Stability has to make money somehow. By releasing an 8B parameter model, they’re encouraging people to use their paid API for inference. It’s not a terrible business decision. And hobbyists can play with the smaller models, which with some refining will probably be just fine for most non-professional use cases.

I would LOL if they released the "safe" model for free but made you pay for the one with boobs.

Oh they’ll never let you pay for porn generation. But they will happily entertain having you pay for quality commercial images that are basically a replacement for the entire graphic design industry.

It's not an easy fap, but I guess I'm watching people get f*cked either way.

Don't people quantize SD down to 8 bits? I understand plenty of people don't have 8GB of VRAM (and I suppose you need some extra for supplemental data, so maybe 10GB?). But that's still well within the realm of consumer hardware capabilities.

I’m the wrong person to ask, but it seems Stability intends to offer models from 800M to 8B parameters in size, which offers something for everyone.

I am going to look at quantization for 8b. But also, these are transformers, so variety of merging / Frankenstein-tune is possible. For example, you can use 8b model to populate the KV cache (which computes once, so can load from slower devices, such as RAM / SSD) and use 800M model for diffusion by replicating weights to match layers of the 8b model.

800m is good for mobile, 8b for graphics cards.

Bigger than that is also possible, not saturated yet but need more GPUs.

Do you know how the memory demands compare to LLMs at the same number of parameters? For example, Mistral 7B quantized to 4 bits works very well on an 8GB card, though there isn’t room for long context.

you ca also quantisation which lowers memory requirements at a small lose of performance.