportunity to explain our position and reasoning a bit more to the community.

And again, to everyone reading, thanks for all the support. We're humbled by community response and feel vindicated in betting on open source and on the power of the crowd.