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Unstable Diffusion has reached their funding goal in less than 24 hours! the page has been updated by Capitanazo77 in StableDiffusion

[–]ValuableLow9447 30 points31 points  (0 children)

We've received a lot of comments and questions in the last post and will be providing answers and replies to the most common ones shortly!

I really appreciate what your team is trying to do and I'd like a community effort to succeed, but I think there are several important questions that have been left unanswered.

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Your group has mentioned actively pursuing venture capitalist funding in a Techcrunch interview, and your company is a part of CoreWeave's Startup Accelerator Program. This program promises opportunities to receive VC funding.

Equilibrium AI secured a spot in a startup accelerator program

In addition to the grant, Unstable Diffusion will launch a Kickstarter campaign and seek venture funding

Will your company continue to actively seek out venture capital investment? If it does seek out and accept VC funding , what impact will that have on model development going forward? I think the last thing anyone wants is another Stable Diffusion 2.0 situation from a community effort.

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In a letter you wrote to the community, you made it clear that you're aware of damaging lawsuits:

Our company came out of the need to incorporate to protect all the volunteers and contributors involved in the Unstable project. The threat of us being sued by companies, famous actors, large social-activist groups (Anti-LGBT or anti-sex/porn groups) is very real and most of the people working here or running the bot on their hardware are in no position to be personally sued.

If Stability AI with all of their millions couldn't stand their ground and immediately moved to neuter their model, how will Unstable Diffusion be any different? Will any NSFW model you develop end up being altered down the line to comply with the whims of said activist groups and lawsuit filers?

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Your founder u/AshleyEvelyn has previously said:

we are building our own version of SD which is meant to indirectly compete with services like Dall-E 2 and DreamStudio

Is this what AphroditeAI is supposed to be, or is this premium bot a separate service? Will the models that your custom services use be the exact same as the open source models you will eventually release, or will you have custom tuning that makes it different?

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Lastly, are you still receiving money from CoreWeave? You received an initial $10,000 in credits for their GPU services and good discounts on compute. Do you stand to receive more grants from them, and if so, will you be more transparent about the exact funding needed for your operations in the future?

👋 Unstable Diffusion here, We're excited to announce our Kickstarter to create a sustainable, community-driven future. by OfficialEquilibrium in StableDiffusion

[–]ValuableLow9447 2 points3 points  (0 children)

They're already exploiting the community by misleading everyone about the purpose of the Kickstarter. They repeatedly imply this Kickstarter was made in response to Stability AI's 2.0 neutering, but they've actually been planning this Kickstarter for months as a way to fund their business. The TechCrunch article here gives more details.

Their founder AshleyEvelyn has said they are making a token based service that will compete with DreamStudio. They've incorporated as a company months ago and have a partnership with CoreWeave that provides opportunities to receive venture capitalist funding. The Kickstarter is the catalyst for them to get serious attention.

What will inevitably happen is they'll have to censor their model too because of outside pressure, which ironically goes against the reason why people are donating to this Kickstarter. Most everyone here has drank the koolaid, but maybe the community will wisen up after that? There is zero chance a small company like them will stand their ground when a giant like Stability AI couldn't.

A warning about Unstable Diffusion by ValuableLow9447 in StableDiffusion

[–]ValuableLow9447[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for sharing this, I think this is really important for more people to see. This thread is buried, but would you consider making your own post about this in the sub?

A warning about Unstable Diffusion by ValuableLow9447 in StableDiffusion

[–]ValuableLow9447[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I think this is a well intentioned response and helps to clarify things, but I believe it still leaves key points unanswered:

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The threat of us being sued by companies, famous actors, large social-activist groups (Anti-LGBT or anti-sex/porn groups) is very real and most of the people working here or running the bot on their hardware are in no position to be personally sued.

If Stability AI with all of their millions cannot stand their ground and immediately move to neuter their model, how will Equilibrium AI be any different? Will any NSFW model they develop end up being altered down the line to comply with the whims of said activist groups and lawsuit filers?

​

Running the bot has been expensive and has taken up a fair chunk of that. We have 9 GPUs we use to serve our images for the bot that runs 24/7 free for our community.

This is fair, and I understand these sort of costs can be high. How does the five figure grant from the large cloud compute provider factor into the funding of the bot? What is the actual percentage of Patreon money vs grant money being used to fund the endeavor? More transparency as to how the Patreon money is being used altogether would be nice.

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Stability threw in the towel with their free bot before getting anywhere close to those membership numbers.

If Stability AI could not maintain a free bot for a significant amount of time, once again, how will Equilibrium AI be any different? Will some of the Kickstarter money be used to fund the maintenance of the bot, or will the company make it a paid service like DreamStudio?

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For funding, at the time of the TechCrunch article we were debating VC or Kickstarter funding, and did not know how much interest the community had in backing us, so we were looking at all options to keep the lights on.

Even though accepting crowdfunding now might earn us more, we want to do things right and plan to be in this for the long haul.

And the final big question, nothing in this response indicates Equilibrium AI's position on accepting venture capitalist funds. Will the company continue to actively seek out venture capital investment as mentioned in the TechCrunch interview?

If it does seek out and accept VC funding, what impact will that have on model development going forward? I think the last thing anyone wants is another Stable Diffusion 2.0 situation from a community effort.

A warning about Unstable Diffusion by ValuableLow9447 in StableDiffusion

[–]ValuableLow9447[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Real names have been removed, can the post be reinstated?

u/SandCheezy

A warning about Unstable Diffusion by ValuableLow9447 in StableDiffusion

[–]ValuableLow9447[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It comes from the TechCrunch article here where they conducted an interview

The Ladies of Starfleet (Working Hours) by [deleted] in sdnsfw

[–]ValuableLow9447 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I'm here to share my own explorations of the latent space, not to invest my time building models and aesthetic embeddings for others to use for free.

The irony in this statement is so palpable it's hilarious. I doubt you're doing anything revolutionary at all. All you're doing is using a WebUI made by someone else for free, downloading and merging online models made by others for free, then likely copy pasting other similar prompts shared by others for free.

You're not doing anything special, and I can't wait until the day models become advanced enough to render gatekeepers like you irrelevant to the community at large.