Stable Diffusion The company behind itStability AIA subscription service has been launched to standardize and change the way its models are used for commercial purposes by customers. The company says the membership program "redefines" the way it grants commercial access to its users, aiming to strike a balance between profitability and openness.
Stability AI's membership program offers three tiers.
A free version for personal and research use.
- A $20 per month subscription for "creators, developers, and startups with less than $1 million in annual revenue, $1 million in institutional funding, and 1 million active users;"
- Enterprise Edition.
- All three tiers have early access to the new AI Models, but only paid tier members are allowed to use it commercially.
In a blog post, the company said, "As our company continues to grow and scale, the Stability AI Membership Program will play a key role in providing financial support for our future core model research and development."
Stability AI has so far been known for its openness, and Emad Mostaque, Stability AI's CEO, told Venture Beat that the company remains committed to releasing "open source models" that provide code and weights that anyone can access. He compared the announcement to Meta's release of Llama2, which was billed as open source because it was available for free on different platforms, but at the same time didn't fulfill all of the requirements of an open source initiative.
However, users on Stable Diffusion's Reddit forums have expressed confusion about the concept of commercial use, including whether commercial use only applies to those who use the model to generate their own generative AI services, or whether anyone making commercial use of Stable Diffusion-generated images must pay a fee. This complexity is also compounded by the fact that AI-generated works have so far been denied copyright protection, making their value uncertain.
Mostaque admitted in a previous Twitter post that the company is "still considering pricing to keep it simple."
Stability AI already lets users pay for some of its models. The company announced its pricing structure for Stable Audio, its text-to-audio AI model, in September. Other AI companies are also offering paid tiers for more features, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus, which allows users to use moreadvancedof the GPT-4 model and faster response times.